"I was introduced to Fassbinder’s plays at nineteen and his films at twenty. His humor is handled with a kind of wonderful seriousness. Theatrical and absurd and full. The blocking alone makes me weak in the knees. In Beware of a Holy Whore, there’s a scene in which a woman is slapped in the face. It’s really not great, but the degree of detachment after this moment is so severe that it makes sense—not that she was hit but that people hit and get hit. Feelings are constant and often uncontrollable. I think in a past life I must have been German."

"It’s German expressionist film directed by Fritz Lang that broached pedophilia. Peter Lorre played a crazed madman who killed and molested children and all kinds of other stuff, and there was a child playing with a ball in one scene when she meets Lorre’s character. Even more horrific than anything else after she disappears, the camera shows the ball rolling down a hill until it finally stops moving. Your mind takes over, and does much more horrific things then the screen can. I think being obvious and throwing blood and guts at the screen is stupid.”

"I was introduced to Fassbinder’s plays at nineteen and his films at twenty. His humor is handled with a kind of wonderful seriousness. Theatrical and absurd and full. The blocking alone makes me weak in the knees. In Beware of a Holy Whore, there’s a scene in which a woman is slapped in the face. It’s really not great, but the degree of detachment after this moment is so severe that it makes sense—not that she was hit but that people hit and get hit. Feelings are constant and often uncontrollable. I think in a past life I must have been German."

"Do I get pretentious? Because this is foreign. {laughs] I love that German film from a few years ago that won the Oscar, The Lives of Others. Such a great movie. I’ve seen it a bunch, and I own it. I love, love, love that movie, and I found that it was just intensely riveting and scary and beautiful and so well crafted, so well plotted as a movie. And such a sad comment on a time in a certain country, but also a really beautiful comment on people being altered and finding their humanity again. I thought that movie was really special."

"Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other 20th Century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Not that he didn’t hope to write and publish more. The life of this Galician Jew was cut short when he was shot dead in the streets of Drohobych in a tit-for-tat between German officers of the occupying Nazi force. What survives is the people and other beings of the ghetto Schulz made eternal and universal in a text where everything has the right to respect, even a tailor’s dummy."

"I loved listening to comedy albums when I was growing up. This one was produced by George Martin. Sellers used to put on all these accents and do them perfectly. On 'Suddenly It's Folk Song' it's him playing a German anthropologist. [Proceeds to recount entire section of the album verbatim, accents and all] It's just a great record. I loved all those black and white caper movies. The talent on Sellers was just amazing. He was so influential on the Bonzos and the Python people. I picked up on this as a teenager and I know every word of it now. It's perfect. It's extraordinary how funny he is."