"I will choose Singin’ in the Rain. To me, that symbolizes everything that can be great about movies. It’s just joyous, it’s just perfectly constructed. It’s just like everything came together; you know, there’s an alchemy that happens with certain films, which, however proficient you are as a filmmaker, however talented you are, and however many hits you’ve had, there has to be a sort of magic dust that happens somewhere. Often when it does, the whole world relates to it or engages with it in some way, and I think that film is such a good example of that. It happened with Casablanca. Just all these elements that could have gone wrong; any one of them could have been too much — too much sugar, too much salt, you know — but somehow the whole recipe’s perfect. And Singin’ in the Rain, to me… It’s like every scene I look forward to, and I can rewatch it endlessly. It’s just quite beautiful. They don’t make them like that anymore, I think."

"I didn’t know there were films that represented the things represented in this film. I didn’t know you could do that. People didn’t think you could do that when this film came out. I always ask myself: how macabre can we go, how graphic can we go, how dark can we go. And the commitment of these actors to the horror that they’re subjected to in this film—you can’t fake that stuff; it’s happening. This nudity is happening, this scatological stuff . . . I don’t know how much of that stuff was happening, but it’s just pure terror and pure excess. There’s also something unwittingly seductive about the beautiful, heightened elements of the film. There aren’t many films that communicate the dangers and trespasses of fascism better than this one. The terror is not in some externalized war story, it’s something that is very domestic and very tangible. You can’t forget a film like Salò, and the shock and the horror of it make such an effective medium for its serious political themes. I think it kind of shares that with Assassination Nation."

"One of my favourite contemporary new music pieces to come out in the past couple of years. She's been composing music for 20 years. This album came out last year so I've been sitting with it, going back to it this year as well. But what strikes me is how patient the music is; it develops very slowly. The ideas are really exciting. So when she marinates on a single idea for a while, it doesn't feel boring. The idea is so strong, you just want to hear it fold over on itself over and over again. And the marriage between the acoustic and the electronic in that piece is really seamless – the recording is so good too. She studied with Kaija Saariaho – another huge Finnish composer. I hear her maybe taking some elements of her way of working, although simplifying it, maybe drawing it out more. That might oversimplify what is going on here, because Ratkje does a vast amount of different kinds of music. But it was yet another element – you can hear that lineage within her work."

"I love Wes Anderson, and I can only compare his movies to other movies he’s made, because you can’t really compare them to other directors’ films. Obviously, Wes lives in a world that’s like his childhood, and he draws from a delicate, nerdy kind of etiquette-obsessed fairy-tale world in many different ways. There’s an elegance about what he does and an absurdity that’s almost otherworldly. His sensibility lies somewhere between the late ’50s and the late ’60s, with modern elements in there, but really it feels like an old storybook. So Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m sure, is something he was dreaming of and you can really feel that. The casting was awesome—I love George Clooney, and I thought he was perfect for it. The pacing of Wes’s dialogue is perfect for animation—snappy, zippy, cartoonish, cute, but with an adult wink. It was incredibly well shot and the music was incredible. I just had a really good time. It was a very, very enjoyable film for any human being."