"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."

"When I first read Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I was some years away from being married, and still a few years away from imagining I ever would be. What did the adulteries and suicide of a doctor's wife in provincial France matter to me? A lot. As my first editor once said to me, "I've known a number of adulterous women." (I didn't doubt that he had.) "But the one I know best, and will never forget, is Emma Bovary.""

"I wanted to throw in a film as well and this is a real classic. There’s a lot to say about it but what I really love is the location. It takes place in a vaguely French/Italian/Mediterranean environment. It’s like a fantastical Amalfi coast or Cote d’Azur seen through the eyes of a Japanese genius. Like all Miyazaki, it can be appreciated by people of any age and has deep, moving insights about growing up."