"Let’s start with Withnail and I. That’s gotta be pretty much up there. I adore that film. I can quote it at great length. Many of my great friends love it, too. It’s a film about two overindulging actors who go on holiday by mistake. What’s not to like? It’s wonderful. There’s so much I would like to say about that film. It’s this sort of beautiful eulogy, really, but a very, very funny one. It’s probably got as many quotable lines in it as any film, really. Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann just… I don’t know. I adore it. That’s the problem with a film you love so much, is I don’t know really what to say about it. I completely love it."

"This is one of my favourite films, and I’m going to almost insist that you say in this article that people must go and watch a song called Carol Brown, from the new series of Flight of the Conchords. It’s been directed by Michel Gondry, and it’s just so amazing; for the rest of the episode you can’t really see that it’s him, but up comes this dazzling thing. I just think for a movie with such a massive concept, that idea, that sort of fantasy, should be done by being completely realistic. In a way it’s like Let the Right One In – the office where they alter your mind feels like a ghastly dental surgery. So you’re in this weird mixture between something that feels terribly realistic, with Kirsten Dunst jumping up and down on a bed, absolutely normal, and yet it’s completely freakish and odd and had these spectacular special effects in it. I love the sort of downbeat-ness of the love story — the fact that, really, they’re sort of right for each other, but only because they’re not right for anyone else. I think it’s a genuinely great fantasy movie, a great love story, and Kate Winslet‘s hair is, after all, blue, so that’s obviously a good reason for seeing it. You’ve been on this massive ride, and it gets back to these people in a corridor, which I suppose is like — if you land on the moon, there’s just you on the moon, and I think there’s something profound about the whole thing."

"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."