Well, naturally, my grandfather. He was a Hasid, meaning a member of the Hasidic community, and I loved him, I adored him. So thanks to him, I became a Hasid too. And my mother — who actually continued his tradition — she’s the one who brought me to Hasidic Masters. And all the stories I tell now — I’ve written so many books with Hasidic tales — these are not mine, these are theirs, my mother’s and my grandfather’s. My father taught me how to reason, how to reach my mind. My soul belonged to my grandfather and my mother. They enriched me, of course. They influenced me profoundly, to this day. When I write, I have the feeling, literally, physically, that one of them is behind my back, looking over my shoulder and reading what I’m writing. I’m terribly afraid of their judgment.

One was Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson. He had got his doctorate in physical chemistry — x-ray crystallography — in 1920. He was the first person to get a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology. And he was continuing with x-ray crystallography, determining the structure of inorganic crystals. After I had accepted appointment as a graduate student at California Institute of Technology, A.A. Noyes, the head of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering, wrote to say that he had decided I should work with Roscoe Dickinson on determining the structure of crystals. This was really extremely fortunate for me, in my opinion. I don’t think that there was any field that was more suited to my interests, and I don’t really know why Dr. Noyes selected me out of eight or ten new graduate students to do x-ray crystallography. Dickinson had a remarkable mind. He was a very careful investigator and thinker, a very logical thinker. When he was teaching me x-ray crystallography, he also taught me to ask at each stage in the argument, “What assumptions are being made? How reliable is the conclusion that you draw? What chance is there that one of the assumptions you have made is not correct?” “You should recognize,” he said to me, “that there is in almost every investigation a lack of complete rigor. You should understand just how reliable the arguments are that you are presenting.

I realized I took ideas from philosophers like Dan Dennett. I took ideas from evolutionary biologists like John Maynard Smith. I took ideas from people who were trying to implement evolution for things like RNA, so people like Jerry Joyce at Scripps. I took ideas from lots of people who could explain their ideas well, so I’ve been influenced by many. I’ve built my ideas on the contributions of many. And, of course, that’s what evolution does. It mutates and recombines what’s already there. Nothing comes out of nothing, right? It all comes on the back of what was there.

I wrote a little book called Screening History , in which I go in great detail into the movies that affected me growing up. This was in the years of puberty, and so on. The Prince and the Pauper , based on Mark Twain’s novel with the Mauch twins in it. All of the propaganda films I loved, because they were political.

It can be combining something disparate. With Greenberg , for example, I had the idea with the character and I wanted to make a movie in L.A. and about L.A. Then I put the two things together and that was the movie. With Francis Ha I wanted to do things in black and white, in New York, and with Greta Gerwig. These are the more conscious things.