"I almost left this off my list, because what’s left to say about it? Renoir celebrates the death knell of the French aristocracy with sublime grace and trenchant satire. No final shot in film history can chill me to the bone like this one."

"It’s difficult; I have so many. But moving right along, a French film, Queen Margot. I love the story, and I love the performances. Jean-Hugues Anglade plays the phenomenal character of this sort of sick, dying king. So that’s one of my favorites."

"I'm not sure which language it's best to watch this in. Adjani speaks French. Shelley Winters and Melvyn Douglas are American. Polanski is Polish, but I expect he can play the part in any tongue. One of my favorites, one of this master's best."

"Renoir is in my holy trinity of filmmakers. How rare for an artist’s love of people and performance to be matched by his or her sense of craft, curiosity, experimentation, and adventure. French Cancan is my favorite of his, the most joyous, celebratory, wondrous thing."

"From the 90s onwards French music started to become very interesting. There have been quite a few French artists, especially in the dance-pop arena, who have found their metier when a lot of earlier French music just didn't translate. We lived in Belgium for quite a long time and one of the things I was completely aware of was the fact that as a British person I knew nothing about French music. And that's one good thing that's happened in music over the last twenty years: the increased internationalisation of music. Yes, Sebastian Tellier has to sing in English, but it doesn't necessarily matter as you don't understand what he's singing about anyway. He kind of does it by stealth. People told me about Sebastian Tellier and I was like, "yeah, it sounds quite interesting." And then you hear it, and you hear it again, and eventually you're like "my god, this is brilliant!" It's a combination of music and voice, it's groovy and funky; it's just incredibly listenable and a little bit bonkers. Again this is one of those records that we've listened to a lot. You can just put it on and it's just there, and sometimes it's just so beautiful, what he does. I'm not afraid of things that are just beautiful."