"""That's when he did all talking songs. He had this pseudonym, Luke the Drifter, but I remember it for 'Beyond The Sunset' and every track was where he sang a little bit, but he talked a lot. The earlier ones that I heard Hank Williams doing were the classic hits that he had, 'Cold Cold Heart' and 'Your Cheating Heart'. This one I came to later. I heard Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter first in America. When I first went to the States in 1965, I was finding albums in the Colony record shop, right in Manhattan. It was the honesty of the songs - they were very well written, the lyrics, which were tremendous. That's what I liked about it and what I still do. The ones were he talks, that's another thing again. He went a step up there: it was great to hear him talk as well as sing. 'I Dreamed About Mama Last Night', that's a great song, just about life, talking and singing."""

"If I had to think of a Bowie album, then this would be the one that pinpointed when I was at my most susceptible. I would have been 14 or 15, and I just remember carrying it into school and feeling very proud to have that vinyl under my arm, and feeling very different to the other kids. The first actual album I bought was The Man Who Sold The World, which I still have a real soft spot for, but I wouldn't say it's as developed as those later albums. Everybody talks about Bowie's golden period as the early 70s, and you tend to forget about everything beyond Scary Monsters, and that's the way I feel too – I think he was by far at his most creative period at that time. It's difficult to pick one album from that period; you could have any of them from Hunky Dory to Scary Monsters. But for me, this is the record that left the biggest mark combined with my age."

"You can’t draw up a list of movies without including Godard, because he is one of the greatest experimenters of the art form. He has always looked for something else, something that goes beyond, and he’s never stopped this quest. Breathless is very important to me because it was the first film I ever saw that actually surprised me and deeply impressed me. I was about fifteen or sixteen, and up until then I’d only seen commercial movies, so this really overwhelmed me and rocked my world. For the first time, my idea of what a film could be was broadened, and in my mind it took on so many different nuances. I was like somebody who had always thought that sweetness could only be found in sugar and then learned that there are thousands of different ways of tasting it. Breathless made me understand that what film allows you to do is explore many different territories and narrative possibilities and that there is an entire world out there."

"The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were leveled, humanity’s faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didn’t look away from harshness and violence—quite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance. I’m thinking of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51, the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world."

"The next I would say is La Strada because, well, do I really have to say? I feel like it’s sort of self-explanatory. Like [laughs] Giulietta Masina, I mean every performance, but particularly the last scene in the movie, with Anthony Quinn and just being on the beach, and everything about that movie is beautiful. And there’s something always about his films that, knowing that audio was recorded post shooting the film — I’m pretty sure that’s true with that movie — just to know, in a way, if it is true, it’s just to know that there are two sort of performances happening simultaneously. You can see and hear that. And I love that idea and what skill and sort of the presence to this day that movie has. And it’s also personally really resonant because my father said after he saw that movie, it was what made him want to make movies, and when I finally saw it when I was a teenager, I understood why. So it inevitably has a resonance beyond the brilliance of the movie itself."