"It's not just an album to me; it's like a movie. It's a whole story—there's cruel, tragic storytelling. I listened to it for the first time in Berlin. Sometimes when I travel, I like to find things that relate to where I am. So I listened to this, and for the whole afternoon, I was like, Oh man. How am I going to leave the apartment? Something changed after I listened to this album. I love Lou Reed, because his voice sounds like your inner conscience. When I read a book, it's Lou Reed's voice narrating it. It's very intimate. I can't really listen to this album casually. It's like going to a museum and seeing a painting that really means something to you—a sacred moment. I don't have many albums that do that for me."

"That was just good ol’ high-concept fun. Evan and I always like to take ridiculous situations and handle them as though they were real. That’s kind of where the idea of Pineapple Express came from. These ridiculous action movie situations and you handle it just how two idiots would handle it. And that’s kind of what Ghostbusters did. It’s a ridiculous concept but it was handled very much, “How would four dudes do that, you know?” And it’s great. I love that movie."

"A relatively new film that went straight into my top five, I adore Punch Drunk Love, and I can almost recite it to you. It was on TV on a loop for a while, and it’s like The Godfather, you hit that film on TV and you stay there. There aren’t many, but you just stay there, thinking, ‘I could keep flipping, but there’s not actually going to be anything better than this,’ and it doesn’t matter that you’ve seen it sixteen times – you just dig it because it’s such high quality. I think Adam Sandler and Emily Watson are completely marvellous in it, and I didn’t know anything about Adam Sandler, I’ve never seen any of his other films, so I’ve only seen him in this. I love Paul Thomas Anderson, and I think it’s my favourite of his films. Possibly a controversial thing to say, as his other films are, perhaps, hipper, but I love the fact that it’s this fucked up love story. I love it stylistically, the jokes, the visual attitude of it and those funky links that he does. I love the apparent arbitrariness of the plot, which hinges on upon the fact that you get free air-miles with a particular brand of chocolate pudding, and I love the way it dovetails at the end. Everyone in it is magnificent, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, who’s in The Boat that Rocked and who is beautiful in Punch Drunk Love. Adam Sandler gives one of the greatest light entertainment performances I’ve ever seen. It’s a submerged light entertainment, it’s so integrated, so authentic in terms of naturalism, that you surprise yourself by laughing, because it’s so deadpan, so undercover in terms of comedy, and that’s my favourite thing of all time, the highest level. For the first twenty minutes you think you’re in art movie hell, but you’re not, so don’t panic."

"This has to be up there. There are parts of this movie that I think are perfect — like when [Andrew Lincoln] is flipping the cards for Keira Knightley. I just died. I think I was in love with Keira too; when I would see her, I could get that heartbreak he felt. For some reason, there’s so many aspects of love in that movie — it all resonates with you one way or another, and there’s such humor and different stories, young and old. There’s all kinds of relationships — it’s family and taking care of them even if you have to sacrifice your own romantic love. I always watch it and am always overwhelmed with how good it is. It’s amazing."

"He started so much. One of the many things I love about Bo Diddley, besides the fact that he created his own instruments with his own effects in them and was one of the first rock & rollers to have women in his band and wore glasses, is that he was a complete original. He's playing blues but it also feels like pop songs to me. Maybe I'm using that term a bit loose but a song like 'I'm a Man' or 'Before You Accuse Me', there's something to them. I feel like it's almost slighting them to call them pop but they're put together in a way that it's not Robert Johnson. There's something new that he's doing here. The fact that he had those shakers and it was such a big part of his sound. We've used that shaker sound and have tried to duplicate it many, many times. You use a little bit of room and you distort it a little bit and that's the Bo Diddley shaker sound. He took a form and made it something else."

"The reason I love it is it’s the ultimate adaptation. You know, memes coming out in your films. This guy makes a film every two, three years, is making, making, making, and all the money goes away and they come to him and they say, “Okay, you can make it for TV. You can make whatever you want,” and he walks up to a building complex and he goes right, The Ten Commandments in that building. How do you do that? He makes 10 movies in a year — three of them I think they released later on as features. And you look at them and they have the balls of a student movie, like a short film about killing. It’s just all about the process. It isn’t about hanging the guy or not hanging the guy, it’s just what it takes to hang a guy. And just stuff like that, that I just think, “How do you do that?” I don’t think it’ll ever happen — at least in my lifetime."