"I discovered Fassbinder senior year of college, and I couldn’t believe it. Both of these films are perfect to me. Ali tells a grotesque yet delicate love story that, to my dummy liberal arts mind, was an analogy for the challenges of a gay relationship in the repressed Germany of the 1970s (at least that’s what I said in my thesis). Maria Braun is the tragic, triumphant story of a woman who does what she must to get by, but loses herself in the process. They both make you wanna dress up and smoke opium and fuck people you meet late at night in a bodega, even if you’re not into that."

"I discovered Fassbinder senior year of college, and I couldn’t believe it. Both of these films are perfect to me. Ali tells a grotesque yet delicate love story that, to my dummy liberal arts mind, was an analogy for the challenges of a gay relationship in the repressed Germany of the 1970s (at least that’s what I said in my thesis). Maria Braun is the tragic, triumphant story of a woman who does what she must to get by, but loses herself in the process. They both make you wanna dress up and smoke opium and fuck people you meet late at night in a bodega, even if you’re not into that."

"I could name a whole lot of well-known artists from anywhere in the world who have made great records but maybe it's more interesting if I pick up on things that I've grown up with that, for geographical reasons, aren't known much outside this particular Welsh language culture. These records aren't talked about everyday in the English language. Someone like Geraint Jarman, with Datyblgu, might be the most powerful Welsh language music [of its time]. He is from a generation earlier [to Datyblgu] and started releasing solo albums in the mid-1970s. He was part of the folk movement in the late-1960s and was in a band with Meic Stevens and Heather Jones called Baramenyn. They were making almost pastiche folk music that was critical of folk music but the records were really popular! They were almost like Os Mutantes without the fuzz! Geraint was a poet first and wrote really good poems like Gil Scott-Heron. He had those skills which he applied to rock music in the mid-1970s. He also had an amazing band who could record an album in a couple of days and an amazing guitarist called Tich Gwilym. This album is like a mid-1970s rock album but informed by punk - Television are in there, too - but it's got that grounding in songwriting from the folk days as well. You can get lost in the guitar playing as well and the lyrics are risqué for the community he was singing to at the time - Wales was quite a religious place in a non conformist way. But it's not kitsch music, it's very much engaging with its day and Geraint grew up in urban Cardiff in a Welsh speaking family but with connections to the Romany world. Like a lot of bands from elsewhere in Wales at the time, he was part of a multi-cultural society, a lot of his friends from school were in reggae bands and he gradually got more and more into reggae. You can hear this in this record but it's also a rock record. By the end of the 1980s, he was playing at Reggae Sunsplash so it's interesting...he was still [singing] in the Welsh language! He's still singing and putting records out. He also pioneered a Welsh television show called Fideo 9 which was like Snub TV or something and he put a lot of energy into that. He was also the voice of the cartoon character Super Ted!"

"I think it’s probably one of the most inspirational movies for me because of Paul Newman‘s performance. I think that is, to me, some of the best, [most] controlled acting in a movie. I think that he has this incredible likability. Even though he’s a drunk, washed-up lawyer, you’re still rooting for him from the very beginning. I’m that sort of weird guy who will watch a movie almost every day if I can. It’s harder when you’re working on the show. I buy a lot of movies on used DVD so I can have certain scenes. I was really looking for things to inspire me. When I got out of college I was waiting tables professionally [and] couldn’t afford to go the theater [every] night. I think those great movies can actually make you feel a certain way. Not only emotionally, but if you’re in this business, it’s one of those things where you see someone do something that good and it buys you a year of energy. That’s what I was really looking for. It sounds so cliché,[but I wanted] to bask in the glow some of these amazing performances, like [those of] Dustin Hoffman and Marlon Brando. But it was also fun. To get back to what I was saying before, that 1970s raw energy, it’s almost frustrating now that people aren’t making more movies like that because people won’t go see them. Even Away We Go is, in a way, a tribute to the 1970s movies, too, but more of the Hal Ashby thing. Again, I don’t think people are making movies like this, so for Sam to do it is incredibly cool. And the fact that my name’s on the poster is totally surreal."

"So here’s where, for me, it comes down to either the second Godfather, Taxi Driver, which is [Martin] Scorsese’s best film, I think, or one of two or three Altmans, I guess. And of those three, I’d probably go with Taxi Driver. It’s pretty great, and it’s one of the most dangerous films ever to come out of this country, I think. And it’s got great performances, and it’s got such electric ambiguity in what it’s saying about this guy. For me, that film marks, probably, the end point of that great period of the 1970s. So many fine directors; Altman, Coppola, the freedom of expression. I almost didn’t have the resources to deal with Taxi Driver when I first saw it . I don’t go back to it all the time, because it’s such a handful, but I think that’s Scorsese’s best film."