"Another masterpiece about Sicily, another meditation on eternity, and an endlessly rich historical tapestry, meticulously composed in color and on 70 mm. Luchino Visconti based the picture on the Count Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published novel, about a Sicilian prince at the time of the Italian unification, or Risorgimento, who steps away from power and influence because he realizes that the life he and his family have led is coming to an end, that he has to get out of the way for younger and more ambitious men like his nephew Tancredi. Visconti and his fellow screenwriters (there were four of them, including his frequent collaborators Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Enrico Medioli) took Lampedusa’s novel and fashioned a whole new work on a grand scale, an epic but of a very unusual type. Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened. The landscapes, the extraordinary settings with their painstakingly selected objects and designs, the costumes, the ceremonies and rituals—it’s all at the service of deepening our sense of time and large-scale change, and the entire picture culminates in an hour-long sequence at a ball in which you can feel, through the eyes of the prince, an entire way of life (one that Visconti himself knew quite well) in the process of fading away. Like Contempt, The Leopard was initially overshadowed by the circumstances around it, namely, the casting of Burt Lancaster as the prince. Here in America, we saw the picture in a shortened and dubbed version (Lancaster was speaking English) that was a little unsatisfying: you could clearly see that the movie Visconti had intended wasn’t quite all there, and it was jarring to watch Lancaster speaking in his normal voice surrounded by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa dubbed into American English. When I got to see the whole thing, I was astonished by the picture and by Lancaster, who gives all of himself to the role and to the world of the film. Visconti had wanted Laurence Olivier, and he was initially very curt with Lancaster, but the actor won him over and they became lifelong friends. I could go on and on about The Leopard. It’s a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by."

"Obviously, Pet Sounds is a massive record and a defining influence on me when I was about 12 or 13 when I first heard it; a huge impact. But weirdly, my younger brother told me that he never really got on with Pet Sounds because he found it to be really hard work in the beginning and it took him many years to fall in love with it. I was really familiar with that throughout my teens, but then later on I discovered The Beach Boys' 'Brother Years', as that period's known, and I just really loved a lot of that stuff. In hindsight, you knew that this was a band that were, I guess, nearing the end of the road and things were changing and they were veering off. Dennis Wilson had his shit and things ended very tragically for him and Brian, with that well publicised walking disaster and they were really tough times. But Holland doesn't sound like a record where they're all struggling or coming to an end or that it's a swansong; it doesn't really feel like that and it still has that really fresh Beach Boys approach. I get this warmth from it and it feels like a big hug. It's this big, lovely Californian cuddle. What I gravitate to here are the musical changes which are almost like scene changes. You've got stuff like 'The Trader' where the second half just goes to another place and that's always inspiring. Of course they're not the only band that does that but it's something that's very inspiring to me, especially on this record. And it's like that on Matador where I'm not constrained by the typical pop structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-double chorus and The Beach Boys are always brilliant for that where they take you off in a completely different direction. And it never feels as if it's self-indulgent, weirdly, when it should be because all of these tracks are so good and so technically proficient. You almost wouldn't forgive them for those self-indulgent touches were it not for the fact that these are guys on top of their game and you can really hear it. It's a great album. I've got my record collection in the studio and my main record player is out in the studio's kitchen and that's where I've got my box of select records. It always changes from week to week and Holland's been there for about four months now. There's always a good time for it."