"I’ll go back to the one that hit me hard a long time ago, Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais. I think the first cuts are so deep, you know, when your hard disc is still pretty empty, and these first films hit you so hard where you go, “Oh my god, I didn’t know this existed, it’s so beautiful.” Hiroshima mon amour was a film by a filmmaker where I didn’t know this language was even possible on film — I was looking at wax museum films and Westerns and war movies and horror movies and everything, but not this one; it really woke up my eyes for something else. It was so poetic and so cool, and just really enjoyable."

"I’m going for a bit film school-y one, because I love Akira Kurosawa films, but I don’t want to go for Seven Samurai, so i’ll go for Yojimbo or Sanjuro, those ones that all the spaghetti westerns were based on. I know it’s not fair, but that clump of Japanese samurai films were just beautiful films. Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero and there’s something really empathetic about him. There’s this lovely thing with his face where you really can just tell everything that he’s thinking. He doesn’t have to do much at all; you can just sense what’s going on with him. So I love those films, anything with Mifune in actually, but that period in particular, he was the best hero ever."

"This might be the first movie that I saw. I remember watching it when I was five or six — I shouldn’t even have been watching it — and I saw it in a theater. I grew up in a small town and they had one of those small town theaters, and they put Westerns and whatnot onscreen. It’s one of those movies that made me think it would be very cool to work in movies. I don’t know if I understood the concept of being a director, but I understood the concept of someone making movies, and this movie did it for me. Other people say Star Wars or Indiana Jones. For me it was this one. That’s why I have an emotional reaction to it."