"I love that movie, when I was a kid I went to the movie theater and saw it 14 times the first weekend. You could see it over and over, they wouldn’t kick you out of the theater back then, so I would just stay there everyday and watch it. To this day, I still love that movie. I think it was brilliant. Sometimes with things like that, you attach a certain period of your life to it, and I saw this when I was a kid. If I’d been 40 years old in 1966, maybe I would have felt differently."

"I’m going to put Hitchcock’s Notorious on there — the Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant film — because I think that was one of the first films that I saw as a child where I felt like, “Ok, that’s my favorite movie.” I thought it was the most romantic movie I had ever seen. It’s impeccably written, impeccably constructed, and her performance in it, I think, is really peerless actually. She’s so simple and detailed. It’s a kind of perfect spy movie. I really love that genre and I think she’s incredible in it. I actually think she’s a really under-rated actress."

"I was a young, precocious seventeen-year-old and this was what I listened to all the time on my Walkman. I had grown up with it. There were deep musicians around us all the time, painters and people into jazz, so I knew I had a feeling for it. The flat was a hub of bohemian appreciation. I learnt that John Coltrane was better than everyone else because he was melodic. Some of the atonal ones, that was all a bit too much. That’s what was played here all the time. I moved out of home when I was 16 and we had a house in Shepherd’s Bush. A shithole, one of the rooms was the dustbin, and that was what I listened to, to the absolute horror of everyone else there, smoking their shit spliffs."

"I actually first discovered a lot of the films on this list, like News from Home, when I lived in New York, next to Kim’s Video, a time when I went a lot to Anthology Film Archives and Lincoln Center. Chantal Akerman has always been a big inspiration for me, and News from Home was the first film of hers that I saw. Watching it was so inspiring and made me feel like I could make movies myself, because it’s so simply done yet so affecting—just letters and an empty city. I have a very strong relationship with my mother, and she also used to send me letters when I lived in New York. I discovered Jeanne Dielman later, and a lot of the screen tests I did for Invisible Life were taken from frames from that film."