"My favorite essay in this collection is "Goodbye To All That." One quote has always resonated with me: "I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage." As a child, I lived all over the world — we moved a million zillion times — and I never felt completely happy until I was in New York City. Like Didion, I felt that I'd reached the mirage; I'd found a place where anything could happen. And she talks about that: "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."

"I watched this 1947 stark, black and white, noirish prison drama as part of research for a film I directed called Animal Factory, written by novelist and ex-convict Eddie Bunker. For years I thought director Jules Dassin was a Frenchman working in the U.S. I was surprised to learn he was an American (Russian Jew) from Connecticut who fled the U.S. during the red scare of the fifties. He ended up in Paris and made the wonderful French film Rififi, which added to my confusion. The Naked City (1948) by Dassin is also a classic, shot on gloriously gritty locations in New York City."

"My buddy Cruz Angeles first turned me on to the films of Wong Kar-wai in my early years in New York City. In the Mood for Love is just flawless. The performance are restrained and yet so full of deep internal life. A glance, a gesture, carries so much weight. You can say so much with what you don’t say. The performances by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung are wonderful. And the cinematography, the visual language of the film, is stunning."

"I actually first discovered a lot of the films on this list, like News from Home, when I lived in New York, next to Kim’s Video, a time when I went a lot to Anthology Film Archives and Lincoln Center. Chantal Akerman has always been a big inspiration for me, and News from Home was the first film of hers that I saw. Watching it was so inspiring and made me feel like I could make movies myself, because it’s so simply done yet so affecting—just letters and an empty city. I have a very strong relationship with my mother, and she also used to send me letters when I lived in New York. I discovered Jeanne Dielman later, and a lot of the screen tests I did for Invisible Life were taken from frames from that film."