"I just think the premise of holding up in a mall… being that prescient about the kind of gated communities, and consumerism, and mixing that with zombies in 1978 is just beyond genius. If you look at, like, John Waters doing Female Trouble in 1974, saying things about crime and beauty and the rise of paparazzi, you know, this kind of crazy Kardashian, TMZ, beauty industry — I mean, as psychotic as that film is, it’s so ahead of the curve. It’s so amazingly looking into the future. So I think those kinds of themes I responded to. And Goblin did the original soundtrack."

"Terry Gilliam grows up from his Python days and delivers a knockout, which (like the Orwell that clearly inspired it) was spot-on in predicting the future. Yes, it’s funny, but it’s mostly bleak, and it is Gilliam’s ultimate film. I love that this DVD set has the hack studio edit included (the “Love Conquers All” version that was sadly used for television, in which a happy ending is inserted, therefore changing the meaning of the film). Kind of reminds me of what the Bush administration has done to the media over the last eight years."

"The language sizzles and hisses in this 2011 Irish novel set in a steampunk future. We slip from the Trace, all tangled alleyways, to the Fancy, which is as it sounds, and even out to the wastes of the Big Nothin’, from which the Bohane river crashes down through the city. There’s a gang war, indelible characters, a martial music. Sweet Baba Jay, did anyone ever really speak this way? It’s wordplay at the level of Nabokov, but with a very different, Gaelic purpose. “Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners set their face against the hardwind as they climbed the bluffs.”"

"Little Linda Manz’s voice-over is enough of a reason to watch this film. Forget the perfect performances by Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, or Brooke Adams’s twisted damsel in distress, or the way the wheat blows at magic hour making you forget the specter of murder that hangs over it all. I’m obsessed with the fact that production designer Jack Fisk built the farmhouse, which is meant to look as old as time and it really does. Also, while shooting Badlands (the previous Malick), Fisk wooed his future wife, Sissy Spacek, by leaving gifts for her in her character’s drawers. Swoon."

"Our developed world is bursting with screens and projections pumping out an incessant stream of what’s real, and what’s represented to be real. In this moment when we are witnessing the evolution of virtual reality, I find Baudrillard’s classic work of semiotics especially relevant. It has been hugely influential for me as a basis from which to explore important concepts and ethics around what our relationship with art and meaning will become. In the future, we will increasingly view the world through representations of reality, which will become so realistic that our brains could become completely deceived."