"I love Cassavetes and many of his films have had a great influence on me. He has made the most impressive female portraits, and Gena Rowlands, who was always so incredible, intimate, explosive, and vibrant, has been an inspiration. A Woman Under the Influence has one of the most incredible female performances in modern cinema; it feels so real that it hurts. She is so vulnerable, it feels like you’re watching someone’s actual existence. Everything seems so free and wild and organic. It’s like looking at a Fauvist painting—it looks easy and natural, but the amount of energy that’s in the film is something that’s hard to capture. Anyone who has been involved in filmmaking knows that it is almost impossible to get to those levels of truth."

"Ives's 114 Songs has been a major source of inspiration for me (particularly for my 69 Love Songs and 50 Song Memoir). But that wasn't all he wrote: from 1887 to 1926 Ives wrote 193 songs, and here they all are on six CDs: lullabies, Christmas carols, German operetta emulations, mortal laments, parlor ballads, cowboy dirges, and even election-day commentary on 'Nov. 2, 1920 (An Election)', and 'Vote for Names! Names! Names!', of which Ives says, ""The [three] pianos represent three political candidates, each uttering his own 'hot air slogan'; the singer represents the disillusioned voter."" The texts come 80% from poets (Keats, Kipling, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many anonymous sources) and 20% from Ives himself, whose aw-shucks Americana (as on 'Slugging A Vampire') and gleefully jarring harmonies keep the surprises genuinely surprising. "

"The Mirror was the closest cinema came to poetry. Tarkovsky abandoned narrative and mixed up different perspectives, stitching together the personal and the historical in a totally unique way. He made some other powerful films, but for me The Mirror is the one I keep going back to for air and inspiration. Its collage, fractured-mirror approach and refusal of anything literal and linear make sure the film will always keep its power and mystery, not unlike Eliot’s Waste Land. I have a problem these days getting through Tarkovsky’s more linear films, with these long, slow tracking shots that have spawned so many imitators (mainly male directors who love to exercise their power over a captive audience for hours). The other Tarkovsky film I can watch repeatedly and keep discovering anew is Ivan’s Childhood."