"That moment I had when I was young, listening to White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground… I mentioned there's a song called 'The Gift', and John Cale narrates it. It's about a man who mails himself to his girlfriend as a present. She opens it, and she fucking kills him. I remember… I didn't realise John Cale was Welsh when I was 15. I remember listening to that song and I was like, "Fuck me! That sounds like a Welsh voice!". My mind exploded: one of the pivotal members of The Velvet Underground was a Taff! Anything is possible baby… I really got into John Cale from that moment onwards. I think if you get into John Cale you go to Paris 1919, which is an amazing album and some would say his best, but Slow Dazzle really pushes it for top spot. Number one, it has one of the best covers of all time: he does a cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel' which is a brilliant, brilliant cover. And he goes from that to 'Ski Patrol', and there's another song called 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is almost like a Harry Nilsson, beautifully orchestrated, melancholic plea to a lover. So he goes from serrated acuteness of 'Heartbreak Hotel' to the lushness of 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is just one of the great motivational songs of all time. In a strange way it just motivates you so much. This is where John Cale got his game together: he realised he was an experimental musician who could also write amazing tunes. And this is where you actually hear him not scared of his voice anymore. This was the start of his true greatness. As a solo artist he's nearly unsurpassable to me."

"I think the period from 1979 to 1982 was the best period for British pop music. And out of all that stuff it's 'Oliver's Army' that I've chosen. It gets more incredible the older I get and the more I understand about it. Visually, when it first came out, Elvis Costello was like a Halloween version of Buddy Holly. It's all distorted - his clothes were too big for him and his glasses were too big for him. He didn't look like a very nice guy - quite frightening - but singing this amazing song. Some songs will move your feet, emotions, and some will move your head - and this has got all of this, all together. I knew all the words. I'd write the words down in my exercise book at school, but I didn't understand any of it. But they're such good words you don't really have to. I love that first line: "Don't start me talking/ I could talk all night". It just brings up that image of youthful idealism - we can sit up all night talking. Before you get into drink, drugs and all that, you just sit up talking because you can. I love that. It could Paris in the late 60s, or London at the end of the century, or Greenwich Village. Musically, I just read about the piano part... Elvis didn't like the song at all and they were going to scrap it, so the piano player suggested, "Why don't we play something like ABBA?" I think it's 'Dancing Queen'. And then they put that on and that was it. But no one wanted to say yes at first as it wasn't a very cool thing to do."

"The longer I live and the more movies I know, the more I love Stanley Donen. However, I fell in love with this film as a child. I went to see it because—well, because I saw everything that came to the Paramount Theater (or the Capitol) in Ashland, Kentucky. But I was especially primed for loving this movie because I was enamored of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly—I had seen that movie ten times the previous year. But Charade was a very different movie from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for a little girl—and for that time—it was very violent, and it scared the hell out of me so much that I thought James Coburn was in my closet at night, and I made my mother go with me to check if he was there before bedtime. Nevertheless, I went back for more every weekend until its run was over. I loved the witty romance between Cary Grant and Audrey, and I loved Paris as much as I had loved New York in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And the mystery works! And I loved that so much I went back again and again, even if it scared the pee outta me. On the DVD, director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone banter amusingly from a long friendship together on the long process it took to make this film. Stone makes the great observation that when you write a mystery, you make it for a second viewing. And if the audience says, “That’s a cheat,” then you didn’t do it right. But if they see it a second time and say, “Oh, it was there all the time, and I didn’t see it,” then you have something. This film has all that and more—i.e., the best clothes ever!"

"The running themes of my top ten list are so perfectly combined in News from Home, which features the most exquisite first-person voice-over and a series of static landscapes of New York City. I had the incredible experience of watching News from Home on the night of October 6, 2015, the day after Chantal Akerman took her own life. I had awoken to this news from Paris on the morning of the sixth. Having spent the day trying to comprehend this incomprehensible fact, I found myself drawn to Hulu that night, choosing to process my grief by watching one of her films. After the first few minutes of News from Home, I realized to my amazement that I had actually never seen it despite thinking that I had (shameful confession: I realize now that it was Hotel Monterey I had seen long ago, and all this time I had somehow mixed up these two titles). Of course, I have seen many of Akerman’s other works and have always considered her a huge influence on my own—especially her formal approach to lengthy shot duration and the static camera and her affection for the mundane. But seeing News from Home, particularly at that moment in time, was such a revelation. It seemed so uncanny that my own cinematic style of mixing static, durational 16 mm urban cityscapes with voice-over would so resemble Akerman’s style in News from Home—and I make this comparison in the humblest way possible. As the final twelve-minute shot of a Manhattan skyline with seagulls unspooled before my bewildered and bleary eyes, I discovered that the conclusion of my new film, The Royal Road, which features a single seagull flying across the San Francisco skyline, pays uncanny homage to Akerman’s film."

"I discovered his music through a friend in Paris, Armelle Pioline, who used to be in a very good French group called Holden. They were very singular, and quite similar to Stereolab, actually: very poetic. And anyway she had worked with quite a lot of French people and she introduced me to a scene of French musicians that were kind of successful in their field but that I had never really explored. Bertrand Belin had a sort of hit in his own world called 'Hypernuit' and that song really shattered me. It had such depth: it was kind of a ray of light into a deep darkness. It's a little bit spooky, but incredibly poetic and haunting. It's the kind of tune you can't really put your finger on. It's kind of diffused but it creates a beautiful picture with touches of darkness and light. I'm very attracted to this type of songwriting; there's a singularity in the writing that I love very much. For me the hit on this particular album is 'La Mot Juste'. Pretty much everyone who's been through my kitchen I've played this record to, and they've all flashed on it: what's this? They've taken the name and really showed interest. It resonates; there's a deep resonance with the beauty of it. I'm not particularly a big fan of Bertrand's voice, which a lot of people seem to go for, but certainly the songwriting and the lyrics are quite sharp. He's also an author: he writes books. And the production on the record is very beautiful. It's 'La Mot Juste': the just instruments, the just notes, the just amounts of whatever it took. I like that. There's no excess, no fat. It's what it is. I love it."