"This goes up to the Chicago stuff. When all the Mississippi guys made it up to Chicagoland, the Chess Brothers started picking them up and made it possible for them to record some stunning material. “There’s so much good stuff here that I don’t even know where to begin. Louisiana Blues, Rollin’ And Tumblin’, Long Distance Call, I Can’t Be Satisfied – all of these recordings were turning points in that, once electricity entered the picture, bands with three and four people in them could do battle with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and 10-piece horn sections. “Muddy Waters had a very distinctive guitar tone. When he played a Gibson Les Paul goldtop, you could really identify the sound, and you knew who it was. Compared to BB or Freddy or Albert, his playing might not have been so fanciful, but his licks were stinging and ferocious. And he laid down a lot of Delta-based slide guitar, too. Just because he was in Chicago, he didn’t leave his humble beginnings behind."

"I was twenty years old when I first saw it. It terrified me then, and still does.
 The preacher, played by Robert Mitchum, is the most frightening
 psychopath I’ve ever seen depicted. This is the only film directed by Charles Laughton, and its haunting, over-the-top storytelling is reminiscent of Laughton’s own character portrayals. The poetic, expressionistic images are by Stanley Cortez, a true American master who I fortunately came to know many years before his death. Stanley photographed, among others, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Three Faces of Eve, in which his lighting is equally unique. The disturbing orchestral score is by Walter Schumann, who also wrote the Dragnet theme and whose music underlines and drives the horror the way Bernard Herrmann’s does in Psycho. This is one of James Agee’s rare screenplays—another was The African Queen—and it captures America in the Depression as
 well as did his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans. The film’s story is an American equivalent of the Brothers Grimm."

"These are all films vying for my favorite film. The thing I love about all the films I chose for the list is that they still feel extraordinarily fresh, as if they were made yesterday. There’s a timeless quality to them and a vibrancy and an energy to all of them, but particularly A Hard Day’s Night really struck me, being a huge fan of rock and roll. It’s a film that really defies any sort of — it’s difficult to put it into a specific genre — it’s a rock and roll film, right? It’s also sort of like a documentary of the early years of Beatlemania, and it’s also comedically like a Marx Brothers film. I just love the combination of all of those things, which give it an intense vibrancy and charm. Also these are five films that I watch at least once a year. I always come back to them and the Criterion collection just restored [Hard Day’s Night]. It was a marvel to see it restored and how beautiful a movie it is."