"Seventeen Seconds is my favorite Cure album. It wasn’t the first one I heard; I bought Japanese Whispers and then The Head on the Door, both on cassette tape, and used to listen to them while I did my newspaper delivery round at the age of about 15 in Oxford. But then I went back and started getting into the earlier Cure records. With the people I knew, Pornography and Faith were both really big, but I gravitated toward Seventeen Seconds because it was less heavy, more minimal. Like most of their albums, it has its own unique sound. My favorite track off the album is ‘Play for Today,’ and I was absolutely buzzing when we played with them in Greece last week and they played this and ‘A Forest’ together in the setlist."

"Last but not least, I would just also mention a modern film. I was between Force Majure, this Swedish film, but then I thought, “Okay, let’s leave Europe. Let’s go to South America.” The Argentinian film Wild Tales was a film that I enjoyed a lot because it’s different episodes all dealing with revenge. One episode more clever and entertaining than the other. I think [it has] one of the funniest, surreal wedding scenes in film history. Probably my favorite wedding scene in a film ever. Very, very Latin American. Very brave. Muchos cojones. Incredibly smart and clever because revenge is told through so many different angles. Wonderful performances with the lovely Ricardo Darin, who is one of my favorite actors. Leonardo Sbaraglia — another wonderful Argentinian actor. A very powerful, fresh and wonderful film."

"Female Trouble, 1974. John Waters. And this may be my very favorite John Waters film. Divine is hilariously divine, and the other actors include fabulous Waters favorite, Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and an old friend of mine, the always iconic, Cookie Mueller, who we lost quite a while ago. But as time goes by, for me, John Waters becomes more and more important as his work echoes through our culture. What is so particular and striking for me about John Waters is that no matter how perverse and weird his themes and characters may be, his films are never ever mean spirited. There’s some kind of naked celebration of human nature and its ridiculousness. And John Waters is such an uplifting and remarkable person. I mean where would we be without him?"

"If David Thewlis in Naked is my favorite male performance, then Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that. I’ve always felt that the first films he made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances. But when he moved over to France with Code Unknown and then The Piano Teacher, something happened where he started making very passionate filmmaking. The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality."