"I think my fifth choice will blow you away. At a time in my life when I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to pursue, and I had a feeling I wanted to pursue acting as a career, one of the films that really hit me hard emotionally that made me feel pushed that way was An Officer and a Gentleman, with Richard Gere. There was just something about that film that had such a profound effect on me. The line,”I have no place else to go,” that he yells up at Lou Gossett, Jr. resonated. I love that film for the emotional impact it had on me. It’s an amazing film."

"This really scared me coming out of it. You knew it was made for 10 cents – that was obvious – but it actually had some fabulous performances. Some of the moments – like when Leatherface kicks open the door and comes after them – I mean your blood just runs cold. It was just amazingly visceral visual storytelling. A few years earlier, I was at college and I wrote a synopsis for a novel and my teacher feedback was “this would make a great movie!” And I was crestfallen, but it made me realise I had a great visual imagination as well, and for years I fought it but eventually realised that was the thing I could do"

"I saw The Wild Bunch on a double bill with Mean Streets, midnight at the Waverly Place Cinema on Bleecker Street in New York [in the 1970s]. Those two played on a double bill; I was in New York, I had a studio and I was basically a practicing artist, working with various art groups — Art & Language, kind of conceptual arts, political arts. We were doing environments, we were doing installations, performance pieces…and I stumbled into this incredible double bill. And it was a life-changing experience. I thought they were just extraordinary. [Sam] Peckinpah for his muscularity, his immediacy, his sheer genius in his storytelling and characters. I was knocked out."