I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

When I'm trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place.

For me, the music is always like the small rowboat I get into at the very beginning of my process.

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

Music just gives me so much energy and inspiration. Music and literature in a way probably influence me more than cinema does because they're different forms and yet related. I probably know as much about music history as I do about the history of cinema.

There is something very pleasurable about watching cartoons, a really warm, comfortable feeling. My taste is quite broad, but most of all I like American cartoons. Early Disney, Betty Boop, Roadrunner, Ren & Stimpy, South Park. Sometimes I'll watch Pokemon or bad 80s cartoons.

I hate those live action versions of animated cartoons. It ruins everything, the whole point of cartoons is to get away from photographs. I mean it would be stupid to say that cartoons are better than photographs but its true.