"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."

"""When I was in high school, I was a little rebellious,"" Levine said. ""I wanted to play music. I didn't want to do the things they were teaching me. I picked up a guitar and that was it. The second I picked up a guitar, I never really put it down again. I fell so madly in love with it, it's all I did. It consumed my every thought, and I'd have friends over that didn't even play instruments and I would just put instruments in their hands."" "I remember hearing Green Day for the first time and being kind of blown away,"" Levine continued. ""When I heard 'Longview' on the radio, I was just kind of enamored by it. I was like, 'Wow, what's this?' It was very accessible, melodic rock and roll music, but it was a little pissed-off and obnoxious."