"This is the record that made me a guitar player. I got given a guitar aged nine and had been taught a couple of things on it, but it’d basically stayed propped against the corner of the room and not used that much… until I first heard The Smiths when I was 13. It was just like, ‘This is what I want to do – I’m doing this! I’m going to be a guitarist in a band!’ “Johnny Marr was like a surrogate guitar teacher right through my early teens - 13, 14, 15 years old - to when I met Mark Gardener at school. We became mates because he heard I could play the riff off Bigmouth Strikes Again and asked me to show him. "That’s how we became friends, so Ride’s got a lot to thank The Smiths for. I still find some of Johnny Marr’s playing totally baffling, like those swoopy lead parts on How Soon Is Now?.”"

"I, as a child, loved Mary Poppins. Something about these misunderstood kids who couldn’t catch a break, and this fantastic woman coming into their life and showing them this other world, and yet also being so coy: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What world do you mean?” I just really liked escapism as a child, I guess. The time element of Britain in another era, and then this fantastical element of going into pictures and cartoons and flying and laughing. It’s like it was so exciting to me, even though it came out 30 years before I was born. Something like that. It was a real go-to as a kid. In the last two and a half decades, it still works. It doesn’t drag. It’s still like the magic is still there. Whereas maybe other films from that era may or may not have aged quite as gracefully as Mary Poppins has."

"The first movie that comes to my mind when somebody asks me about favorites is Searching for Bobby Fischer by Steve Zaillian. First of all, it’s a beautifully, beautifully shot and acted movie. I mean, the screenplay is brilliant, but more than anything, Conrad Hall shot the movie, and it’s one of the best performances I’ve seen by an actor of any age in a movie. The honesty and the presence of the lead kid in the movie is amazing. And every actor surrounding him is extraordinary, from Joan Allen, and Laurence Fishburne, Joe Mantegna, Ben Kingsley; Laura Linney plays like a one scene role in the movie. Like a virtually unknown at the time, Laura Linney. And just the story of father and son and the score is beautiful. It is inevitably one that I am always drawn to, and I think it’s filled with hope but also like a real darkness and the beauty of childhood."

"You get 12 years of childhood, give or take. These days, maybe less. The movies I loved during that time have been well documented in other conversations, and they’re all the same as yours. Back To The Future remains the best movie I ever saw. Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, like everyone else. But Pete’s Dragon, though it may not entirely hold up to scrutiny now, was the movie that taught me how to be. I saw Elliott as a model for how to treat other people. He was generous and warm, but mostly seemed driven by the needs of whoever required him most. I’ve always been someone with a small circle of friends. Each stretch of my life has been defined by one person who was just my person. We became inseparable for a certain number of years, and that time was our season, just the two of us making our way through life. This was before my wife took the mantle, never to be relinquished. I had a similar dynamic with all of them — I wanted us to have so much fun, they’d consider their lives a little better for having been friends. Like Elliott."

"The whole [Godfather] series was brilliant. I loved all three of them. But my favorite was number two. I thought it was extraordinarily shot. I think the way Francis Coppola puts these incredible stories together where he has the juxtaposition of having people be killed while this incredible symphonic music is playing and some opera is taking place — it’s all an opera. I think the whole Godfather series is like one magnificent opera. I just think it’s one of the great movies of the century — since film making. I think he is a genius. I think he just captured the passion and the anger and the ignorance of the whole world of the Mafia, and what that meant — the Black Hand. He glamorized them in a way that made us want to know them, be there, experience it — even though it speaks of great danger. But there was something so enticing about their world, that whole world. And the people were such rich studies of character. Robert De Niro was the greatest he’d ever been, and of course, Pacino. Those performances – every single performance was genius. I loved the films. I even like the third one."