"The story of singer Sally Bowles in the Weimar Republic, which came out late in 1972, into a very dreary Britain. I think of it as a glam-rock document, really: all those fantastic songs, confined to the stage, plus the brilliant makeup, in this frightening city. The notion of “divine decadence” was very intriguing when you were an 18-year-old student from Newcastle, recently arrived in London. It also had an impact on punk – look at Siouxsie Sioux: obviously influenced by Liza Minnelli. My friends and I would listen to the soundtrack in our Tottenham student flat, back-to-back with Lou Reed’s Transformer and Roxy Music’s second album. It had the same impact."

"To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II movie. To make a comedy about World War II in the middle of World War II is major league balls, and he pulls it off brilliantly. It’s Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. It’s her last film; she’s amazingly funny. And Benny does this great trick of playing the character in the film and yet getting laughs off what you know about the Jack Benny character from out of the movie, without ever disrupting the flow of the story. Just a brilliant movie. Really well worth studying for how to direct a serious comedy about a serious subject, and yet be really funny."

"I’m a big kid, I’m a kid at heart, so I still love the classic family films, such as the great Warner Bros film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — not the remake, but the original. It’s still one of the best movies, hands down, ever made, and of course that goes back to the ingenuity of the characters and the storyline. [Producer] David Wolper did such an amazing job bringing it to life, and Gene Wilder gave such an amazing performance. The songs, the music, the colors, the scope — it was just brilliant and really lead you to a fantasy world that didn’t exist, but that we could all imagine was real."

"After Gone and Road Warrior is Pulp Fiction, which I consider a perfect movie. I consider it a pitch-perfect movie. I’ve gotten to the point now where I pray to not come across it while channel surfing because, if I see five frames of it, then I have to sit and watch the rest of it. I’m now up to something like 30 or 40 times I’ve seen it. I just love that movie and all its dimensions, its crazy story structure, Quentin’s just brilliant dialogue, and the kind of mix of style and atmosphere with these memorable, memorable characters. Pulp is definitely one [of my favorites], although anything Tarantino would be good with me."

"Yes, he’s my son and, now, my writing partner. But this novel, penned by Jess well before we decided to collaborate, was a prize-winning international best seller and for good reason. Page-turning, suspenseful, beautifully written, deeply insightful, and rich in its portrayal of art world corruption and a long-forgotten, bizarre and particularly tormented artist. You will not be disappointed. And as long as I’m going to be accused of nepotism, check out the novels of my brilliant wife, Faye Kellerman. Her most recent, Walking Shadows, explores the ramifications of a decades-old murder and is, like all of Faye’s books, elegantly spare and spot-on when it comes to exploring the human condition."