"Alan Lomax was a folklorist and ethnomusicologist who was making archival recordings and field recordings in the 40s, and this album consists mainly of prison chain gang songs. The first time I heard it, it stopped me in my tracks - it was incredibly moving to hear because it's just the sound of male voices and pickaxes and nothing else... it sounds haunted but hopeful. Like listening to ghosts, the quality of the singing and the recording [is such] that you can never have again - a document of its time. It's spiritual: the pain is in their singing, which would have been their only mode of expression. It's singular and not something I'd put on everyday, being a heavy listen."

"Schindler’s List. I remember, again, I was under age. It was all experiences I wasn’t really allowed to be having, you know. So, I went to watch Schindler’s List. My dad was like, “OK, we’re taking you to the movies. You have to watch this movie. It’s an important film to see.” The cinema was packed out, and I was probably about 12 or 13, and it was just incredibly moving and overwhelming for a 13-year-old to watch, and the visuals of the girl in red in this black-and-white world, things like that. It’s just really ingrained in me. I remember the experience of going to watch that with everyone, and being moved."

"I don't really know what to say about this record. It's just one of those very emotive pieces of music that you need to be in a certain frame of mind to listen to and enjoy – those quiet, reflective moments. There are certain albums you can't put on in the car, and this would be one of them. It just wouldn't work. You can hardly hear the first three minutes of this, even if you turn your speakers up to 11, but it gradually builds up. It's refreshing, sometimes, to listen to music that has a completely different pace and is from a different world. If you're in the right frame of mind, it can be something deeply moving."

"That title track, it really affected me emotionally. I can't really explain why, but it really got under my skin. We were going to a lot of parties and stuff, and that was always the track that was played, and everybody would get up and start dancing to it. I love most of the Bowie stuff, but '"Heroes"' and that whole era, I found it really moving. "Heroes" was a rebellion inspiration, an "I told you so"-type thing. It seemed to be very anti-establishment, and something your parents wouldn't approve of, so we loved it. I've never seen Bowie, though we did play a tour supporting him in South America."

"Well I always have a hard time with this. As we get older or grow or whatever, it’s always changing, because you just see more movies, for one thing, so you change. One of my most favorite movies, I think a perennial favorite movie of mine is La Ronde. I don’t know how well acquainted you are with it. It’s one of my favorite movies. Anton Walbrook is one of the stars, who also the stars of another one of my favorite movies, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. He’s the guy who’s that German who has the seven-minute monologue with the moving camera that never cuts, and he breaks down during it."

"This is a companion portrait of the existential man of The Fire Within, but it is the obverse—men facing their end not by the personal choice of suicide but by literally being blown to bits. Beginning in a slow, sleepy town (an extended sequence that was once severely trimmed), it tracks men who are moving toward death on a literal and metaphorical road but whose ability to face the void ahead of them is Camus-like in its indomitability. Screwed down as tightly as a pipe bomb, this Clouzot film threatens to blow up in front of you at every turn. You want to scream as you reach to grab the truck’s steering wheel."

"I loved Pan’s Labyrinth. It transported me into another world. I like fantasy worlds; I love Lord of the Rings as well, for that reason, because you really get to get out of reality and go somewhere else. Pan’s Labyrinth was kind of this dark, sick, beautiful… it was like watching a moving painting, like a Salvador Dali painting or something like that. It was just really magical and it sort of provoked so many different feelings at one time. It’s kind of sick, you know, the guy with no eyes is coming at her and it felt like when you have a crazy dream — you’re watching someone’s crazy dream. It just affected me."

"In fact, the whole John Cassavetes: Five Films set. This is the starter kit for anyone who wonders about the roots of the American independent film movement. Seeing Cassavetes’s debut, the politically charged love story Shadows, is like watching the birth of a giant. Meanwhile, Faces and A Woman Under the Influence are searing portraits of the blinding pain true love can bring when a marriage ends up tearing a family apart. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night, on the other hand, are noirish sagas of death and business. Plus, Charles Kiselyak’s moving documentary A Constant Forge offers up the proper historical and cultural perspective on one of American cinema’s true visionaries."

"“I hope to build a house with my films,” Fassbinder famously said. “Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.” For me, the front door to that house is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I first watched it when I was home from college one December, and my young and impressionable mind was instantly changed. The use of long takes, the meticulous, ever-moving camera direction, the outlandish costumes, the emotional cruelty, the wigs . . . Fassbinder finds beauty in despair, and despair in beauty, but ultimately knows that the real truth lies in the costume changes."