"""Alright, I’d say the first would have to be Goodfellas. I know that’s probably one you get a lot, but I remember it came out, and I was probably in about the 8th grade. Me and my buddy Dougie Thornel probably saw that at the theaters 30 times. I mean we would just go, and we would watch it, and then sit in the theater and watch it again. I can’t say enough good about it. It’s horrifying, it’s hilarious, it’s so unbelievably honest. Look, I mean, Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker. You know, the fact that I got the chance to work with him [on The Wolf of Wall Street] was sort of the mountaintop, the kind of crowning achievement of my career, and I don’t mean that in sort of how I’m perceived by the world. I just mean in terms of experience. My brief time on that movie really changed the way that I work as an actor. He’s one of these guys that makes you feel that anything is possible. I’ve studied in the Russian theater, and one of the main ways that we study was you get a scene and then you do a big improvisation about the scene and what the scene could be. That’s precisely how he worked. Each one of these scenes, you create this unbelievably vivid reality, you really take yourself to the place, and everybody feels like they are one hundred feet tall. It doesn’t matter whether you are background or whether you are craft services or anything, but everybody is so full of ideas. You make it on the day, and then he just sort of takes what he wants from that. I feel like that method of filmmaking that’s so Scorsese, so uniquely his, shines brightest in that movie. That sense of anything can happen at anytime, it’s happening right there in the moment. I think it really, really just shines brightest in that film, and that’s why it’s my favorite film."""

"The aesthetics of it, just the way the frontier looked. The way it was shot, it made it seem like it was the land of opportunity, this new frontier, this undiscovered territory for a certain culture. We were introduced to — which I didn’t know as a kid — the people that actually lived there, or are from there. We were introduced to their lives. They weren’t just Wild Bunch, killing people. It was very heartfelt, and it wasn’t just this white man coming to save the day. It was more along the lines of he was learning the ways, and he earned, from the audience and the tribe, their trust. I believed that our lead character, Kevin Costner, became a part of the tribe, because the movie takes its time to do so, which is risky, because you can lose us if you’re going too slow, if it’s paced like a snail. But everything worked, and the flow of story wasn’t interrupted or sacrificed due to some cool moments, or movie moments that needed to keep the audience awake. They were unapologetic in that way, so I really appreciated it. There’s the whole coffee interaction, and “tatanka.” That was my s—, man. I used to love that. And the score. The score was incredible. I love the score."

"They were one of, if not the first, rock & roll male bands that I was really attracted to. I am definitely a female-orientated person, that's just the way I am. I don't go gaga over every single male rockstar that comes out, I sort of tend to be way more interested in the female narrative. But who can resist The Clash? [Laughs] even I could not resist The Clash. 

 I was thrilled by the sound and also the style; they felt like a real gang to me. It really captured my imagination and I wanted to be in The Clash. They still are, arguably, one of the coolest male rock bands of all time, if not the coolest rock band of all time. There's not anybody really that touches them. I love the political bias in their writing and I love the raucousness of it – and I thought they were fucking hot as fuck [laughs]. 

 Again, just amazing songs. Like, I associate 'Rock the Casbah' with a lot of great parties that I went to around about that time. There was a lot of finger-fucking going on to The Clash, an innocent but erotic memory. My sexuality was beginning to really explode when I discovered The Clash so I always associate it with that kind of hotness. It's just The Clash equals hotness. End of story."

"That's what I'd listen to on Bikini Kill tours. I'd put on my Walkman with my Fear Of A Black Planet cassette and I would go running and listen to it. I felt like they were making this really accessible music full of political ideas that were often very personal and sometimes very broad and I was like, "I want to make music like this, that you want to listen to because it sounds so great, but when you dig into the lyrics they're also smart and sometimes funny and very tongue in cheek." That's what I wanted to make so I'd just listen to it all the time. When I was running it was such good music to listen to because the beats are so awesome. It was a massive influence to Le Tigre. Not that we did hip-hop but I wanted to do songs that sounded good. Public Enemy made me okay with having higher production values. You can still be extremely political and radical and say what you want but do it in a way that just sounds great. First you notice how great it sounds and then, as you keep listening to it, you go, "Wait, what's this about? They mention this book, they mention Marcus Garvey, I want to go find out about that!"

"I just feel like that’s a movie that I saw when I was a kid, and you watch it over and over and over again, and you’re like, “Oh, Steve Martin’s doing bits, but they fit a story.” And it’s beautifully shot and directed by Carl Reiner, which some people don’t realize, and I just can’t think of a movie that informed my comedic personality more than The Jerk. It’s also a dumb character… it breaks all these stupid rules that Hollywood has for the sake of humor, and for the sake of jokes, and it’s a feel-good movie. Oh, man. I watch it over and over and over again. It’s got bits of Woody Allen’s kind of mysticalism, but it’s not. It’s jokey but the jokes don’t have punchlines. It’s like a Steve Martin album live, and they did a good job with making it a story. In a lot of ways you have no Borat without The Jerk, you have no anything, Lebowski; all those characters are Jerk-inspired. I play dumb quite a bit; I’ll say that right now. I don’t know if you call it a crutch, or what, but I tend to lean dumb… I don’t think I would have been able to get away with that had it not been for that movie."

"Now we’ll start with the Paul Newman ones. The three Paul Newman ones. I guess I’ll start with Cool Hand Luke. I think it’s the first time I ever started to recognize metaphor. Or I guess allegory, because it’s a bit of a Christ allegory, I think. After he eats those 50 eggs and he’s laid out on that table it’s the same way that he’s laid out at the end after he’s shot. His legs are crossed, and his arms are out. I didn’t know when I first saw that film that that’s what was going on, or I didn’t know how that affected the rest of the story, but I recognized it, I know that. Because Cool Hand Luke is a strange film where I grew up with it on TV every weekend. It was just one of those films that always played on cable on the weekends growing up. It’s just always there, so you never really consider it. My dad loves that film. Then you go back and sit and watch it when you’re older and you realize that in the background of your life there was this amazing piece of artwork playing. Obviously its depiction of the south and the character behavior in it is just so rich and the cast amazing. Also I’m really drawn to this idea of a square peg in a round hole. That’s what Cool Hand Luke was. Luke was this guy, he wasn’t a bad person but he just didn’t fit in the world around him and he was persecuted as a result. Yeah, he was responsible, he was cutting the heads off parking meters. He was always culpable in the things that he did. But it was more a result that he probably just never belonged anywhere and he was restless as a result, unsettled. What that says to me: it’s not like that’s the way I felt in my life — quite the opposite actually. What I recognized in that is that is an archetype of a man, that person exists. To be able to take a personality type like that and make it so realistic, make it not cliché, make it not generic, but at the same time represent this type of person — I’m really impressed by that. It’s kind of what you strive for in ultimate storytelling in my mind. Both specificity and universality all at the same time."