"These guys are a Brazilian 60s band, who people in their home country think of as their Beatles, but they're actually their own, weird, indescribable entity. The band is two brothers and a lady named Rita Lee. More than anything with this record, if you listen to it, you instantly want to live in Brazil – and you know a record is good if it makes you want to emigrate. It really conjures up a world. It's so imaginative and fun, it's part of that group of 60s records like Sgt Pepper's. They were 17 when they were making this record but they were already master songwriters with a massive skill and technique beyond almost everyone who is around right now. Just like The Beatles, they are able to be haphazard with it – they are so good they can have comedy skits in the middle of their songs: the coolest chorus with sound of breaking plates at the end of it. Apparently they were inventing machines while they were making it. They were putting their guitars through sewing machines. So the pulsing tremolo tone through one of the songs is the contact of the needle with the machine. Effectively they made a guitar pedal out of a sewing machine! It's super playful and Brazilian in character, but also perfectly fused with the international psychedelic revolution but it comes off as this other animal. It's the coolest thing when cultures get mixed together, it's so great to see that hybrid to happen. This band was important for me because when I was doing The Moldy Peaches because I was so inspired by how fun they were. My fantasy of what a show could be was them!"

"What would Fellini do after La dolce vita? We all wondered. How would he top himself? Would he even want to top himself? Would he shift gears? Finally, he did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation—that of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name (episodes for two omnibus films and a shared credit with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights counted for him as one and a half films, plus seven), achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a follow-up—and he built a movie around it. 8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways—the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions (another great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl—again, shot by Gianni Di Venanzo). But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself. The picture has inspired many movies over the years (including Alex in Wonderland, Stardust Memories, and All That Jazz), and we’ve seen the dilemma of Guido, the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni, repeated many times over in reality—look at the life of Bob Dylan during the period we covered in No Direction Home, to take just one example. Like with The Red Shoes, I look at it again every year or so, and it’s always a different experience."