"I had the pleasure of working with the director of this film, Werner Herzog, recently. He is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers. In Fitzcarraldo, he manages to bring an opera house into a Peruvian jungle. What an amazing concept!"

"I discovered opera when I was about 13 with Verdi's Requiem . I started off a normal child and within two hours I became this opera queen. It was a religious conversion. Then after that, Maria Callas released La Divina 1 and La Divina 2, her greatest studio recordings from a particular period when I would say her voice wasn't quite at its zenith, but it was in this very interesting stage where it was matched with beauty and experience. So even though not all the notes were perfect you could definitely hear the angst and the pain and the passion that she had experienced in her career and life. I became enraptured by those records. They also had very iconic covers, that amazing photograph of her washed out against a black or white backdrop. It was also the kind of record that I could use to show others my point, and my passion, about opera. I could play it for a bunch of skinheads, heroin addicts, mods or punk rockers or whatever and they would physically freeze at the most dramatic points, because there's no way to deny her power at certain moments – whereas with a lot of opera it can be a hard sell. So they were my little secret weapons I could bring to my crazy underground parties and have a moment of respite from the horror of existence."

"A surreal world of characters trapped in a house, the book felt more like a dream than a story. I loved it because it was so different from anything else I ever read. I was never particularly interested in Opera, but this story swept me away."

"When I was 18 and had a job framing pictures in a gallery, the guy working next to me would always play opera, and I thought he was a nutter. But now I adore it. Maria Callas will never go missing in my listening, because she rocks."

"Everybody ends up dead or insane-slash-arrested. Nancy Olson is dismissed to wed Jack Webb — the real off-screen horror ending. Every performance is outlandish, as big as anything on any Mexican soap opera. The dead monkey. Buster Keaton. The fun never ends. The best noir comedy, ever."