"Here’s another film of which so much has been said and written over the years that you wind up thinking: There’s nothing left to say . . . But of course, that’s always a cop-out because it’s never true—there’s always more to say about a film, to see it again is to see it anew, to see it in 2014 as opposed to 1960 is a very different experience, and for some people it will literally be brand-new (to those people, I would say, simply: See it! Now!!). It’s difficult to think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way that people are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hear. I realize that L’avventura is supposed to be about characters who are “alienated” from their surroundings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in general that it more or less shuts down thought. In fact, I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, it’s one of the great works of cinema."

"I guess you could pick any one album of their mid- to late-period, especially Revolver or Rubber Soul. This was very much discovered as a teenager, their story, their music, the feeling of a slight sense of ownership. I don’t like that, in a way, because I hate it when people feel that they kind of own our songs as a band! But anyway, anyone’s who’s grown up with The Beatles feels that sense of, “They’re mine!”. But Sgt. Pepper's… is just mind-bending as to how ambitious it is and also what their energy must have been like and the scene they were occupying. I wish that existed now; unfortunately it just doesn’t. There was a kind of innocence to that time that doesn’t exist now, it was a time when great pop music... you... you still had to try. I think one of my big problems with music today, with a lot of the pop music that’s out there, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great music, but most of what the general population listen to or are exposed to is really kind of mindless or soulless and music can do so much more for you as a human being."

"The first half is just an astonishing rundown, it's almost like a greatest hits. This record, and Kate Bush in general, has a lot to do with me making music at all. It was her complete inability to do what everybody else was doing, she just was a law unto herself. I found that incredibly awe-inspiring, in most ways. I also loved her use of strings, in a sort of choppy choppy way, rather than a sentimental way. In pop music, you tend to have strings just colouring in the chords at the back or doing a syrupy high note, and I always thought they could do more than that, and she proved it in a kind of [mimics heavy staccato strings] kind of baroque style, which I have shamelessly pilfered basically. The second half she goes off on one, and some of it's a bit silly, but, you know, who cares? Even when it's silly it's great. Now I'm pretty sure I just took one listen to 'Running Up That Hill', which would've been the first single, and thought, ""I'm having that"". I would've bought it on cassette because that was the era, and I probably wore out the cassette until it warbled and I had to buy a new one!"

"When you see A Constant Forge, you realize that Cassavetes was living his films at all times. That’s something I definitely tried to do with my past two films—I wasn’t just going somewhere to make a film, I was really living it and making it a lifestyle. There’s sort of an inherent sloppiness that comes with that, but I love it because it feels like the result of just trying to capture what’s happening as opposed to constructing what has happened. I love Cassavetes in general, but Faces in particular has to be one of his most honest and real films, and it definitely feels like it has a maturity to it that you don’t find as much in Shadows, even though Shadowsis incredible. Rossellini always said the shot doesn’t need to be pretty, that for him the first thing is to keep the audience close to the characters and to follow the characters. And in Faces, there are a ton of out-of-focus shots, and it’s anything but pretty. It’s not a film that strikes people because of the magnitude and beauty of its images. It’s more about the relationships and the real life that you feel in it."