"I saw the film The Graduate when I was 15 and heard the track 'The Sound Of Silence' and I immediately went out and bought the songbook and learned every song. Hearing Simon & Garfunkel was the thing that made me decide I would really like to make music for a living. I could play the songs, and suddenly music seemed much less foreign to me. Before that it was watching people on Top Of The Pops doing their thing, and it was just another world to me, it didn't seem like something that could be homegrown or that I could possibly achieve. At the time I'd just started going to the school guitar club and learning basic chords, and this music came along and I thought, ""Ah, I can learn that"". I like the simplicity of the lyrics, and there's a naivety to the songwriting, and when they write about New York and that, now I live here and have been visiting for years, I can see where their inspirations came from. You can't deliberately be naive, you write simple songs I guess, and hopefully something that you do happens in the writing process. I'm really into melody, I couldn't listen to a jazz fusion record for instance, I'm the opposite end of the scale, that's all."

"Alex Guinness, to me is — forget De Niro, forget Pacino — he’s the man. Alec Guinness is such a quintessential English actor, but he’s also a brilliant actor. He’s just the best. And The Man in the White Suit is just such a beautiful, charming movie. It’s about a man who invents a suit that you don’t have to wash. It’s a whole movie about it! It’s something that some of the more flamboyant directors should think about remaking. [Laughs] It’s about this guy who invents this material that keeps white all the time. It’s directed by Alexander Mackendrick, a fellow Scot, and the opening title sequence is amazing. Mackendrick is a brilliant director. I just enjoy his work; I enjoy the pace of his work. I think he’s really overlooked. He did The Ladykillers and Whisky Galore, and The Sweet Smell of Success. A lot of really cool movies. Alec Guinness, to me — forget Star Wars and all that — he’s just the best. And to work with someone like Alexander Mackendrick, who really understood what a story meant…it’s funny, because on IMDB the movie is listed as sci-fi. It’s not sci-fi, that’s ridiculous! It’s actually a very nice tale, about inventing the thing that nobody wants. Like a car that doesn’t need petrol. The thing that people don’t want because of the money [the auto industry] could make off of you. If you say hey great, I’ve invented this car that doesn’t need petrol, and then there’s a silence, and then there’s a gunshot, and you’re dead. It’s that kind of thing."

"I like films that really break every rule, where the director, writers, producers have gone out, they’re just going, “We don’t give a f— what the hell has happened in other movies, or how other movies were written, or other movies were shot. We’re just going to do it our way.” And those movies not only tickle my fancy, but they always give me a lot of courage when I should have to do something to go, “You know what? Be more like that. Don’t listen so much to the popular wisdom or the collective wisdom, the rules.” And that’s one of the reasons I’m so proud of The Fast and the Furious. It’s because nobody gave a s— about the movie except me and the cast, and so we didn’t hear anything. I just did what I wanted to do. I was very much inspired by the original Gone in 60 Seconds, but the H.B. Halicki version, not the other version. You know, because that guy was staging car chases on the Long Beach freeway with no permits, no anything [laughing] and he was clipping telephone poles and doing all sorts of stuff that was just so balls-to-the-wall. H.B. Halicki was a junk dealer who wanted to be a movie director. And he financed, wrote, directed and starred in the original Gone in 60 Seconds. That was such an outrageous thing that it stimulated me in many, many different ways."

"The Bridge on the River Kwai was one of those movies that my father and I watched for the first time, and he prefaced it by saying, “You’re probably not going to like this movie now, but you’re going to understand it later.” [laughs] And I remember watching it with that I mind — because I was young — and now I’m at the end of… You know, my dad is no longer with me, and I look at Alec Guinness’s character in it, and I now understand him. Where, at a point earlier in my life, I didn’t understand him — I was like, “Why is this guy building a bridge for the enemy? Why would a person get so obsessed with this just to try to keep order?” — I now understand it. It’s one of those movies that means a lot to me, because it was the first time that I think my father showed me that movies can actually speak to an ageless part of your soul. I remember the first time I saw Unforgiven, and I thought it was going to be like this big Western shoot-em-up, and I was like, “Man, I didn’t like that movie at all.” Then, I was at work the next day, and I thought, “I can’t stop thinking about that movie. Maybe I saw it wrong.” And now it’s one of the best movies ever. Bridge on the River Kwai was the first time I ever realized that."

"Why Shaggs’ Own Thing and not Philosophy Of The World? The reason is, Philosophy of the World is bad and Shaggs’ Own Thing is a beautiful, sad record. It’s not like what people normally think about The Shaggs; it’s not them at their most shambolic. It doesn't get you in the gut and it’s not ridiculous. It’s really not a train wreck. Well, maybe it is like a train wreck, or maybe more like a badly assembled car that still gets you where you want to go. It’s not a smooth ride, but it is beautiful. It’s like another language. There’s nobody else like them. They sound just how they should sound. But this record didn’t actually have much of an impact because it was actually subtle."