"The ultimate film noir that’s not about violent crime, it’s just character assassination at its most brutal. Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster are beyond iconic in their performances; they become the embodiments of a rancid spirit that can sometimes be found in New York, in show business, in every business everywhere, where money talks and I’ll walk over your body to get some. “I’d hate to take a bite outta you, Sidney—you’re a cookie full of arsenic.” I like to say that to my wife."

"Like many of these, this movie qualifies for me partly because it was an unexpected thrill when I first saw it in the early seventies. I’m neither much a Tony Curtis nor a Burt Lancaster fan, and I’d never heard of Alexander Mackendrick (he made half his relatively few films, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, in the UK; a later, strong U.S. job was A High Wind in Jamaica). Sweet Smell of Success, again, too, is quasi-noir. It’s a black-and-white, urban, small film about people’s bad luck and bad character, set in the Broadway cubicles and show-biz restaurants of New York’s sleazy show-world underbelly. Despite my prior relative indifference to the actors in it, they’re perfectly cast—against their standard types—in this, and do terrific jobs, and the script, by the highly skilled and literate Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is spectacular. James Wong Howe shot the cold-ass thing."

"George Clinton is very important to us. In fact, George, Sly Stone, Miles Davis and Curtis Mayfield are all people we're inspired by and look up to. I'm lucky to have become friends with George. We played a show last year with his band in London and he's just an amazing guy. I remember getting this album, listening to it and thinking, "Free your mind and the rest will follow." It's free, psychedelic, sexualised funk. Also, there are incredible lyrics. George is a great lyricist, one of the best. On one track, George was told to play a guitar solo and imagine that he was just told that his mother had died. Funkadelic can go from real, emotional, plaintive with a song like 'Maggot Brain' to a big, acoustic funk track. The message from the band is that you can do anything. George had many great musicians in his band and he changed it around, you just never know who was going to play on the track. It always sounds like Funkadelic because of George's vision."

"I love L.A. Confidential. If it’s on for even a second, I just watch it to the end. I almost want to call my cable service provider and ask them not to show it any more, because it has overwhelmed my life. It’s because I’m from California, from Los Angeles, because the idea of police corruption, of political ambition, of logic and defying expectations. Really, Bud White is Rudy, in the thug cop questing for detective greatness. [laughs] There’s something about that. Also, the way that it commingles all of the ideas of pornography and politics and financial development and mob power and drugs. You know, I studied history and English at UCLA, and one of the big themes in a bunch of our history classes had to do with, “How is it that Los Angeles and Hollywood and California present themselves to the world as both this destination place of palm trees and glitter and gold and your future, and also corruption and deceit?” There’s this duality to it, and I just think that Curtis Hanson’s way of delivering that… And the performances! I mean, David Strathairn and Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger and Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell… Police corruption, and justice, vigilante justice, and it’s just got everything. It’s just a perfect movie."