"I would say Sullivan’s Travels would probably round out the five. That movie is kind of what I’m always wrestling with, you know — there’s the idea of, “Do I go out and entertain people [laughs], or do I go out and say something?” I love that movie. That’s just another movie that, you know, Preston Sturges movies — they’re not really set in the real world, or most of them aren’t set in any real world, but the characters are always very realistic; and then he has these great, oddball one-dimensional characters that show up. Clearly that’s something that’s kind of influenced me, ’cause I don’t think the world that my movies take place in, it’s not a real place. I always laugh at people who go, “Well, you know, they would have been caught” in [God Bless America] and I’m like, “It’s not real, man.” I don’t wanna have a scene where Harvey Keitel is in front of this big map of the United States going, “I gotta get inside their brains. I gotta figure out where they’re gonna strike next.”"

"I'd heard this record off and on over the years and I was more familiar with stuff like 'Bonnie And Clyde' but the thread through a lot of these records is that I look at the sonic value. And I've always loved Serge Gainsbourg's production, be it the bass sound or the drum sound and so I really don't give a shit that it's sung in French because that's part of the whole package. My brother and his wife bought me the vinyl version about five or six years ago and it reinvigorated it for me and it reignited how I felt about Serge. When you put that record on, whether it's making Sunday lunch or having a few smokes at the end of the night, it just delivers what I want at that moment and that's the thing about great records. You may not love them all the time but there are the times when you do. But this has got a really cool poise that I enjoy."

"They're a funny band, Man, because they were always on the fringes of being really successful but they didn't really hit the big time. But they did well in America, and for this, the line-up had changed a tiny bit and it causes a lot of conjecture among their fans, but it's just beautiful. Actually, I've got a sneaking feeling that My Morning Jacket must be fans of Man, because there's stuff on Welsh-Connection which sounds very much like MMJ on their album Circuital. The cover is a mock-up of the French Connection movie poster, so you can sense the mood of everything, but the actual song 'The Welsh Connection' is just amazing. There's a certain 70s, deep-brown and depressed mood to it, but it kind of flies as well. It's what you imagine the 70s to be like; you imagine them being devoid of fantasy, so you had to lift yourself above the strikes and the power cuts and the joblessness and the overcooked beige food. You imagine that there's no fantasy for you to actually plough, and you've gotta just rise above it and try and dream. That's why I love this record; it feels like you're floating above reality and the brownness of the 70s, and it's trying to get somewhere. I've always found Man intriguing, because they're a west Walian band but they were making music that was very much competing with some of the best American West Coast prog-rock bands or rock bands, and I always find that intriguing - when a band tapped into something that was not of their typography or geographical situation. It's just a beautiful record, and a lot of their fans don't actually think it's their best, but I think it's their best by a mile."

"I guess I’ll have to start with Songs from the Second Floor, which is a film by Roy Andersson, who is a brilliant Swedish filmmaker who basically… He made a feature in the ’70s called A Swedish Love Story that is a really wonderful, strange, funny, acerbic commentary on Sweden that became this huge hit. I think it was the biggest hit ever in Sweden. And then he delved into making commercials for a long time, and he developed this new style over the course of something like 300, 400, 500 commercials. Then, in the early 2000s, he came out with this film that took him several years to make called Songs from the Second Floor, which is like a parody of obsessive perfectionism. He’s very similar Jacques Tati in that he works primarily with stationary wide shots, and he’s always building sets. All of the sets in his films are built from scratch, and the reason his films take so long to make is because each each vignette is one shot, and the set for that shot tends to take a month to build. There’s just like these gorgeous paintings, and there’s this really singular, dark, dry, sad wit driving everything he does. Since Songs from the Second Floor he’s come out with two other films that play like spiritual sequels, You the Living and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which I think you can see on Netflix. But Songs from the Second Floor remains the most perfect of the films, in my opinion."