"A little Whiplash anecdote is, of course, like everybody else, I had no idea who Damien Chazelle was. Jason Reitman was the one who sent me the script, in an email, for Whiplash. He sent me both the short and the feature script and just said, “Read this,” and obviously it’s from Jason so I’m gonna read it. It was again, obviously, probably one of the most brilliant scripts I had ever read and one of the best fits in terms of the character that I really immediately understood and felt like I could wrap my brain around and pull off. They said, “The writer-director would love to meet you,” and we set up a lunch, and Damien and I sat down and immediately basically agreed on everything, except he didn’t know that I had a musical background, so he was talking about how we’d have body doubles and we’d have somebody coaching me on how to wave my arms around like a conductor. And I said, “Hey, we don’t need that because actually, that’s one of the arrows I have in my quiver.” That was one of those moments where it felt like kismet, that Damien was like, “Oh, my God.” He said, “When Jason and Helen suggested you for this part, I immediately thought that’s a great idea, but I had no idea that you actually had those kinds of abilities.” And also, he didn’t write the script for me, but he wrote it with Miles Teller in mind from the beginning, and didn’t know that Miles had been playing drums since he was 15 years old."

"I've got some family in Canada, and when I was about 12 we went over for a holiday. When we came back, my cousins had given my brother a load of American music, and that was really the first time that I had heard Smashing Pumpkins. And he'd come back and play these tapes and it was like: ""Wow! Music from America!"" This was the time before the internet, and we didn't have a TV either, so this was all kind of exotic. I remember not really realising that they were playing guitars because it didn't really sound like that. I couldn't tell what it was made of. It sounded like machinery and that it was made of fiddly twiddly weird tones, and obviously with his voice on top of it, I was like, ""What the hell is this?!"" I remember for a year not really liking it, but my brother kept on playing it, and it slowly crept into me. That whole album is so deeply produced that the playing on it, the sound on it, is just fucking awesome. The breadth of different sounds are amazing. Every intro is like a perfect little new world opening up. You always think of Billy Corgan being a total egomaniac locking the other band members out of the studio as the story goes, making Jimmy Chamberlin rehearse for 12 hours a day until the drums were perfect. The end result is this perfect dreamy, shoegaze-y album with a hard core, yet it's also quite gentle as well, which I think is a common theme with all the albums I've chosen."

"His Girl Friday is funny because it’s… In that way that I think In Bruges and JCVD are just perfect, it is perfect. It is beyond perfect. It is transcendently flawless for like the first 45 minutes, and then it kind of goes off into crazy town. But you still stay with it, and the tone completely changes and it gets really weird and dark, but I guess that’s what happens in some of those movies. But it’s the perfect distillation of that kind of fast-talking, thin-line-between-love-and-hate style relationship. It would definitely be the kind of movie that, if somebody was trying to get into movies from the ’30s and ’40s and wanted that kind of patter and that kind of style, I would definitely point them in that direction. The Women is my favorite film, but it’s kind of a lot to take in, and I would understand if it scared people off a little bit. Whereas if you watch the first 20 minutes of His Girl Friday, you’re in. It’s like a starter course for that kind of film."

"I was half tempted to put in all of The Beatles' albums. It's really hard for me to pick one because I fucking love all of them. They mean so much to me. I think Revolver, because it pointed the way forward. It's interesting that 'Tomorrow Never Knows', which still sounds like something that's coming from the future, was the first song that they started work on. They started that in early 1966 or whatever. Pretty far out when you think about it. That song always sounds contemporary to me. That thing with the bass and drums where it's just one groove, like a loop. And all the tape sounds that are coming in and out. It's very advanced for its time. The sound was so different that you knew there was something else going on, that something was changing culturally and musically for people, which of course it did the following year. The Indian influence is there as well. Obviously it's in 'Love You To', the George track, but also the way the guitars are played. You've got a slight drone going on with the guitars."