"When I was young I became a huge Fellini fan and realised there was just one person doing the music for all his films. Casanova is one of the lesser known Fellini films I'd say. I hadn't seen it until my girlfriend and I watched it about five years ago. It blew me away because it's one of the spookiest; it's a very bizarre film, and the visual and musical landscape are both edgy and weird, as well as sexy. It's one of my favourites now. Nino Rota is perhaps my favourite composer now. I feel like something happened in the 60s with film scores where these classically trained composers were suddenly expanding their palettes to include synths, electric harpsichords and guitars. Nino Rota has really influenced me a lot, he chooses spooky notes and disturbing sounds, although I never knew about the Casanova score until 6 or 7 years ago. My girlfriend started watching the film with Donald Sutherland and we couldn't believe the soundtrack, it was so interesting and moody. It turned out to be my favourite Nino Rota score, even though I hadn't heard it until then."

"Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 is one of my favorites. It’s epic — when I saw it at a film festival, they literally had an intermission where they served pasta and red wine. It was wonderful. It’s a thin, handsome Gérard Depardieu in the prime of his youth, and Robert De Niro doing a great aging character, the rich boy. Depardieu [as] the poor boy. Probably one of the greatest entrances in the history of cinema for the beautiful actress Dominique Sanda. And Bertolucci uses this town, this little village — and you see it go from the turn of the century to WWII, and it changes with the seasons, and the time. And one of the best villains ever, Donald Sutherland, as this sort of grand guignol, a fascista, brown shirt — you know, black shirt — that is corrupted by the Mussolini movement in Italy. And he just completely surprises you with his performance. It’s really wonderful and kinky, and strange and beautiful. And the music is extraordinary. Yeah, it’s really a great film — a long movie, but a great movie — and it really left an indelible stamp on my brain. All these movies in my top five are what I call “desert island” movies. These are films that I can see again and again, and they have sequences or images in them, or they’ve left such a film memory in my imagination — such a stamp on my memory and imagination — that I can see them again and again."

"This one’s going to make you — well, I don’t know what you’re going to say to this, but Ordinary People, the Robert Redford film with Timothy Hutton, and Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, [has] got to be one of the most emotional films for me, just seeing the middle upper class being stripped of the veneer and seeing the dysfunction within. That film really captures that more than any other, I think, and certainly of that time, it was such a dangerous statement for Robert Redford to be making in a film like that. Every time I watch that film — and I must have seen it over 100 times — I weep. And Mary Tyler Moore’s performance in that film, I’m telling you, man, growing up in LA, I knew women like her… That was my friends’ mothers, without a doubt. It’s so simple and it’s just beautiful story telling. Judd Hirsch as the therapist and the relationship he creates with Timothy Hutton in that film is pretty special. I feel that if that film doesn’t touch you on some level, that you’re not human. Looking back at it now, it may seem like a very after-school-special choice, but if you really visit that film again, it holds up, man. It’s pretty compelling. You got to see that, man, on a Sunday when it’s a little rainy out there. I don’t know if you have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, but whoever that is, sit with them, put that on. I’m telling you, dude. It’s like… How do I put it? It’s like The Notebook for our generation, or my generation, you know?"

"Those performances. Timothy Hutton’s performance in that is probably the most directly inspiring to me, and that’s a young guy at the top of his game, emotionally raw, and brings everything that a young actor could want in a performance. I feel that that film is the most heart-wrenching and true portrait of a family maybe I’ve ever seen. To describe it well would reveal too much. That’s what’s brilliant about it. Everyone should watch it and watch Mary Tyler Moore with Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe that movie. It seems like such a simple concept, and yet Robert Redford kills it. The scene that always gets me, hits me so hard, is a small scene that not many people would say they love. Most say the big breakdown scene with Judd Hirsh. For me, it’s the scene where Timothy Hutton has been going to Judd Hirsch for a little bit, and he’s opening up. It’s such a journey of what it means to be vulnerable and the importance of vulnerability in your own family, especially after trauma. My character in The Cat and the Moon is very much inspired by Timothy Hutton’s character in Ordinary People. His journey of being so closed off and edgy to cracking open into this well of unmined emotion. Particularly the scene where he and Donald Sutherland, who’s amazing as well, are decorating the tree — ugh, the Christmas tree. It’s such a sweet scene. Mary Tyler Moore comes home, and she’s got this cold, dark look on her face. I’ll never get over her facial expressions in that movie. What she’s thinking versus what she’s putting on the surface is the most genius magic trick. It’s the most exhilarating thing ever. That movie is the best."