"My copy of Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself, an illustrated beauty of a book by Allen Crawford, which exquisitely spreads out Whitman’s famous Leaves of Grass poem over 234 pages. Its cloth-bound body was a gift from a friend who had been staying in Paris, and it bears a stamp from the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore situated on the Left Bank. The friend is a dear one who I barely see given our current geolocations, but the sort where years can pass and you can still converse as if it were yesterday"

"For me, Criterion was an entry point for Asian cinema, which was really awesome. I started picking out films like Good Morning. Ozu is so beautiful. You look at the colors he’s working with, the stillness, the beauty. I tried not to put another Ozu on this list, but I had to include Tokyo Story also. I remember watching it for the first time and was like, man, so little happened but so much happened, and there’s such a wise grace. I hope we can see more films like this again."

"For me, Criterion was an entry point for Asian cinema, which was really awesome. I started picking out films like Good Morning. Ozu is so beautiful. You look at the colors he’s working with, the stillness, the beauty. I tried not to put another Ozu on this list, but I had to include Tokyo Story also. I remember watching it for the first time and was like, man, so little happened but so much happened, and there’s such a wise grace. I hope we can see more films like this again."

"I’d have to have a John Ford movie; there are four or five movies of his that are tied in my book. He added a secular audience involvement in what was the beauty of cinema. In other words, he was the first guy that I think made movies live up to the potential of what they could be, and continued to do so throughout his career. He was able to be, to me, the most profoundly humanistic bridge between the potential of cinema and how it relates to the human condition."

"If I were stuck on a desert island, I’d find it hard to let go of this record! It encapsulates every part of the perfect beauty of classical music, particularly Bach, yet it uses that with electronic synthesiser. It’s a totally new world, bringing the future and I think it’s fantastic. It also featured on A Clockwork Orange, which featured the 9th Symphony by Beethoven and is also one of my all-time favourite records. But that wasn’t on Switched On Bach, so I had to source the origin of that later."

"I just finished editing my new movie and I basically haven’t slowed down since the shoot in August, so I’m playing catch up on a ton of things I missed. This film has stuck with me like crazy. I’m trying to find some normalcy in life again and writing ideas for a new movie in my note pad, spending time with my girlfriend, and taking care of my cats. I think there is inspiration and beauty in so many small things all around us… This movie has latched on to me and hasn’t let go."

"When I became a film academic in the 1980s, I was allocated a class through which I discovered silent (or rather non-sync-sound) films. I had never appreciated the extraordinary beauty of this cinema and, most of all, I loved films of the very late twenties, made on the cusp of the transition—for instance, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld and The Docks of New York. People on Sunday is an amazing film document of Berlin just before the Nazis came to power, and is also a “young modern woman” film."

"It’s a piece that Messiaen wrote when he was in a concentration camp. It’s very spiritual, and that’s one of the things that’s so interesting about it. The fact that he was in such a terrible environment and could create music of such beauty is pretty remarkable. I’m a big fan of Messiaen for his use of textures and colors. He’s like a lot of film composers in that you can really see his music; he creates a landscape of sound and uses unusual tones and instruments to tell a story."

"Cronenberg is a genius. He reinvented genre filmmaking, giving it the depth of the most ambitious fiction. This truly visionary work must be one of his masterpieces. When it was released, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe a filmmaker could have not just captured the very soul of our present, or its hidden meaning, but also found its poetry, the mysterious beauty of it. eXistenZ, shot fifteen years later in a very different world, echoes it in fascinating ways. I consider David Cronenberg to be one of the great modern artists."

"Stripped to the bone, as sharp and lucent and alarming as a piece of broken crystal. An Englishwoman who has always depended on men to stay alive is older now and discarded. She has returned to Paris, which is as close as home to her as a place has been, but she no longer retains her one reliable resource, beauty. The intensity of her alienated helplessness renders with spectral clarity her memories and her precarious daily life in the city that no longer wishes to make room for her."