"I really like songs that are storytelling in a way and The Kinks are great at that. “Waterloo Sunset” in particular sparked a lot of images in my mind about how you write songs and the way that melodies flow. “I think the best songs make you feel a certain way, and it’s a bit more than just the lyric really. The lyrics for “Waterloo Sunset” are brilliant but the song makes you feel like there’s a longing for a lost moment. I love the idea of two people meeting in a crowd, but with the whole atmosphere of the song, as soon as I hear it, I slip back into it and it just overwhelms me. ""There’s also a beautiful lost story within the song, the tale of a city and a river. I read that Ray Davies originally called it “Liverpool Sunset”, from when he was on tour in Liverpool and then later he changed it. “I was pretty obsessed with music from when I was quite young, and I still listen to music an awful lot. I don’t listen to these songs much anymore, but when I hear them, I love them. I think on my musical journey and absorbing that stuff, The Beatles and The Kinks were very much the beginning of it. I’m definitely sticking in an era here!"

"I was thirteen when I saw this on opening weekend, and I remember leaving the theater walking on air. This had everything I’d wanted in a film. I was expecting just another fun action movie, and it was so much more. I was blown away by Verhoeven’s skillful hand with bleak absurdist satire, action, and genuine pathos. Somehow the film’s ludicrous extremes were able to make a perfect in-the-moment statement about the Regan-era eighties without the benefit of hindsight. Amazing script, amazing cast, and Peter Weller should’ve gotten an Oscar. So many memorable lines. Rob Bottin’s iconic designs of Robocop and the nuclear waste victim. Phil Tippet’s brilliant stop-motion wonder ED-209, so hilariously anthropomorphized through its beastly sound design and hurky movement—and I’ve yet to see something like that executed as perfectly with CGI. Some truly great, subversive physical comedy. When this was first released on Criterion I was so excited it was getting the reverence it deserved among the other classics. I believe it’s on the commentary track where Verhoeven talks about the sequel he pitched that was inevitably turned down. Instead of simply repeating himself, he proposed a love story with RoboCop falling for a cyborg that was little more than a floating brain in a jar. I would love to see that."

"Strangelove — you can watch it again and again. Brilliant. To me, maybe the funniest movie ever made. Huge variety in the styles of the movie. Some of it’s shot like cinéma vérité documentary. Some of it’s very stylized. The mise en scène changes radically. When you’re in the bomber it’s hand-held — it might as well be Richie Leacock, or one of the Pennebakers making a movie; that’s how free-form it is. Totally realistic, even though you have Slim Pickens as the pilot of the jet that’s taking the atomic bomb to Russia. He’s hilarious, and yet you have a sense of this is really what it looks like — what their equipment looks like, what the gauges and the codes look like. They do a really funny sequence where they open up their survival box and there’s a condom, and there’s a 45, and it’s totally believable. And of course it ends with Slim Pickens riding the atomic bomb down like a wild horse toward Russia, and the world ending. And Sterling Hayden, absolutely hilarious throughout the movie, and Sellers playing five parts, I think. The scenes between him and Sterling Hayden, where he’s the British officer who’s been assigned to this airbase and Sterling Hayden is completely wacko and is convinced that they’re stealing his precious bodily fluids, because when he had sex he felt depleted. [Laughs]."

"The great British director Lindsay Anderson died 20 years ago and he only made five or six films, but they’re all very interesting, and I think his most famous is called If… It’s the film Malcolm McDowell did before A Clockwork Orange, and it’s kind of the ultimate teenage movie. It’s beautiful and very radical. It won Cannes that year, and it’s very much of its time, the ’60s, and Malcolm McDowell is brilliant in it. It’s the ultimate teen rebellion movie — and I like that genre — but it’s also very poetic, almost Brechtian, and there’s almost fantasy elements to it. Like, there’s this woman in the movie who might not even be real. It’s filmed in color and there are sections that are black-and-white and it’s kind of amazing. It’s the first film of a trilogy too. Malcolm McDowell’s character’s name is Mick Travis, and so a few years later, they did a film called O Lucky Man! and then ten years later they did Britannia Hospital together, Lindsay Anderson and Malcolm McDowell. So it’s one of the greater film trilogies in my opinion… It’s definitely worth watching. It used to be a bigger cult film in the ’70s and the ’80s, but I see it’s falling off. I don’t know if young people are watching it the way they used to."