"I kinda wanna go to Jet Li again, which is kinda not right — we should probably do some Jackie Chan, right? Drunken Master, Drunken Master II, maybe? I don’t know, I just wanted to do a costume one, you know — like Tai Chi Master. There’s something really beautiful about that one, the scope. Sometimes the scope doesn’t have power to it. This one does. I’m gonna put that one in here as a “highly recommend.”"

"I really love all of Bresson’s movies, but I’m picking this one because it was the first one I saw by him and one of the first VHS tapes I ever bought. I still own that tape. There’s this beautiful, tender, awkward quality to all of Bresson’s movies that I really love. You feel like the actors might forget their lines at any moment . . . but then they don’t, and it just feels so transcendently real . . ."

"I really like to do covers, but the idea of a children's choir doing such classic songs and interpreting them… In 'Space Oddity' there's 'ding!', one vibraphone hit that's totally out of time and a tambourine will go at the same moment and then there's "ground control to Major Tom", these little kids - you can imagine them being really stoic and really getting behind what they were singing and being so serious about it. And then there's little jangly guitars that are so 70s as well, you can almost hear the school wall. People would do anything now to record an album that sounded like it was in a 70s school, but that wasn't them trying to be cool, that was them being who they were and what they were doing. And then 'Desperado', there's a nine-year-old girl who sings, like the quietest voice I've ever heard, but they've mic'ed it up so well. I purposefully try sometimes to mic up my voice really quietly so it sounds like you're being told a secret. This little girl, her voice is shaking, but it's the most gentle sound - it's like when a little child reaches up and touches your face, that feeling of… it's called Innocence & Despair - they're absolute innocents, but they're also singing songs like 'Desperado' and "oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking and I pushed away", but it's seven-, ten-, 12-year-olds singing. 'Space Oddity', the fact that that's about a spaceman just stuck out in space just drifting away, and they do make it sound quite psychedelic and eccentric and funny. And the shambolicness of it is so cool. What I like is that so many people try to do that, that faux-childishness, and this guy who was running it was obviously a passionate, avid music lover of that time, and persuaded the school and the parents to let these kids sing pop music, which then was pushing boundaries. It's beautiful. He [Hans Fenger, organiser/arranger of project] really managed to pull something together. I think it all comes down to the beauty of being not self-aware. They're aware, they're trying their best, but it's like the older you get I suppose the more you feel nostalgic about those times and that feeling. Picasso and Matisse and great artists have always been trying to get back to childhood. You get to a certain stage and you want to revisit, but trying to keep that childhood alive is almost the hardest thing, because you build up all these layers of self-awareness and what you want to project and how you want to do it. Even now when I watch Glee and all that shit, all these kids have got the dance routines down - I'm sad that there's no one being this shit anymore. You should be a bit shit when you're little, because that's the freedom. Having perfectly scaled voices, and projecting, and knowing how to communicate with your audience. It's just like, "really? Is that what it's about or is this what it's about?": a bunch of kids getting together, loving it and making mistakes and not caring and sounding a bit out of tune. "I'm going to play my vibraphone part, it's in the wrong place, but I loved it, I'm going to do it again!" Just one note, in the wrong place, amazing. You're playing David Bowie and you're seven, what more is there?"

"My third and final pick is “Grandma,” a comedy about a grandmother and her granddaughter. Her granddaughter is pregnant, she wants to have an abortion. And it’s this very low-key, good-humored… it’s not a movie that tries to be about too much. It’s just about these characters and their situation. The grandmother is played by Lily Tomlin, and [in] this performance she plays this feminist poet and writer who’s just a wonderfully cranky, uncompromising woman. I don’t know, if that is not a great performance, I don’t know what is. And it’s a very underplayed, very controlled performance. The Oscars like to award sort of big, emotional, weeping-and-fist-pounding moments of acting, and there’s none of that in “Grandma.” It’s just such a delight. If I were to give the Oscars advice, first thing I would say is: just lighten up. You know, there’s a lot of really great movies that are funny. And I don’t even wanna get started on the Foreign Language Film category, which is such a mess. The one-film-per-country-rule… Just find the movies from all over the world that are most exciting and most original and find a way to give those some prizes."

"I guess my first favorite movie would be Chariots of Fire. I know it’s not just me because it won an Academy Award, so I know it’s pretty good. But it struck a chord with me. I think when I was younger I was very religious, and that aspect of the story appealed to me. Although not anymore, I still love it. I have a certain, I guess, fascination with that kind of period in England. Not that I know about it; I’m not a historian or anything. But just like it’s something so romantic about, you know, going to school there and in that atmosphere and that time. I mean, it was an awful time for a lot of people, but for the guys who got to go to Oxford and Cambridge. I don’t know. It’s cool. And then they go to the Olympics, and the characters are just so interesting, and winning. I mean obviously based on real people, and such fantastic acting, you know. Great direction. Art direction, and wardrobe, and all of that."

"We've played with them quite a few times over the last couple of years, getting to know James Murphy and hearing that music in unexpected places. I love them now. I think I loved them too late, now they're broke up or whatever, but I love them. It's hypnotic, [like] we're going to grind away and discover the nuances. It's not about a big giant arrangement that takes you up and down, it's about being on the edge and going, and going, and going. They did that well, he had a great band. And their sounds are important, it isn't just guitars and keyboards. We'd see them play and they'd take a lot of effort to get these little sounds that all work together. We got to know that record by it being around all the time, which is great, because you're not just putting it on and going 'What is this shit?'. You're just hearing it and going 'What is that, that's cool?'. 'Dude, it's LCD Soundsystem.'"

"I got really into reggae music in high school. Her vocals, her phrasing, everything taught me so much about how to put emphasis on different syllables, the way to punctuate things, making something sound extremely effortless when it wasn't. She's having fun and goofing around but I know that it takes a lot of work to make it sound like that. That was something that really appealed to me, wanting things to sound alive, effortless and fun while still touching on heavy issues. She just has a fucking great voice, as a singer she's just inspirational. I hadn't started doing anything yet, that was before college, I probably didn't own the album to be honest, I just taped stuff off the radio. I couldn't afford to buy a lot of records and my parents never had a lot of records. We'd buy singles at this place called Roxy Maxis for 99 cents. I taped all of the stuff on cassette so I'm sorry that I didn't pay for it."