"I could've picked anything by Roxy but Siren is just incredible; there isn't a bad track on the whole thing. That album was the last before they went lounge. The suits came a bit later. On Siren he was still dressed like an army guy - well, a cub scout without the hat on. I never saw Roxy live until 2001 though - I only ever saw them on the telly. 'Love Is A Drug' and 'Both Ends Burning' are great singles, they had so much oomph. And 'Whirlwind'- what a song - just a hugely consistent record from start to finish. Very well played and very well produced."

"Then I’m gonna go into Kubrick. 2001, because it is so enigmatic, it is so poetic, and it remains a mystery to me, even today where I can view it annually, three times a year, and still find something new in it. I’m still mystified by it. It achieved this status of being eternal in a way that didn’t rely heavily on performance; it was the special effects, the music. The fact that it was a success, that it was a commercial success, and it challenged every critic — many critics didn’t get it — so it was really ahead of its time. Nothing’s been ever quite like it again."

"The last one, I’ll say another classic: 2001. I think it’s a movie that you can watch every year and you’ll keep discovering new things. It’s funny how, as time goes by, the movie becomes more relevant and poignant. I love the fact how the storytelling of Kubrick is always inviting you to interpret the movie yourself, but at the same time it’s so rich — so much layers. The fact that now we’re living in a moment where technology is replacing man from [the] center of life — Kubrick really started to talk about that so many years ago, and I think it’s overwhelming. Every time I see it I think it’s overwhelming because I discover new things."

"What else would I go for? 2001. That’s gotta be up there. Just the trippiest, most beautiful epic. Again, I’m just sort of floored, really. I went to see the New York Philharmonic play the score live to a screening with my wife not that long ago, and it was awesome. There was an interval built in — it was obviously part of the film. We were shuffling back in after the interval, and I heard an elderly couple who were maybe not loving the experience. This guy is shuffling in and said to his wife, “Well, if you thought nothing happened in the first half…” [laughs] Yeah. She was not really loving that."

"Kubrick has always been my keystone filmmaker. It was when I saw 2001 at age seven on opening weekend in New York that I first had my mind blown by a film. (And yes, I got to see the infamous nineteen minutes before they were cut!) I didn’t understand it, but I became obsessed with understanding it, dragging my poor dad back to it over and over. It changed my life . . . and I still have the Criterion laserdisc—my first Criterion purchase. The extras on the LD were—and still are—extraordinary, even if the picture quality has long been surpassed on Blu-ray. This film is why I’ve kept my rickety laserdisc player. (I’d love to see Criterion get ahold of 2001 again and what they could do with this greatest of all science-fiction films with modern 4K technology.) Paths of Glory was the second Kubrick film I saw, a couple of years later, when my dad took me to a revival house (I think it was the Carnegie Hall Cinema). He loved the film and its unflinching, humanist, antiwar stance, and it immediately became a huge touchstone for me. Its influence is all over my film A Midnight Clear, but I see it in other ways in almost everything I do. I was so excited when the Blu-ray was announced that I ordered two, so I could store one as a backup in case—God forbid—anything happened to my first copy and the disc went out of print."

"I know these are things that go back in time, but now coming up to date, we got 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, the projecting forward of Arthur C. Clarke was just such a marvel of imagination, but not just guessing. I mean, he predicted that communication satellites would rotate at the same rate that the earth rotates. They’re in orbit traveling, so they sort of remain stationary over the equator. Now, that was a brilliant observation, and I think so many of these people — Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells, all of these science fiction writers. In a way, it prompted me to think about creating imaginary situations in the past, in the present, and off into the future, being as true to reality as possible. It also predicted things that we would call today… It’s a cable that goes all the way up and out to geosynchronous. And that has fascinated a lot of people, and I’ve appreciated some engineering observations that I think were quite impractical, but Arthur Clarke projected building a tower all the way out there. 22,000 miles. Now, that’s pretty stretching. But I feel very satisfied since Arthur Clarke wrote an epilogue to the book that Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I wrote with other people, First on The Moon, and Arthur Clarke wrote the epilogue to that. And because of his contributions and my appreciation of those and having met him on several occasions, I just was compelled to arrange a cruise so that I would get to spend a day with Arthur Clarke in 2001."

"My favorite genre: movies that are for children that are not for children at all. (And when Mike Patton, with Fantômas, covered one of its songs on the band’s 2001 album, The Director’s Cut, an even darker veil was pulled over the film.) This film sends me back to summer nights down South, running through the woods long after the dinner bell rang. I’d freeze on the line between our glowing yellow porch light in front and the deeper woods behind. The compact blackness of those deeper woods terrified me, but it hypnotized me more. The Night of the Hunter’s river sequence and the title sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird are the truest portrayals of childhood that have ever been captured on film."

"Who hasn't had the discussion of favourite Bowie albums? And I always go for this one. There's so much behind it in terms of knowing that just weeks or months before it, Bowie had met Mick Ronson and you know that this is a very new relationship and what Bowie had just come from. And it's kind of like the birth of The Spiders From Mars. It's quite complex in a way and I feel everything around it and the importance of that record. I guess that at the time this must have been quite a mental album for people to hear; it must have been quite insane. You know, like: 'What the fuck has Bowie done?' It's this really dark, fucked-up record and that plays a massive part in how I feel about it. I feel the same way about 2001: A Space Odyssey which I saw again the other day for the first time in about 15 years. And I wonder how it must've been for people when they saw it first time around. Sci-fi back then was kind of cheesy, low-budget B-movie shit and suddenly this movie comes out that's a complete change in direction with this seriousness, and gravitas, and coldness and it's not very inviting. And that's how I feel about The Man Who Sold The World. It was Bowie's 2001 at a time when people weren't used to that or ready for that. There's the darkness and the depth and, of course, there's the beauty. 'After All' is a beautiful song and very tender. It's like the birth of so much really."