"It’s going to be a draw between Godfather II and Manhattan. Obviously, there’s no point in seeing Godfather II without seeing The Godfather, but Godfather II is the only sequel I like. It’s just a spectacular character study and the scope of it, the humor of it, the sex appeal, the action, and the twist of the story and Fredo Corleone and Robert Deniro in the flashbacks — all of that is everything you ever want when you watch a movie. Manhattan I saw in the 1970s as a teenager. Woody Allen was pretty important in my house. My parents are both New York Jews and Manhattan is just an incredibly beautiful movie with a deep expression of humor and existentialism together. It now seems more morally complex to me than I realized, but I just loved things in it like the camera being locked off and people walking in and out of the frame. I noticed that even as a kid and tried to bend my head around the corners."

"It all started with us on the bus with a few guitars just singing the melody to what became 'The Jean Genie', but it was just naïve and silly. Then, a week later, Bowie came and said: 'Alright, I've finished that one!' And it was of course nowhere near what we had been singing lyrically, but the feel was there. It was one of those nods to good time rock & roll from the early days, spanning from the blues days right into the future. Although it was a very simple song, the lyrics were almost like a rap before rap came out, just with a blues rock backing. He was rapping about the weird scenes we were hanging out in in New York at the time. It just seemed to sum up a whole few years of the 1970s for us. There was weirdness in there, things you couldn't understand, sex, drugs and rock & roll are all in that song. It was, again, David going ahead and churning out a hit. And that one was a first take – that's what's on the record."

"Jaws is the next poster on my wall, I’m staring at it right now. You are about to be introduced to, in my opinion, the greatest craftsman storyteller the cinema has ever seen and with a vehicle that had literally the perfect balance — and he brought that. It was [Steven Spielberg’s] balance of humor and artistry and the genre. It was the culminating of that balance. I screened that movie for my crew — I forgot which movie, two or three movies ago, and it’s just incredible to watch the balancing act of the humor. Roy Schieder’s trying to understand about what’s going on in the town about the shark and there’s this lady complaining to him about the kids that are karate chopping the fence. It’s genius because life moves on, and this is like real life. It’s the collision of a perfect story from the book with great sensibilities for entertainment and humor. Spielberg gets the precision of the craft and thinking about the shot with the me lieu of the time, and does in that docu-1970s style, which is my favorite time period in cinema ever."

"""The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed. I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood. Which was a completely new one for me. I’d be, you know, This is my world. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell–starring, the idea of kids — while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film. For years I wondered about why some sequences were in black and white, and many years later I was reading an interview with Lindsey Anderson and discovered it was because they ran out of money for color film, so they just went over to black and white stock, which works in several places through the story."""