"Medium Cool. I’m crazy about that film. To me, there are a lot of great films from that era because I was seeing them in our movie house when I was a kid [Luhrmann’s dad ran a theater for a period], but what I love about Medium Cool is that it preempts the idea of taking a real historical event and weaving a drama around it. So that’s great about it. Robert Forster is great in that picture. Not to mention — and I’ll be a bit flippant here — the clothes are fantastic. It’s just a great pop cultural picture."

"This was Fellini’s first film in color. Fellini, along with cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo, experimented with this exciting new medium. There’s an enthusiasm and boldness to the use of color in it, and it shapes the way I think about color in film even today."

"I am a big fan of work in any medium that can take on death — being dead, being a soul — in a new way. It shares something with my favorite aspects of George Saunders in its matter of fact dealings with what might be considered supernatural."

"Stan Brakhage looked at film in a way that was exciting for me. He was never hampered by traditional storytelling or theatrically crafted scenes. Or even by cameras themselves. The images in his groundbreaking films set my imagination free to look at the medium in a new way."