"Life of Brian is the one Monty Python movie that really works as a movie (they’re all funny). The hardest I ever saw my dad laugh is when it cuts to the Sermon on the Mount and the camera slowly zooms back to reveal a huge crowd of people listening and finally settles on Terry Jones, playing Brian’s mother, at the very back, and he shouts “Speak up!” One of the best comedies ever."

"I got really obsessed with Queen when I was about 15 or 16. I don’t know what it was. I just love the songs, they’re incredibly well-written. Total pop songs, but so deep and technical. I remember reading a thing saying that Brian May refused to tour the world until he finished his degree in mathematics and physics because he wanted something to fall back on if the music thing didn’t work. I thought that was so cool."

"The Life of Brian. Put that up there. I can watch Monty Python any time of the day or night, anywhere, particularly the series. That film is just so kind of brazen and smart and silly. It’s outrageously funny and epic as well. People don’t make comedies on that kind of scale anymore. Epic is usually associated with something very earnest and serious. I just love how they sort of blew that out of the water."

"Close-up and Blow Out make a great double feature, mainly because their titles sound so cool together but also because you can’t find two better examples of wickedly smart and politically alive “self-referential” cinema that couldn’t be less doctrinaire. Also, because including Brian De Palma proves I’m not a total snob and allows me to plug one of the funniest and most intelligent books of film theory of the past decade, Chris Dumas’s Un-American Psycho."

"Close-up and Blow Out make a great double feature, mainly because their titles sound so cool together but also because you can’t find two better examples of wickedly smart and politically alive “self-referential” cinema that couldn’t be less doctrinaire. Also, because including Brian De Palma proves I’m not a total snob and allows me to plug one of the funniest and most intelligent books of film theory of the past decade, Chris Dumas’s Un-American Psycho."

"Kurosawa’s High and Low is one of the greatest and most contained crime thrillers ever made, with the first half largely confined to one location, and the second half venturing out into a real and deeply divided world. Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is a nihilistic portrait of political corruption, featuring John Travolta at his most blazingly charismatic. These are without a doubt two of the films that made me want to make films. They’re that inspiring."

"Kurosawa’s High and Low is one of the greatest and most contained crime thrillers ever made, with the first half largely confined to one location, and the second half venturing out into a real and deeply divided world. Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is a nihilistic portrait of political corruption, featuring John Travolta at his most blazingly charismatic. These are without a doubt two of the films that made me want to make films. They’re that inspiring."