"I can’t leave out Kubrick. I think my favorite Kubrick movie is kind of tied between A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The Shining meant a lot to me. It was the first movie that made me really want to act. I love Jack Nicholson in that movie. I didn’t know who Jack Nicholson was at the time — I was like 11 when I saw it, but something about what he was doing in that movie just fascinated me."

"The way that the little girl listens to the song she sings again and again really influenced how I try to use music. It’s music that comes from within the story and somehow resonates with the territory that the film is exploring. I was so impressed by that when I saw it for the first time. The way I used music in Gloria, even though it is quite different, somehow owes a lot to this film."

"Now, my favorite films as a more mature person, when I was learning about what the director is and does, probably a lot of them were Howard Hawks movies, like Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo. In Hawks’ world, Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo are his visions of adventure stories with male groups, and men and women’s relationships, and life and death and danger. He’s developed that idea throughout his career. Those are just his beliefs."

"I was turned onto this record—and to Firecracker Recordings in general—in London at Kristina Records, the best record shop I’ve been to in a while. The Panoram record rules. Really abstract and minimal like a lot of stuff coming out this year, but has this very melodic, positive, clubby, acid/’90s vibe to it as well that I really love. The subtle club vibe reminds me of when I was a kid. Super nostalgic and musical."

"The next one would be Dead Alive by Peter Jackson. Again, another animated cartoon with live actors, and this is a film that really showed me how you can take a violent, dark situation and make it comic. Lots of blood, lots of decapitation, lots of violence, and yet it’s a comedy. That was a big influence on me when I started doing I Married a Strange Person!. I really referred a lot to Dead Alive."

"Before the Rain is one of my favorite movies of recent years. I think, in a very interesting way, there is a lot of spiritual thought hidden in the movie. When I saw it, the structure of the movie was very new, how it works with time. In my opinion, “time” will be one of the big topics in the future of telling stories, and how we approach it narratively will change in the next twenty to thirty years."

"This is the second film on my list about a dying man, and like Hunger, it’s based on true events. Bob Fosse came to feature filmmaking by way of dance, which is entirely evident here. This film features a lot of actors dancing, dancers acting, and dancers dancing. It’s a sweaty and sexy take on the stress and fragility of the creative process. Plus, it features an early-career Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death."

"For a period of time, I thought I might only make documentaries. Films like Gimme Shelter had a lot to do with this attitude. Why make narrative work when real life was so interesting? I loved the Maysles approach to filming; I loved the Rolling Stones during that period; I loved the controversy surrounding the film. It still kind of seems like the perfect movie. Anytime this is playing in the theater, I try to see it."

"Then I’ll go with Ikiru by Kurosawa. The scene about a man who died. The opening scene is like, “Oh, this guy died — let’s talk about his life.” And then it goes back. It is, you know, it was made in the ’50s and it was hard to get good prints of it, but now the Criterion Blu-ray is out and it looks a lot better. It’s just a beautiful movie, astonishingly; the movie and the message."

"I enjoy sci-fi thanks to my brother John's passion for it, and this was the first sci-fi book to hit my radar. It touches on so many things: politics, religion, paganism, revivalism, psychokinesis – and it even introduced a couple of things that didn't exist before: the waterbed (which came out a few years after the book), and the word "grok" which means "to understand something intuitively or by empathy.” There's a lot to grok in this book."