"Full disclosure: Lena is one of my best friends, but this was a film that I latched onto and loved long before I even met her. I see it as The Graduate for my generation of girls. The first time I watched it, I felt so dragged and so seen, as though my post-collegiate neuroses were just laid bare and my illogical chaotic feminine misbehavior just strung up for everybody to see. Dead-end jobs, complicated mother-daughter relationships, complicated sister-sister relationships: Dunham explores these things with a mix of levity and fearless vulgarity that makes her work feel so true and so to the gut."

"Mother and Child by Rodrigo García, because he’s really incredible about dealing with human relationships and he’s not afraid to go as dark as you need. He’s one of my favorite directors of all time, and I think he can write for a woman almost better than he can for a man. (laughs) And he’s a straight man. His father is actually Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He’s got just a nice touch with women and the performances are outstanding. Annette Bening and Naomi Watts and Britt [Brittany] Robertson, just f***ing everybody in that movie is… oh, it’s just f***ing one of the most beautiful, flawless films I’ve ever seen."

"My mother, who is this brilliant actress [Blythe Danner], started reading Jane Eyre to me when I was probably 9 or 10 years old. It was the first adult book that I got lost in. There's one scene when Jane is a child living with her relatives, and an older cousin begins to torture her. She fights back, but ends up getting locked away in a room as punishment. I so felt her frustration. When I read it again later in school, I connected to different parts of the book — especially the scenes with Jane as a young governess, new to Rochester's house and rather unsure of herself."

"Most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai. But here he is at his most precise and poetic. Both movies are epics of the spirit, and both are plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings; whether showing Oliver’s mother straining and in pain, by intercutting with a flexing branch of thorns, or by lovingly lingering on Miss Havisham’s decaying splendor, Lean understand the need for hyperbole in order to manage the larger-than-life Dickensian archetypes. Some of the passages in both films skate the fine line between poetry and horror."

"Most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai. But here he is at his most precise and poetic. Both movies are epics of the spirit, and both are plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings; whether showing Oliver’s mother straining and in pain, by intercutting with a flexing branch of thorns, or by lovingly lingering on Miss Havisham’s decaying splendor, Lean understand the need for hyperbole in order to manage the larger-than-life Dickensian archetypes. Some of the passages in both films skate the fine line between poetry and horror."

"I saw it when I was a young man in Philadelphia, and I became obsessed with R. Crumb. He reminded me a lot of my father—especially in the way he dealt with the weirdness of sexuality. And he was kind of depraved. Crumb is this beautiful portrait of this man teetering on the edge of madness, but Zwigoff makes him so sympathetic. Maryse Alberti does beautiful camera work that makes you feel like you’re in this guy’s world in a way that’s so intimate and lovely. After I saw it I spent all of my bar mitzvah money on Crumb comics, which was disappointing for my mother."

"My mother took me to see Jethro Tull for my 14th birthday. We were living in the Los Angeles area and they were playing a couple of towns over. It was pretty much my first rock concert. I was heavily into Jethro Tull back then and I still am. Stand Up is the record that moves me the most. It's only their second album and they're still kind of scruffy. There's a heavy rock influence but they had that English thing going on, you know, university dudes who were really into folk music. It didn't seem like an affectation to me – it still seems real."

"My main thing for music has always been the radio; that’s where I’ve heard things. Around age 5, when I was getting ready for school, my mum would get us up, and we would have breakfast in the kitchen, and the radio would be on. It would be the BBC Radio 2, which is the easy listening station. So I remember hearing a song called “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot whilst I was having my hair brushed and trying to keep still—because if you moved when you were having your hair brushed in the morning, my mother used to get in a really bad mood."