"Number three is 8 1/2. I feel like this is not particularly original of me, but this film probably has the most athletic blocking and camerawork that I had seen in any film. A lot of my favorite filmmakers have stolen from this film — you know, the filming from Fellini in general, but especially this film. I’ve already started stealing from him, but filmmakers like Scorsese and Polanski — so much of their technique is derived from really just the playfulness of this film in particular, and whenever I want to inspire myself to play with the camera and to play with blocking and to try to go a little bit further, I’ll watch 8 1/2."

"Finally another American band. Aerosmith. They are a classic rock & roll band. What am I gonna say? It's just such a sexy, gritty record. I think I've said this about a lot of these records [laughs]. But it's got vibe, you know... Aerosmith have a kind of danger element to them. You know the history of the band, it's well-documented. You could hear it almost coming apart at the seams almost all the time, and the fact that it didn't... They were just riding that line. The rhythm section was amazing. The way Brad Whitford and Joe Perry played together... I mean, give it a listen, it's a classic rock album."

"It stars Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as a couple who gives birth to the Bad Guy’s son. And how do you know? Well, he’s got 666 somewhere on his skull, and you got to move the hairs apart. I mean, it’s just very scary stuff, but when you really think about it, not a lot of blood and gore. There’s a scene where a guy is walking with the intent of hurting [the son, Damien], and then all of a sudden the truck rolls down a hill and decapitates the guy. You’re kind going, ‘What the Hell?’ And layer after layer of the story peel away until finally, later on, you understand.”

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"Carolyn Cassady was the wife of Neal Cassady who is the hero in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” She was his wife, but also an artist and art teacher, and she was linked to this absolute lunatic of a man who was her Achilles heel. He regularly betrayed her, but you love who you love. She had a love affair with Kerouac as well—weirdly because Neal Cassady suggested it. She was an incredibly gifted writer, but she was managing these crazy men in her life and bringing up her children and I guess she didn’t see herself in that way. But she wrote with so much intuition and insight, and a lot of beauty as well."

"When I first met Peter Quill in Kyln, I ain’t never heard of a “raccoon,” but he made me watch this movie and… aww flarg, I loved it! It’s a gritty tale about a wily raccoon that gets abducted by one of Quill’s ancient ancestors in some cheese hut called “Wisconsin.” The little guy unleashes a whole lot of krutack on his captors and eventually cons the kid into letting him go free. It reminded me of my own childhood, when I got stuck in a lab on Halfworld. That’s where I met my best bud Groot. This flick had us bawling like saplings. BUT DON’T TELL QUILL! I don’t want him to know we was gettin’ sentimental…"

"The other one in the comedy genre is an all-time classic, Coming to America. Like Harlem Nights, Coming to America, the rawness of it, Eddie and Arsenio’s relationship, just all the different characters Eddie was able to play and pull off — not a shabby job, Arsenio played a lot of characters himself — but the brilliance of Eddie Murphy. If they gave Oscars for comedies back then, that would have been the top of the list. You know, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor turned in some incredible ones, too, but I tend to love what Coming to America was all about. Just the fact that it was New York, and how it started and where it went."

"That title track, it really affected me emotionally. I can't really explain why, but it really got under my skin. We were going to a lot of parties and stuff, and that was always the track that was played, and everybody would get up and start dancing to it. I love most of the Bowie stuff, but '"Heroes"' and that whole era, I found it really moving. "Heroes" was a rebellion inspiration, an "I told you so"-type thing. It seemed to be very anti-establishment, and something your parents wouldn't approve of, so we loved it. I've never seen Bowie, though we did play a tour supporting him in South America."

"I went to see The Spirit of the Beehive at Film Forum on a whim only a few years ago, when it was rereleased, and it immediately became one of my favorite movies ever. It opens with a town full of kids, all yelling “The movie’s here! The movie’s here!” while running alongside a truck carrying a print of Frankenstein to the church where it will be screened. From there, you are swept right into the life and story of a thoroughly compelling little girl with beautiful brown eyes, a sister, a cat, a big house, a fair dose of anxiety, and a lot of free time in stressful post-civil-war Spain."