"Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy! The songs were so sexy and raw and filled with beautiful, actually relatable teenage angst. The music and the production was all so immediate. My cool friends and my older brother were all listening to punk. I tried to be cool and tried to like the Sex Pistols, but I just couldn't get into the records. There just wasn't enough song there for me. But the Violent Femmes was like punk music that my brain could actually follow. I played that tape into the ground, just a non-stop soundtrack. Another thing I realised revisiting it was there's just not a bad song on that record, not a single moment that isn't essential. There's not two seconds of filler."

"Another all-time favorite would be Cuckoo’s Nest, which was particularly interesting from my perspective because a year or so before the film came out, I had seen the play. I was in college, and I was studying music. I wasn’t into acting or theater or any of that at the time, but a friend of mine was in the play, in a little black box production of the play at the theater department at the University of Montana where I studied music. And I went to see it, and it was, in many ways, an interestingly cast production, but it was brilliant. It was one of the first pieces of theater I saw that had that, you know, that real raw kind of Steppenwolf vibe that really blew me away. So when the movie came out, I kinda felt like, “You know, I don’t think I want to see this movie,” because the play was really so well done. But then I saw the movie, and obviously, [director Milos] Forman and the entire cast, down to people that didn’t even speak on camera, that movie was just so wonderfully done."

"Iggy reminds me a lot of me. And it's all in that name; it's all in the title of that album. It’s raw power, you know? I like the funk that David Bowie was able to get behind Iggy. Believe it or not, I first saw an image of Iggy Pop at church, and they were talking about secret messages and backward masking - and they had [a picture of] Iggy Pop looking crazy. I didn't get into it until later, but I think how I was introduced to it was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. And what I like about Iggy is it's just genuine raunch. And the album seems like it’s all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album - or at least you'd like to believe that. I just read an interview with him in which he said he wrote a lot of it in Hyde Park sitting under a tree wearing pyjama's too, which gave it a cool twist as well. I just love 'Search And Destroy' and 'I Need Somebody' as well."

"She made three in the series, this, then II and III. This one is about hardcore punk in L.A. in the early ’80s so there’s a lot of Black Flag and that whole scene. Its aesthetic was one of the main influences that Chris Blauvelt and I used for Mid90s – for the way things looked, the way the backstage in the apartment looked, for the 16 mm. It’s a remarkable and encompassing snapshot of a scene that I’m personally drawn to, and the ethics and aesthetics of the film are as fucked up and raw as what it’s depicting. The crazy thing is that Penelope Spheeris started as a punk doc maker and ended up directing broad ’90s comedies - she made Wayne’s World (1992)! She also made Suburbia (1983), which is amazing, and another influence for Blauvelt and I. The main thing I did when I became a known as a an actor and had access to people and filmmakers, was me saying, like, “Hi, I’m the kid from Superbad, can I please have all the Decline movies?” That’s how I abused fame at that time."

"""I first got a copy of Raw Power in high school, so this was my first exposure to Iggy and The Stooges. At that point, I was more familiar with the more overt versions of punk, like the Sex Pistols or The Banned, and as much as I knew that The Stooges were punk rock they just weren't described in those terms, and that felt about right. They somehow felt more sensual - they were harder to define. It seemed as if they were teetering on the edge of something the whole time. "This song is a perfect example of that. Is it a ballad? Is it a rock song? Is it a soul screamer kind of thing? Really, it's all of those and it says a lot about my limited understanding of the style at the time that it didn't sound like punk to me when I first heard it. It's maybe the most feminine, least male-aggressive track on there. It's not 'Search and Destroy', and it's not ‘Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell'. I mean, he's saying ""penetrate me!"" It's my favourite song on that record."

"I spent the summer of 2002 in Los Angeles, interning for my uncle’s company. I rented a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture. Other than my inflatable mattress in the corner (which sprang a leak right away), it was just a big empty space. I had a suitcase, a guitar, and a laptop with me. I had no television and a superslow Internet connection, so watching DVDs on my laptop was my only source of entertainment. I happened to rent both of these films that summer, and they are still two of my favorites. The sloppiness and raw energy of The Harder They Come was so inspiring. Two-Lane Blacktop also had a great energy about it, but in a more deliberate, quiet way. Both films were convincing arguments for casting musicians as leads, regardless of their acting experience, which I have done several times and plan to continue doing. Most importantly, the films couldn’t be shaken. They crept into me and wouldn’t go away. My initial reaction to something is far less important to me than my feeling about it a month or a year later. These two are still with me."