"Mizoguchi is one of the greatest masters who ever worked in the medium of film; he’s right up there with Renoir and Murnau and Ford, and after the war he made three pictures—The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, and Sansho the Bailiff—that stand at the summit of cinema. All of his artistry is channeled into the most extraordinary simplicity. You’re face-to-face with something mysterious, tragically inevitable, and then, in the end, peacefully removed. I love all three of these pictures and many other Mizoguchi films as well (including Princess Yang Kwei-fei, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, and Miss Oyu, to name only a few), but Ugetsu has the most powerful effect on me. There are moments in the picture, famous ones, that I’ve seen again and again and that always take my breath away: the boat slowly materializing from out of the mist and coming toward us . . . Genjuro collapsing on the grass in ecstasy and being smothered by Lady Wakasa . . . the final crane up from the son making an offering at his mother’s grave to the fields beyond. Just to think of these moments now fills me with awe and wonder."

"I see this as the mothership of a whole new century and a step further in the sexual adventures of pop culture. Antony means something to me emotionally. It was a perfect work of art, and people who I'd recommended it to, had despaired at my recommendation and couldn't understand it, and found it depressing, but it just came in a moment in my life when sadly my pet dog died, and it was just before its 17th birthday. He meant a lot to me and it was almost like having a child - a constant companion. I kind of cried non-stop for three months. I was in a gloomy cloud. But there was some sort of hope amongst the glamour and the gloom on that record, and a rebirth or coming out of a cocoon like a butterfly. I did get to meet him after the Turning show at the Barbican - and he's a big bird, isn't he? I also met Andy Butler [of Hercules & Love Affair] who was working on that tour and all the other glamorous characters. That was quite a special moment for me, the Turning performances. That was quite a momentous album."

"I’m taking you in a slightly different direction now, and I’m going to throw down Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. To me, as an actor, and as a lover and proponent of independent film, what Kathryn Bigelow and Jeremy Renner were able to do on a budget… The storytelling in this movie is sublime. I would have a hard time putting any performance by a male actor above the beautifully nuanced, incredibly layered performance that Jeremy Renner gives in this movie. Yes, he was nominated; I still don’t think he gets enough credit for this performance. Maybe it’s my place in life, maybe it’s the age I was when I saw the film, maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been frustrated with the lack of war films coming out at a time when America was at war and these stories needed to be told. I still feel like they need to be told and aren’t necessarily being told the right way. The Hurt Locker, to me, is as perfect a film as you can make. And Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty — those three characters, gosh… That movie blows me away."