"The first song that I think put me in a musical direction was probably Just Like a Woman by Bob Dylan, which I realise is not a very PC song now. I actually just had a think about how unacceptable that song would be in today’s day and age. But I think if you say something like that without any malice or highbrow nature then you could reverse it and say ‘just like a man’ as well. I definitely had a moment with it recently though where I was like, ‘I would not write that song today.’ But it was a revelation at the time: it was just a guy with a guitar and some lyrics and not even a good voice. That kind of hit me and I said, ‘I could do that.’ “This was probably during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and I was listening to stuff like Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana, but I wasn’t ever able to play like that, and growing up in suburban New Jersey I had no idea what Mr. Brownstone was. I was just pissed because I was in the suburbs and there was nothing to do. I was dealing with this whole lower middle-class frustration thing. Right after that, I heard the first Clash record and I made the connection between the harmonica that Joe Strummer was using with the harmonica that Bob Dylan was using."

"We’re back to opera, we haven’t left it — because Magnolia. If you think about the moment Keanu wakes up as a battery, the moment Lana Turner loses it in traffic and is in this insane hysteria of flashing lights that is completely unrealistic, and then you look at the moment where it’s raining frogs. I saw it, and was like, “Is this going to be one of those movies that I don’t like where he looks down on every one?” I think Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz are super talented, but sometimes I don’t want to sit through their movies because the bile is just unbearable. I didn’t really know PT Anderson’s work that well, or what was going to happen. And then, it turns out he loves people so hard that it rains frogs. There is actual opera in this one. Oh, and BT-dubs, there is a musical number. The license and the observation and the amount that he went for it. The craft and his ability to sustain that much — any one of these movies could have fallen into a puddle of pretension, but the mastery behind them meant that they never could. Jason Robards, who happens to be in two of the movies on this list, him actually dying of actual cancer playing a guy dying of cancer, giving that speech. And Tom Cruise giving the best performance he’ll ever give. It just felt so achingly, weirdly logical to me."

"It’s one of the great ’50s melodramas, and it’s kind of like a musical without the music, but it has a great score, of course. I saw it in my early- to mid-20s, and it just really affected me. It’s about a guy who goes back to his hometown where his brother is a prominent citizen. He’s a stalled-out, blocked writer, and he’s been a soldier, and a worker, and a would-be novelist, and he’s kind of a gambler and a drinker — this is Sinatra, of course, the conflicted one — and he lives in two worlds. Because he’s a published writer, he has the respect of the local English teacher and her brother — the respectable world of literature — but he really has a soft spot for bars and gambling and floozies and the Shirley MacLaine character. And then you’ve got Gwen French, who’s played by Martha Hyer, who’s the uptight school teacher. So it’s all these opposites colliding — respectability, debauchery… It’s wonderfully melodramatic and beautifully made… It’s about male friendship too. I consider it kind of the first Rat Pack movie, although it’s just Dean and Frank with Shirley around too. It doesn’t have a lot of the other people, but it’s the first one to capture these guys gambling and hanging out and that camaraderie. They become roommates and go on, like, a trip to Terre Haute, IN, to go gambling. It’s just wonderful."

"Raising Arizona. It’s definitely in the top five. I remember seeing that movie as a VHS rental when I was, I think, 12 years old. I’d just had an operation, and I was recovering at home, and my mom just went and got a bunch of movies, and that was one that I could not… I couldn’t even comprehend it the first time I saw it. It was so weird. It was so beautifully weird. At least from my perspective, I had never seen a comedy toned quite like that before, and I just loved it, and I couldn’t get enough of it, and I wound up just watching it over and over again. It wasn’t just funny writing, it was funny looking. The acting is incredible, and the casting, the production design, the cinematography, the score… Carter Burwell, he wrote this haunting score that’s based on an old traditional tune, “Down in the Willow Garden”, which is this kind of haunting river ballad, and it’s the musical motif through the whole thing. It even plays during the diaper robbery scene in the convenience store. There’s like a Muzak version of that playing, and I caught all those little things. I was blown away by the specificity and the choices, and it was one of many movies that I kind of point to as being a moment that, for me, kind of stood out as, “Oh, this is what I want to do with my life.”"

"Carol Reed was a brilliant director and a sweet man, but he was not a one-man band like David Lean; he required a strong, patient producer who loved him, as my Uncle Alex did, and a gifted screenwriter, which Alex found for him in the novelist Graham Greene, as well as an art director of genius—my father. He was at his best surrounded by talented people who loved him, who were virtual family, and that shows in his best films, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man. One unusual aspect of Carol’s gifts was that he was among the rare directors good at working with children—go watch The Third Man and you will be astonished at the brilliant inclusion of the ghastly little boy who accuses Holly Martins of murder. Most of the great directors hate working with animals or children, but Carol—himself the illegitimate son of the great Edwardian actor and theatrical producer Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree—had a natural sympathy and understanding of children. He was in fact childlike himself—hence his choice, later in life, to make a film of the musical Oliver!—and this shows in his direction of Bobby Henrey in this, another of those English films in which good manners manage to hide passion and even murder, except in the alarmingly clear view of a child. Ralph Richardson, dear Ralph, is at his best in the role of the butler."