"It was one of my cassettes but I think that this is my favourite Beatles record. When I was really young my older brother were really into them. There was a very small selection of records in the house so we just listened to those records over and over again. Two of them were The Wall and Dark Side Of The Moon, one of my brothers was big Pink Floyd fan. Another was Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, and Don McLean's American Pie, and the White Album, which led me to other Beatles stuff. But I love Abbey Road because it's so clearly an album, in that there's clearly a first song and a last song and all the songs in the middle are in an order. You couldn't listen to Abbey Road on shuffle and I like that. I think we've lost a lot of that these days. Things end up just being these singles and no one really buys albums anymore. Albums just aren't constructed that way as much anymore; the whole, the complete package, a narrative, an arc. The first copy I got had somehow been fucked up in the manufacturing process or something because side B was on side A. I remember the first time I listened to it I was listening to it out of order and it sounded weird to me, it felt weird. Then when I realised that it was backwards I listened to it again in the correct order and I was like, "oh, I get it". I also feel like the songs on that record, save for 'Octopus's Garden', also have some darkness about them, which I really like."

"Over the last thirty years, inspired amateurs and adventurers have become scarce and a lot of cinema tends to be produced by strict industrial norms. So I’m always on the lookout for any spark of life and originality, if only to reassure myself that cinema still has somewhere to go. So of course there are some Charlie Kaufman and Coen brothers films, and Cristi Puiu’s wonderfully grim Death of Mr. Lazarescu. But the film that took me on a ride into the unknown in the most irresistible and disturbing way, and still continues to haunt me, is Mullholland Dr. A similar thing happened to me more recently with Ciro Guerra’s hypnotic Embrace of the Serpent and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, both road movies of sorts, following an obsessive course through a strange yet familiar territory."

"This is a companion portrait of the existential man of The Fire Within, but it is the obverse—men facing their end not by the personal choice of suicide but by literally being blown to bits. Beginning in a slow, sleepy town (an extended sequence that was once severely trimmed), it tracks men who are moving toward death on a literal and metaphorical road but whose ability to face the void ahead of them is Camus-like in its indomitability. Screwed down as tightly as a pipe bomb, this Clouzot film threatens to blow up in front of you at every turn. You want to scream as you reach to grab the truck’s steering wheel."

"Everyone asks me if Nebraska influenced my work. The truth is, no. "Atlantic City" influenced my work, but as a whole, Nebraska isn’t a record that ever connected with me. I don’t know why, and I’m not saying it’s a bad record. I just don’t jive with it. I got sucked into The Ghost of Tom Joad on a road trip I took when I first graduated from high school. It was my first time leaving on my own and taking off for a few days. On that trip I listened to this record, front to back, about 100 times. The song “Highway 29” is still probably my favorite Bruce song ever. I don’t know what it is about this record that makes me love it so much, but to me, it’s some of Springsteen’s finest work and surely overlooked."