"Back in high school, my best friend gave me a tattered paperback of Boy Wonder by the late/great James Robert Baker. We’d been into making movies, writing stories, and living imaginatively since kindergarten, and this gonzo, out-of-print novel about a young-madman-turned-Hollywood-super-producer had it all. Boy Wonder is the perfect summer read, a fount of crazed inspiration, laugh-out-loud funny, and to this day, one of the most seminal reading experiences I’ve had."

"Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all constantly responding to, or writing back against, the Homeric poems. The Athenian tragedy that is maybe most deeply engaged with rewriting and recreating “The Odyssey,” is Euripides' “Helen”, a provocative, brainy, funny play about the myth that Helen never went to Troy in the first place—the same myth that is central to HD's brilliant sequence “Helen in Egypt.” I translated the Euripides “Helen,” for a collection of Greek tragedy translations, “The Greek Plays.”"

"Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars. One of the most underrated and under-appreciated films of all time and my favorite comedy. Kurt Russell is genius in this film and I wish he would return to comedies because his delivery and timing are to die for. Excellent supporting cast including the wonderful Jack Warden who plays two characters — dueling brothers. And kudos to Zemeckis and [co-writer] Bob Gale for writing a biting, social satirical and very un-PC script. “Jesus Palomino!”"

"It’s not often that a writer makes me laugh out loud, but [David] Sedaris does. He brings me to tears. It’s to the point where I can’t read his writing in public because people think I’m having some kind of meltdown. In this collection of essays, [When You Are Engulfed in Flames] he has a way of finding humour in the strangest and most painful moments, like a week with a creepy baby-sitter, or the death of his mother."

"I love this movie and its revisionist style and its radical politics, but most importantly there is no more punk-rock move in cinema history than having the opening credits be the checks that you’re writing to the cast and crew. Godard—the rich-kid film nerd to end all rich-kid film nerds—gets the machinations of the motion picture “industry” better than any of us. Contempt is masterful, Weekend is a lark, Tout va bien burns everything to the ground."