"My favorite film is a Fred Astaire film called A Damsel in Distress. It’s without Ginger Rogers, but it’s based on a P.G. Woodhouse book, who is my favorite author of all time, and he wrote the script. And it’s hilarious, and it’s wonderful. Astaire is amazing in it. Joan Fontaine is 22 years old. It’s beautiful, and it’s based on this wonderful Woodhouse book. I watch that at least once a year. And it’s got Burns and Allen, and they’re hilarious. It’s a great film."

"I saw Rust And Bone. It’s about a woman who is a whale trainer, and she loves to go dancing: she loves to go to the club. And the other main character is really into boxing, and he has a son that he doesn’t take care of, but then he has to. It’s hard to feel empathy for either character in the beginning. There are some really intense plot twists. She eventually loses her legs. They become good friends. I won’t say anymore, but it was amazing."

"The Band – they happened at a time when I was in my most purpose driven period, which was after I came out of hospital having being cured of tuberculosis. I was looking up everything that was going on and one of the albums I got was this one. It was just amazing how this authentic expression of folk rock or electrified folk complemented unique songwriting. It’s like if you listen to the Dubliners – that’s almost the equivalent of this American style. So yeah, that was big."

"Björk’s Debut and Post were mind-blowing records at the time—that somebody could use electronic beats and then do super innovative stuff with it. Then she continued doing things that explored lots of different other areas, with the Greenland Choir and with sounds made with the mouth. Once in awhile you see this amazing total artist, where you go, This person thinks about the stage, the shows, the costumes, the record covers, and the music, and it’s all part of a total thing."

"I’m going to break your rules, and I’m going to mention The Singing Detective, which was a TV series out of Britain with Michael Gambon. I don’t know if you ever saw it. Dennis Potter; it was so amazing. I remember watching that while I was acting training, in my first year of acting training, and I loved it so much, I got depressed, because I remember thinking, “I will never be able to act as well as Michael Gambon.” It was just so incredible."

"It’s hard to have favorites because I just have so many that I like and I respond to them differently with different moods and different pieces of memory, but I tried to name five that just came to my head. So I came with Bicycle Thief. It’s amazing. It’s very touching and so ahead of it’s time, it seems, but so simple, yet so complex. Just a very, very unique film that someone turned me onto years ago and that I had no idea about."

"For me, this created a whole new layer of filmmaking. It’s an amazing movie, and a little bit like La strada in that you don’t have to be a filmmaker or enthusiast to appreciate it. It just plays out like a really good documentary and a really good fiction, and it says a lot not only about Iranian society but about the human condition. This is the richest movie Kiarostami made, in my opinion, and it’s one of the best works of Iranian cinema."

"An amazing film. I fell in love with Cassavetes when I first came across him with Husbands, but I can’t watch his films anymore because it seems like there’s a bunch of actors showing off in front of a shaky camera, whereas Pialat’s À nos amours has aged well. It has an austerity and a real sense of danger about it. It makes you feel the pain of being alive quite viscerally. His more formal and pictorial Van Gogh is also difficult to forget."