"A lot of people didn’t like it, but I loved Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the Russian film Solaris from the minute I saw it. I like it more than the original. I never paid too much attention to soundtrack music before that, but as soon as I heard that one in the theater I was just like, “What the fuck is this?” If you looked at my iTunes playlist, this soundtrack might be the most played album on my computer. It’s like experimental ambient music that still really involves your emotions. You could draw a line from this soundtrack to “The Ghost of You Lingers” from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which came out around this time."

"When I was a kid I saw My Name Is Joe in the theater. I’d never seen anybody act like Peter Mullan before and I’d never seen a movie like that, period. Watching Mullan in that movie I was just like, how do you do that? How do you get actors to do that? After that I watched every Ken Loach movie I could. Kes is one of my favorite movies ever. The plot of We the Animals is very smiliar to Kes; we follow the same formula. In fact, the entire last third of our movie is completely ripped off from the end of Kes and follows almost beat by beat the storytelling of that film."

"I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count. I think it’s the best movie about being a kid ever made. It’s a fairy tale and a nightmare and a totally believable portrayal of a Swedish family in Uppsala at the turn of the twentieth century, all at the same time. It has always reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It’s also a movie about the weird magic of theater . . . Both the opening sequence and the reading from Strindberg at the end kill me. And the way Bergman shoots inanimate objects . . . The statues and the toy angels and the clocks and the puppets and the lamps . . . They’re all watching Alexander, the whole movie."