"I had heard about Cassavetes, and when I started to see his movies I realized that I knew his face from childhood favorites Rosemary’s Baby and The Dirty Dozen. I loved The Dirty Dozen because of The Team. I still have an eight-by-ten publicity still from that movie. Which Cassavetes movie did I see first? I can’t remember. I know we watched Minnie and Moskowitz many times before a tour around the year 2000 and quoted it often, and I still offer Minnie’s toast to Zelmo in most instances when I am in the position to offer a toast: “To you and your happiness.” I know at some point I saw I’m Almost Not Crazy . . . before I saw Love Streams itself. Love Streams is, to me, Cassavetes’s version of Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or Russ Meyer’s Supervixens: a summing-up and distillation of ideas, theories, characters, plot devices; making a statement by improving upon many earlier acts and creating something that absolutely could not have been made without specific lives behind it, celebrating those lives and the shared history of creator and audience. I’ve never seen Love Streams projected; first I owned a VHS copy and later a copy of the European DVD whose release was sponsored by Agnès B. Love Streams also reminds me of my favorite movie, The Misfits, in the way that life on-screen and off- is a crucial collaborator in the ultimate full effect of the movie."

"I love all of Bergman’s films, but his later period has had the biggest impact on me, starting with Persona. The film marked the advent of a new period for him; I know that he wrote it when he was in the hospital and thought he was going to die. It adopts a dream logic in a really forward-thinking way, and like Altman’s Three Women, is an example of a proto-Lynchian dream movie. I was thinking about that when we were making Hereditary, how it gradually adopts a nightmare logic. Cries and Whispers strikes me as the most painful and beautiful film about death . . . and sisterhood. I screened it for the crew when we were making Hereditary, which is also a movie about suffering. Bergman was always wrestling with the big things—family dynamics, one’s relationship to God—but he did it in such an accessible way. His films are entertainments—they’re fun, and they’re beautiful. I feel like he has a reputation for being a forbidding director, but I find him to be as inviting as a filmmaker like that could possibly be."

"I love all of Bergman’s films, but his later period has had the biggest impact on me, starting with Persona. The film marked the advent of a new period for him; I know that he wrote it when he was in the hospital and thought he was going to die. It adopts a dream logic in a really forward-thinking way, and like Altman’s Three Women, is an example of a proto-Lynchian dream movie. I was thinking about that when we were making Hereditary, how it gradually adopts a nightmare logic. Cries and Whispers strikes me as the most painful and beautiful film about death . . . and sisterhood. I screened it for the crew when we were making Hereditary, which is also a movie about suffering. Bergman was always wrestling with the big things—family dynamics, one’s relationship to God—but he did it in such an accessible way. His films are entertainments—they’re fun, and they’re beautiful. I feel like he has a reputation for being a forbidding director, but I find him to be as inviting as a filmmaker like that could possibly be."

"I am a huge Nicolas Roeg fan and consider this and his 1973 masterpiece Don’t Look Now to feature some of the best editing of all time, with visual and audio juxtapositions that wow even now. Walkabout is cinema as poetry. Images rhyme with one another in a truly hypnotic fashion. Scenes are as vivid and intense as they are unreal and lyrical. There’s a phantasmagorical array of images, but also a rigorous, genius sense of structure. Both this film and Don’t Look Now open with sequences that encapsulate the movie like thematic overtures. Walkabout’s first five minutes tell you everything while saying nothing: images of the city overlaid with aboriginal music, breathing exercises at a girls’ school that complement the native sounds, an oasis of parkland in the urban sprawl, a lone tree in a concrete square, a patch of swimming-pool blue in an apartment block contrasted with the white-hot nothingness of the outback. It’s a completely stunning collage, one of the greatest openings in all of cinema. And what’s even better? The rest of the movie lives up to it."