"I tell people that my favorite film is Gandhi, but my actual favorite film is Patton. Well, you know, there’s so many ideas in the two of them. You know, Patton says, “God help me; I love it so,” with regard to war, and Gandhi is willing to die and to encourage a lot of other people to be willing to die in service of a peaceful civil disobedience. So both things have to do with creating change. So, with Gandhi, I think Ben Kingsley’s portrait — just physically, how he looks, and the way he sounds when he’s delivering that sentient dialogue — and then Attenborough’s canvas — the visual canvas of India, the trains and all that stuff — and then, just my knowledge of the history of people pushing back against colonialism; all of those things just lift you up. They lift you up. The idea of Martin Sheen reporting back to America about what he’s seeing and the obvious lessons that are learned from these people who are willing to walk into abuse in order to make the point that they should be free — I love it because it’s like, “What can we learn from places and people around the world?” I love that. I love the international richness of it, the cultural richness."

"Sgt Pepper’s was my childhood Beatles record. Again, it’s moving, but in quite an abstract way, just describing what she’s leaving behind. You don’t ever hear where she’s gone or why, but you get these little hints: she’s leaving home after living alone and yet her Mum and Dad are there. It’s all done with McCartney’s jovial style but it’s got this sadness in it, which I think he’s really good at - he’s done it lots of times, with ‘Eleanor Rigby’ being the absolute epitome of it. “But that whole album made an impact on me as a kid. It’s a kind of dark, sickly-feeling album to me. It’s not very comfortable, it’s trippy and weird. You don’t really know where you are with it, it’s colourful, but in a ghoulish way. It’s a scary record for a child, because it’s just so weird. And ‘She’s Leaving Home’ holds you a bit closer than the other songs I think, even though it’s about someone leaving home. I also like the musical elements - the melody and the structure of it. “The Beatles have been an ongoing influence in my life and I think if you like them as a child you’re always going to like them. But the great thing about The Beatles is the breadth and the evolution of their records, if you’re not feeling ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ anymore, you can dip in at different points and find different sides to them. ""There’s so many things they touched on. ‘Helter Skelter’ is basically the whole of The Who’s output in one song; the post-rock elements of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, that’s a fucking genre now! And they just did it for a laugh and never did it again. There’s so many little flashes like that and more than anything it just makes me feel like it would have been so amazing to have been around in a time when nothing’s been done. “The other great thing about the Beatles was that they put stuff on those records specifically for children, tracks like ‘Octopus’s Garden’. I think that’s something that’s been completely lost now, because children are given adult themes in a friend way now, rather than saying, “Here’s something you might actually like, being a child. Don’t worry about the other stuff.” Although funnily enough, with Get To Heaven we got so many people telling us that their children really liked it. We were really pleased about that - maybe it’s the colourful nature of it. It’s definitely something I want to explore more."

"We’re back to opera, we haven’t left it — because Magnolia. If you think about the moment Keanu wakes up as a battery, the moment Lana Turner loses it in traffic and is in this insane hysteria of flashing lights that is completely unrealistic, and then you look at the moment where it’s raining frogs. I saw it, and was like, “Is this going to be one of those movies that I don’t like where he looks down on every one?” I think Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz are super talented, but sometimes I don’t want to sit through their movies because the bile is just unbearable. I didn’t really know PT Anderson’s work that well, or what was going to happen. And then, it turns out he loves people so hard that it rains frogs. There is actual opera in this one. Oh, and BT-dubs, there is a musical number. The license and the observation and the amount that he went for it. The craft and his ability to sustain that much — any one of these movies could have fallen into a puddle of pretension, but the mastery behind them meant that they never could. Jason Robards, who happens to be in two of the movies on this list, him actually dying of actual cancer playing a guy dying of cancer, giving that speech. And Tom Cruise giving the best performance he’ll ever give. It just felt so achingly, weirdly logical to me."

"It's everything that I love about music. It's hip hop, trip hop, acid jazz, alternative... I don’t want to call it R n B, but there's some soul in there. Very dark and tortured sounding soul, but soul nonetheless. It's fusion, is what it is. What I liked most about rock music, besides the music I make, is when I don't understand what they're talking about. Geoff Barrow... See, I've never seen Geoff Barrow. I don't know how he looks, although he probably doesn't look like he's supposed to be making this kind of music. I heard stories about it, how they’d record certain stuff to wax and then sample it. Just going through a lot of shit to make the record. It's just so grand, and you think of the artist - who gave them the blank cheque to go to that extreme!? Someone could have easily rapped on all of that stuff. It sounds almost like Wu Tang production, something RZA did. I can hear rhyming over it, but Beth Gibbons has this pixie-kind of vocal, with that ethereal and enchanted kind of thing. It's awesome."