"I could go with Shadow of a Doubt, any number of Woody Allen movies, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson — The Royal Tenenbaums I love — but I’m going to go with The Big Lebowski because it’s such a fully realized, beautiful film. John Goodman is amazing, [John] Turturro, [Steve] Buscemi, Sam Elliot — and then Jeff Bridges was fantastic. Julianne Moore. Just really, really, really, really such a satisfying film to watch, and so quotable, and something that I could have on a loop 24 hours a day in my home and never be bored with. Fantastic film. I’ll say no more."

"Paul Thomas Anderson. Magnolia. I just really love it. I mean, yeah, There Will be Blood is also a close contender; I love that too. But Magnolia — the audacity of it. I watched that movie and it’s scary by the end of it [laughing]. You’ve gone through this sort of tapestry of humanity that I feel is very hard to match in a lot of cinema these days. He is always surprising me, but that movie just… He finds a way to get the drama — he has a moment where everyone starts breaking out in unified song. And it feels totally authentic and earned. I’ve never seen a movie that does that but didn’t feel indulgent."

"Next up is There Will Be Blood. I gotta say, Paul Thomas Anderson might be the best working director alive. There Will Be Blood was such an interesting balance of showing why Daniel Plainview prospered in the oil rush of California. But it also shows how he’s essentially decrepit as a human being. He’s almost rotting away. He’s losing sight of his own humanity. It’s about dehumanization. Even outside of how gorgeous it looks, especially when the fire ignites the oil derrick and then the camera is rushing in. It’s a low angle tracking shot following Plainview as he’s rushing toward the fire. The colors in that scene are literally just dumbfounding. But the biggest thing is performance, performance, performance, performance, performance! Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, and Paul Dano as the pastor is freaking insane. Insane! And his dynamic with Daniel Plainview is some of the most compelling s–t I’ve seen on film. The fact that Plainview views Paul Dano’s character as a necessary mechanism to control the people in the town, but he doesn’t give him any bit of respect; Plainview doesn’t believe a lick of what Dano is saying in those church services. But he feels it’s important for the people in the town that are working day in and day out for him to believe it. It’s such an interesting dynamic."

"A Man For All Seasons is basically porn for people who love dialogue. Paul Scofield’s brilliant performance. Robert Shaw’s equally brilliant performance as Henry the VII. It’s always appealed to me. I was 13 years old the first time I saw it. Absolutely fell in love with it because it’s wall-to-wall language with compelling performances. And [it’s] about something to me, in terms that I was raised Catholic. So Thomas Moore’s decision to not sign the oath of succession appealed to me as I was growing up because this is a dude who’s martyred for his beliefs and whatnot. And people will always compare that movie to The Crucible for some reason. But I never felt the same connection to The Crucible because in that instance John Procter is just going to great lengths to try to keep his name. Whereas Thomas Moore went to great lengths to keep, what he felt was his soul, intact. By taking that oath it would’ve been selling out on his soul, it would’ve been lying. He couldn’t do it and I always found that insanely admirable and the life one wants to emulate to some degree, without being crazy Catholic at the same time."

"Punch-Drunk Love is at the very top of the list. Like everybody else, I’m a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. The journey that he took Adam Sandler on in that movie, starting as a guy who is very put-upon and all this kind of stuff, and then love came into his life through Emily Watson. Just to see that journey. There’s a great scene at the end when he just totally stands up to Philip Seymour Hoffman at his mattress store, and there’s that time when Emily’s in the car with him, and he grabs… I think it was a tire iron in the car and swings. It’s just such a great moment. And then that crying scene with the therapist in the closet. I mean, it was just perfection, that entire film, for me."

"In my book this isn't a punk record - it's a fantastic rock album. I mean, it's produced by Chris Thomas for goodness sake. Cookie (Paul Cook) is a fantastic drummer: I know him because he plays in Phil Collen's other band, The Manraze Then you have Steve Jones - fucking amazing guitarist. Matlock had gone by this point, I think he was on 'Anarchy…' and Sid was on 'Bodies' but apart from that Jones did all of the guitar and all of the bass parts as well. And he probably did more overdubs on that than we did on bloody Pyromania - it took nine months to record. It's a real album: it represents punk, but in many ways it doesn't. The Pistols record is as planned out as a Genesis album. And that's why it works: it's fucking brilliant. Nobody snarls like Rotten: his 'we mean it, man' on 'God Save the Queen', it puts the hairs on my arm up to this day."

"I think a lot about Martin Scorsese and how heavily influenced Paul Thomas Anderson was by him. I feel like he learned so much from Scorsese in Boogie Nights, and so I feel like picking Boogie Nights is somewhat accounting for my Martin Scorsese love. But I’m also being very honest about a movie that I can watch over and over. Just the epic nature and the grandness of it, and some of the shots and the style of it, and the music — my God, the way he uses music — and that great shot where somebody jumps into the pool and you hear the muffled soundtrack. It’s brilliant. I never get sick of watching it. And the acting is just some of my favorite actors at the top of their game. I love doing impressions and one of my earliest impressions of an actor was Philip Seymour Hoffman in that movie, when he’s saying how much he loves the name and he’s chewing on the pen."

"Ranks with the best of Hitchcock, who wanted to make it but Clouzot beat him to the rights. It was made in the same year as Night and Fog and The Night of the Hunter, 1955—what a year, what a decade for world cinema. The penultimate scene had the same effect on me as Psycho. Though it no longer holds surprises for me, I watch it for its mastery of suspense and the performances of Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and
 Véra Clouzot. But I confess that the nine-minute scene without words where 
Véra hears noises from her bedroom, goes down the hall to check them out, and is literally scared to death still nails me. You can bet I thought 
about how it was shot and paced when I sent Ellen Burstyn up to that attic in The Exorcist. No nudity, no sexuality, no violence, just pure, slow-building suspense that escalates to terror. The original novel was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote Vertigo."