"I love that movie. I worked with him [director François Truffaut], but I remember seeing that movie long before. I didn’t even know it was such a fantastic film for everybody. When I saw it for the first time I thought, “I’m actually looking through a window back to the 1920s Paris.” Everything I love about that era. I met Truffaut and I was with him for about six months on Close Encounters and I realized suddenly that he had done 400 Blows which is really the story of my life as a child. I wondered who would make a film like 400 Blows, why? And then I met him. I love that one."

"I’d put The Fellowship of the Ring in there. I just think Peter Jackson did a fantastic job with the movie, and I loved those books. It’s one of those things where, reading the books, and getting so excited about them, and just praying that the movie did it justice. And it totally did, to me. Plus, the relationship between Frodo and Sam, and Gollum, and all of that. I loved it. I’m also a huge fan of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I had the opposite experience with that, where it just didn’t click like it did with The Lord of the Rings. So I just loved what Peter Jackson did with that."

"For some reason, Maurice Pialat doesn’t get the same attention here in the States as his contemporary Cassavetes. But I feel he deserves just as much. Without this film, we wouldn’t have Sandrine Bonnaire, and the complexity of the family dynamic is like nothing I’ve ever seen before on film. I’m proud to be neighbors with Tom Stevens, the actor who played the young American tourist. We were speaking in our New York City apartment building stairwell, and Tom told me that he had been in “a little film that you probably never heard of called À nos amours”—I nearly fell down the stairs. The extras are fantastic on the release, including an interview with Catherine Breillat."

"Come on, it’s common sense. Jaws is a fantastic film. Maybe the second film I saw in my life — I saw The Gumball Rally prior to Jaws — but Jaws is the first one that made a deep, deep impression. I saw it a drive-in with my parents when I was five, which is kinda weird in retrospective. It was PG at the time. My kid’s nine and my wife still won’t let me show her Jaws. I made the mistake of showing my kid Gremlins when she was six and I have heard no end of it from my old lady. She’s all, “She’s still afraid of Gremlins.” Gremlins is a harmless f–king movie."

"This is an amazing film, so visually stunning and strange and melancholic. It’s a good film to remind me of a time period that I was living at that time; it made me feel very heavy, you know, as a kid in 1985. I would have been twelve or thirteen, and it was just a formative time of existence. It affected me in a pretty intense way, just simply by its mood alone. Terry Gilliam’s imagination was so surreal and rich. And the propulsion of the story with the atmosphere in this world, and the gadgets and inventions and trials that all these characters have to go through, it’s a fantastic voyage of the mind."

"Jesca Hoop is a friend of mine. And she said there's this girl in town, you've got to see her band: "They're amazing and I want to see if they are the real deal." So I say okay, and we went down to the movie lounge, and we were both absolutely knocked out. We hung around afterwards and then got the band signed. Listen to 'Low Low Low' and that will tell you exactly what I love about them. They are raw and they are real and she sings from her heart, and she has a big troubled heart. She plays guitar amazingly and she sings with real guts and they're just a fantastic band."

"The story of singer Sally Bowles in the Weimar Republic, which came out late in 1972, into a very dreary Britain. I think of it as a glam-rock document, really: all those fantastic songs, confined to the stage, plus the brilliant makeup, in this frightening city. The notion of “divine decadence” was very intriguing when you were an 18-year-old student from Newcastle, recently arrived in London. It also had an impact on punk – look at Siouxsie Sioux: obviously influenced by Liza Minnelli. My friends and I would listen to the soundtrack in our Tottenham student flat, back-to-back with Lou Reed’s Transformer and Roxy Music’s second album. It had the same impact."