"I watched this film at a small theater in Paris, with an audience of mostly French people in their sixties. In that environment, it actually managed to resensitize me to cinema violence, something I assumed was impossible. Hearing the gasps from the audience allowed me to see the film as intended. These poor old French people were being assaulted by the film. It was rocking their world! When the lights came up, I was both upset by the film and delighted by the expressions on the faces around me. We were all just looking at each other in silence. After that, I better understood the power of a collective cinema experience."

"Robert Ashley is famous for having made these so-called operas, a lot of them were for TV. He works with the voice in these really great ways. I love this record because you don't know exactly what's going on: there's a lot of mystery. You have to piece together what's going on within the minutiae of the musical environment. Or you don't and you just listen and enjoy it. The sounds are very beautiful. Ther's a distant organ in the background just playing this one chord and you can also hear a bass. You can hear this woman whispering in French but you can barely hear her. Then this male singer appears but there's some crazy modulation on his voice. So all these crazy elements combine to create this crazy environment that you want to listen to for maybe ten minutes, because it's not like a song but it's got the elements of a song: you've got a bassline, you've got these instruments playing harmonies and you have voices. But you can't tell what's going on. It has an atmosphere. The album is called Automatic Writing but the track I'm talking about here, specifically, is called 'Automatic Writing'. It's important for me because it reinforced this idea that you could put beauty into music without necessarily using sweet melodies or whatever. I do have that in my music, but I also like the drama that can come from just… voices."

"When I was a boy I dreamed of sailing and exploring the the open seas. I know my inspiration arose from watching episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. This almanac was the first gift I received from my then girlfriend, now wife, and why I still love her. She saw my passion for the ocean and presented me with a book by my hero. Cousteau gives many examples of how we have been destroying our shared environment for thousands of years. But more importantly, he always leads us to solutions we can implement to save and restore our planet. “We have one planet. We have to take care of it.”"

"One of my other favorite films is Don’t Look Now, which is kind of an antecedent or… something we were going for a similar vibe with our film, The Forest. I think, to date, it’s still one of the most disturbing movies that’s ever been made. I love how Venice is a very unique specific place in that movie. I’m a huge Donald Sutherland fan. I had an opportunity to work with him at one point and always loved that movie, and I was just gushing over that film. And I like its sense of stranger-in-a-strange-land, how it’s about a westerner that’s trapped in this very unique and specific environment, which is something we were trying to mimic in The Forest."