"I just love that record. It was so beautifully done on every level - the arrangements are really incredible. Her writing, the storytelling is wonderful - she captures these scenes. She has a very casual way of expressing herself and it's very romantic: romantic in a literary way, like the romantic writers. She uses these long descriptions and paints a picture really well. But I think what really got me was the arrangements. The arrangements are so incredible, they're so economical; every instrument comes in when it's needed and then steps away. The texture is always changing. You know how arrangements can be kinda blocky? That's never the case here. I think she worked on them with Ryan Francesconi. They're sometimes very sparse, the percussion is incredible. I don't know how to explain it… I don't know, even the packaging is beautiful. Yeah. Love it."

"I really love Bicycle Thief. That just reminds me of my relationship with my father. My mother — they were divorced and I was raised mostly by my father. We grew up really poor. Something about that film really strikes a chord in me real deep. I remember [when I first saw it],I think I was in college and I had just left home. It was part of film studies class. We were told to watch it and I remember getting really emotional watching it. I guess it just really struck a chord because it made me realize everything my father had gone through to support us and to be there for us. I just remember that relationship, that father/son relationship and him loving his father so much and the end — his father just constantly trying so hard to support the family and make ends meet, and really not being able to pull it off. Poverty sucks, you know what I mean? And then in the end, him having to kind of resort to something that goes completely against his character, really, in order to provide for his family. And those moments of just pure humiliation, as a man, to try to provide for your family. I remember times like that with my dad and it just really hit close to home. I remember missing my dad because I was in New York. I was away from home for the first time and getting a real clear idea of what my father had gone through to provide for me. I think when you’re in the day-to-day and living it, you don’t have that objectivity, and you’re not able to step back and see the big picture. Then sometimes these really great movies are able to that for you. They’re kind of able to strike these chords in you and illuminate things for you. I think that’s what the Bicycle Thief did for me."

"My second favorite film is probably even more intellectually challenging than Wong Kar-Wai; it’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I f***ing love that movie! I have two children; I’ve probably seen this movie, with each child, about 50 times each. And that’s no exaggeration. There’s nothing I don’t know about this movie. I once went to a meeting with an executive in Hollywood, and they asked me what I wanted to do. I said, ‘I’d love to do a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘ — I was just making it up — ‘and I’d call it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Boom,’ and he said that’s a great title! [Laughs] I was only kidding. But that’s a movie I really love. In the UK at Christmastime, the girls would get The Sound of Music and the boys would get Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was that kind of thing, where every Christmas you would see it. So when I had kids, of course I put it on for my son and then he became obsessed with it. It’s the kind of movie where you never really get to the end; it’s so long, and the kids can only really wait so long. But the beginning of the film is like 20 minutes long, before anything even happens. It’s just the story of the car. It’s fantastic!"