The film that changed the filmmaker I wanted to become.

Martin Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker, but this documentary may have influenced me more deeply than any of his films.

My Voyage to Italy introduced me to the heart of Italian cinema through Scorsese’s own personal journey with the films that shaped him. Watching it changed my style. It changed the kind of filmmaker I wanted to become.

The section on Italian neorealism resonated with me most. That way of looking at ordinary people, real environments and everyday life stayed with me. It became part of the foundation of how I see stories, and it’s still at the heart of the work I make today.

Scorsese has always been one of my greatest teachers. My Voyage to Italy made that relationship even more personal. Of everything on this list, this may be the most precious to me.

I first studied Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye in film school, and I’ve returned to it multiple times since.

To me, it’s the foundational book on film editing. It taught me a great deal about the craft and helped shape the way I think about putting a film together.

This was the first cookbook I ever read. My dad found it in a bargain bin at Barnes & Noble sometime in the 90s, and we still have that original copy today.

I learned to cook by watching my grandmother and my mom, but this book taught me about Italian cuisine in a different way. The photographs, the descriptions, the tone of the writing and the way it approached food stayed with me. I still haven’t found another cookbook I enjoy returning to as much.

If My Voyage to Italy became the foundation of the way I make films, The Classic Italian Cookbook became the foundation of the way I cook.

There was a period in my life when I was deeply exploring my Sicilian heritage, and The Sicilian became part of that journey.

I had already been to Sicily, but reading this made me feel like I was there again. It connected me more deeply to the land my father came from and reminded me of why I love it so much.

It also helped shape me as a storyteller, not because it taught me how to write, but because it made me dream and visualize. I fell in love with the writing, the characters and the world the story created in my imagination.

It remains one of my favorite novels.

As a kid, I became fascinated with Ray Harryhausen and stop motion animation. Before I discovered Martin Scorsese, I knew Harryhausen. I sought out the films he worked on, watched interviews with him and read about his craft.

I was already deeply curious about mythology, creatures and monsters, and his work brought those things to life on screen in a way that captured my imagination.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad contains one of those images that has never left me: the battle between the Minotaur and the Griffin. Even today, watching it takes me back to what it felt like as a kid seeing these fantastical creatures come alive on a movie screen.

Harryhausen showed me some of the magic of movies before I understood that I wanted to spend my life making them.

I love classic literature, and I love heavy metal. Somehow, those two worlds came together for me in high school.

I discovered Iced Earth and their 16 minute epic ‘Dante’s Inferno.’ I loved the song so much that I wanted to understand the story behind it, and that curiosity led me to Dante and The Divine Comedy.

What I found was much bigger than a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The symbolism, the dramatic irony, the writing and especially the imagery fascinated me. But underneath all of it is something timeless.

To me, The Divine Comedy is ultimately a story of discovery. Dante travels through these extraordinary places, but the deeper journey is inward. It’s about confronting who we are and discovering ourselves.

It became one of those works that showed me how powerful a story can become when imagery, symbolism and meaning all occupy the same space.

By the time I read Scorsese on Scorsese, I already knew how much his work meant to me. This book simply brought me deeper into his world, his films and the way he thinks about filmmaking.

Like so much of what I’ve learned from Scorsese, I’ve carried those lessons into my own work.

My love of mythology and my fascination with Dante eventually led me to Paradise Lost, and it introduced me to something that would become incredibly important to me as a storyteller: the tragic hero.

I became fascinated by the idea of downfall. A character can be powerful, compelling and deeply flawed, and we can understand them even as we watch the choices that lead toward their destruction.

That fascination found its way directly into my own writing. One of the screenplays I wrote in college centered on a main character who was directly influenced by what I discovered in Paradise Lost.

It helped me discover tragedy not simply as something terrible happening to a character, but as a way of understanding character itself.

This is one of the newer influences in my life. Scott, the CEO of a company I was doing video work for, recommended it to me, and its principles quickly became foundational to the way I work.

It helped me organize my thoughts, materialize ideas that might otherwise remain in my head, and turn those ideas into action.

I’m grateful Scott introduced me to it. I’m still building my second brain, but it has already changed the way I think, create and work.