"I lived a stone's throw from Penny Lane, and my sister had Beatles wallpaper, my brother had a plastic Beatles wig and Beatles cap, and they were older than me, and my auntie Kathleen - who was a bit of a ... swinging sixties... a Liver bird, put it that way - came to live with us and she brought with her Sgt. Pepper's. She would go and see concerts like Gene Pitney at the Liverpool Empire and things like that. She was quite an interesting woman - to me anyway - and was great fun. I had one of those portable record players like you did in the 1960s, and I would play this over and over again while staring at the Peter Blake/Jann Howarth record sleeve, which made a 3D collage, and asking people ""who's this?"" and ""who is this?"". I've said it before, it was a bit like Dorothy opening the door of the house once it's arrived in Munchkinland, and everything goes technicolour from the black and white-ness of 1960s Liverpool. It was like a portal into things like the Hollywood musicals that I'd been seeing on the Saturday morning at the pictures. My auntie Kath would say, ""Ooh I saw The Beatles in the Liverpool passport office getting a passport while I was getting mine"" and my mum would go, ""I knew Julia when she used to look like Lucille Ball and she used to strut down the street"", and so it was Beatles saturation, living in that particular part of town. 'She's Leaving Home' on that album was the first song that made me cry, which I think is quite an important moment in your life, when a piece of music makes you cry. It was just the sadness of the story of a girl leaving home. Then of course there was 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', 'A Day In The Life' and all those odd string arrangements. There was also the Magical Mystery Tour double EP in gatefold technicolour glory and things like that. It was like an entry into a world that was distant yet very close as well. It made me want to learn the lyrics to sing along and I guess it was just very important to me in my journey of music appreciation. And if you had the measles or chicken pox, you were quarantined to my sister's bedroom, and it was like a TARDIS of 'John Paul George Ringo' and it would drive you absolutely insane, as it was all you could read: 'John Paul George Ringo John Paul George Ringo John Paul George Ringo' and their smiling happy faces. It was kind of great and yet torturous at the same time. Pop torture."

"Cool Hand Luke, to me, and I’m not a film historian, but what it feels like to me is it’s in this intersectional point between the glamorization of film and that golden era of Hollywood where everything was meant to look perfect, like all the old Cary Grant movies like His Girl Friday and Arsenic and Old Lace, where everything is supposed to look so nice and everybody’s always impeccably dressed and charming and all that. Cool Hand Luke comes after that, where it’s a more cinema verite realism kind of thing. But also, there are still elements of the older films that you don’t get anymore, like using imagery in a really cool way. Like, there’s one scene where, to inspire a feeling of tension and stress, there’s just a really slow push in on a whirling fan that just keeps whirling and whirling, and I feel like they don’t do that much anymore. Now they have to really pander to the audience, and make sure that they serve up to you exactly what’s going on, instead of using that kind of stuff. Also, Paul Newman is the f—ing best, and he’s so good in that movie, and it’s just cool, man. It’s just a guy who just won’t get beat by the system, and I really like that. There’s so many layers to that movie. It’s one of the few movies that I make sure I keep downloaded on my iPhone or my iPad, just so that I always have it available."

"Ernest Hemingway’s superb eight-page short story is the jumping-off point and inspiration for these two essential and very different movies (Stacy Keach reads the story magnificently in one of the DVD extras). I don’t understand why more people don’t know the 1946 Siodmak film. For my money, this is not only the best noir movie of all time but is just about my favorite Hollywood drama from the 1940s. The complex narrative structure begins as a jumbled Rubik’s Cube, and, slowly but surely, each piece falls into its precise place by movie’s end (the stuff Quentin Tarantino’s dreams are made of). The moody atmosphere provided by Siodmak and his technicians is a marvel. The cinematic execution of a heist has never been better. Here marks the birth of two glorious stars: Burt Lancaster (a beautiful caged animal, all teeth) and Ava Gardner (wow). Paul Schrader’s seminal essay on film noir, as a DVD extra, is invaluable. For those of you who wonder why Siegel’s 1964 violent, stylish, quirkily entertaining B version (the first TV movie ever made) is on this list, I have two words for you: Lee Marvin. There has never been a star like him before or since. Words simply cannot do justice to the magic of this guy—the timbre of his voice, the calm, paranoid, roughneck danger in his physical moves. In a spectacular extra on this DVD, fellow actor Clu Gulager gives a very moving (and, one feels while watching it, very truthful) account of working with Marvin, Siegel, and Ronald Reagan (who hated the movie—yet another reason to see it!)."