"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."

"This was the first band I ever saw. I went to see The Who at Charlton in 1974, when I was 12 or 13, and we bunked in, and supporting The Who was Alex Harvey. And, fuck me! He had this sort of fake brick wall, and he burst through and started singing ‘Framed’ and it was just a fucking revelation. It’s funny because I’ve been looking at a bit of him on Youtube recently, interviews that he did, and what a fucking character. The bits of film that are left of him, there’s a clip of him singing ‘Framed’ at some festival, and he pours a bottle of beer over his wild curly hair and turns it into a quiff with his hand. It was only when Jerry Leiber from Leiber & Stoller died recently that I realised they wrote that song. He shocked me, with the theatricality, the fearlessness, just doing what the fuck he wanted. They had this song called ‘The Faith Healer‘, which I heard made Johnny Rotten want to be in a band. Just outrageous, but charming and intelligent too. And they did a version of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Next‘, which was just fucking brilliant. He weren’t around for very long, but I have a lifelong love of his work. Just that mixture of comedy and… terror. Perfect!"