"The last one, for me, just in terms of comedy, is This is Spinal Tap. [Laughs] I mean, I love Spinal Tap. When I first saw it in 1984 I was the only person in the cinema at Swiss Cottage in London, and I didn’t know whether it was real or if it wasn’t. [Laughs] It was just so profoundly funny. I think it obviously inspired me personally, in a huge way. I would say that the movies that inspired Anvil! were a combination of Withnail and I and This is Spinal Tap. [Laughs]"

"I do remember talking with [filmmaker David] Fincher. He was telling me about the original one that [Michael Haneke] did, Funny Games, and I was telling him about Hidden. And we didn’t realize in that conversation that we were talking about the same filmmaker. But it is truly, for me, the God of cinema, that just does not breathe a step wrong, and is contemporary life apart from Kieslowski’s time — is Haneke. I looked at that film and I thought it the most thrillingly, chillingly, correctly timed movie that I have ever seen."

"I had no clue who they were [at the time]. There was a band called Zero Seven and a few other bands around at that time that were in the same realm in that the artists aren't visible. I challenge a lot of people to recognise these artists! You could sit next to them in the cinema and you wouldn't know. But this was a great album to just have on. And to be doing something else to. Having them on in the kitchen or garden – they're really great records to have as the backdrop."

"I think I was graduating from college, yeah. It was just so fresh and amazing, and the storytelling, you know, changed cinema forever. I just loved it. And it brought back John Travolta. Every character was incredible, and I loved its really dark sense of humor. Like, literally some of the hardest laughing I’ve ever done in my life was when John Travolta accidentally blows the head off that guy. [laughs] Making that funny is such a feat. The comic sensibility of Quentin Tarantino never ceases to amaze me."

"For me, Criterion was an entry point for Asian cinema, which was really awesome. I started picking out films like Good Morning. Ozu is so beautiful. You look at the colors he’s working with, the stillness, the beauty. I tried not to put another Ozu on this list, but I had to include Tokyo Story also. I remember watching it for the first time and was like, man, so little happened but so much happened, and there’s such a wise grace. I hope we can see more films like this again."

"For me, Criterion was an entry point for Asian cinema, which was really awesome. I started picking out films like Good Morning. Ozu is so beautiful. You look at the colors he’s working with, the stillness, the beauty. I tried not to put another Ozu on this list, but I had to include Tokyo Story also. I remember watching it for the first time and was like, man, so little happened but so much happened, and there’s such a wise grace. I hope we can see more films like this again."

"Terrence Malick is the preeminent practicing metaphysician of the cinema. In his brilliant and haunting first feature, he tells the story of a vicious young serial killer and his impassive underage girlfriend, both perfectly rendered by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The violence unfolds in the context of a vastly uncaring natural world and is relayed to us by the girl through a detached narration utterly innocent of emotion. The result is not a moral inquiry into human action but rather a compelling meditation on the nature of being itself."

"Mark Sandrich was the superlative director of Fred Astaire musicals, strikingly more successful at this demanding (though charming) form than the better known George Stevens. It’s very funny, chock-a-block with great character actors, and with wonderful music (Cole Porter) and choreography (Astaire with Hermes Pan). There’s something about works at the beginning of a form or style of cinema, even if rough and lacking couth, that I find more lovable and compelling than that form perfected (which in this case would be the gorgeous Top Hat made by Sandrich the next year)."