Directed by: David Lean | Written by: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson

Whenever I'm asked about my favorite movies, I always have to mention Lawrence of Arabia. They did a re-release of it when I was in the fourth grade. At the time, we had this single-screen theater in Little Rock that has now, unfortunately, been turned into a parking lot. I went to go see Lawrence of Arabia at that theater, and, you know, I was just a fourth-grade kid. I didn't really know what was going on. I didn't really know what Lawrence of Arabia was about. But I knew something special was happening in front of me, because it was playing on a 70mm print.

I think it is so important to be truly immersed in a film, and I felt the scope and scale of Lawrence of Arabia. When I started making my first film, Shotgun Stories, I knew that I wanted to find a horizon line like in Lawrence of Arabia. Fortunately, the Arkansas Delta is a good place to look for that.

Written and Directed by: Terrence Malick

I saw Badlands for the first time in college. Up to that point, I'd grown up on a steady diet of only the movies that were shown at my local cineplex in Little Rock. There was a bit of an independent film movement creeping in through local video stores in the late '90s, and that's how I saw films like Mystery Train and Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. But I vividly remember when I was in college and they screened a print of Badlands.

I remember I went home that night and called my brother. I said, "You've got to watch this movie I just saw. I've never seen anything like it." The film seemed to live in this weird, ethereal place, but the dialogue was also so good! Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are great in it, and Sheen's character is so likable but also really dangerous. I didn't know that movies could feel how that film does, so Badlands is a really important film for me.

Directed by: Stuart Rosenberg | Written by: Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson

I've been on a bit of a Paul Newman kick lately, and I really think that Hud, Cool Hand Luke, and The Hustler are three of the greatest films ever made. If I had to pick a favorite between them, I'd say Cool Hand Luke is probably the easiest to watch, at least. Hud's just heartbreaking. The scene where they have to kill those longhorns in that film is absolutely heart-wrenching.

I know Paul Newman was always surprised whenever people would put posters of his characters up in their rooms, because he thought he played a lot of them like they were villains. He'd ask, "Why would they do that?" And to that, I say, "Well, because you're Paul Newman." That dynamic definitely was in my head when I was making Mud. I wrote that film for Matthew McConaughey, because I think he's the closest actor we have to Paul Newman, and I needed his character to be incredibly likable despite doing a lot of terrible things.

Directed by: Michael Ritchie | Written by: Jane Anderson

The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom is this made-for-TV movie I love by Michael Ritchie, who is one of my favorite directors. It stars Holly Hunter, and I was shown it in college by a professor of mine, because we had been talking in class about dialogue. He really wanted to make the point that film dialogue isn't an accurate or true representation of how people talk. In real life, we talk in incomplete sentences and our thoughts trail off. That film is about this woman in Texas whose daughter loses in a cheerleading competition to another young girl, so she tries to hire her brother-in-law to murder the other cheerleader. It was based on a true story, and Beau Bridges plays the brother-in-law character, who thinks this mom was insane so he starts recording every meeting he had with her. They took those recordings and turned all of that into dialogue for the film, and Holly Hunter does an incredible job of bringing that aspect of it to life.

When I listened to the audio recordings that Danny Lyon captured for The Bikeriders and I listened specifically to his interviews with Kathy, the woman Jodie plays, I thought, "This is my opportunity to do something like that, because no one talks like this anymore — not in this type of accent and this type of vernacular. This is my opportunity to actually build a lot of dialogue out of pre-recorded stuff." So much of the dialogue you hear in the film is real, and that's why it has this very specific energy. When I first talked to Tom, he even joked, "Can I play Kathy? She's so fully-realized on the page. My character's a bit of a shadow. I've got to fill Johnny in, but I could play Kathy." He said that because of where her dialogue in the film came from.

Directed by: Martin Scorsese | Written by: Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese

Goodfellas is another movie that influenced The Bikeriders, and for good reason. If you look at the first hour of that movie, it is not plotted in any traditional way. Really, what it's doing throughout that first hour is making you fall in love with the romantic side of a very dangerous subculture, so I really studied that film in terms of its structure.

I don't really know at this point what more I could say about it that I and so many other people haven't already said. But structurally and aesthetically speaking, it was a really important reference point for me as I was making Bikeriders.