"Jaws is the next poster on my wall, I’m staring at it right now. You are about to be introduced to, in my opinion, the greatest craftsman storyteller the cinema has ever seen and with a vehicle that had literally the perfect balance — and he brought that. It was [Steven Spielberg’s] balance of humor and artistry and the genre. It was the culminating of that balance. I screened that movie for my crew — I forgot which movie, two or three movies ago, and it’s just incredible to watch the balancing act of the humor. Roy Schieder’s trying to understand about what’s going on in the town about the shark and there’s this lady complaining to him about the kids that are karate chopping the fence. It’s genius because life moves on, and this is like real life. It’s the collision of a perfect story from the book with great sensibilities for entertainment and humor. Spielberg gets the precision of the craft and thinking about the shot with the me lieu of the time, and does in that docu-1970s style, which is my favorite time period in cinema ever."

"I just love the songs on this. I’m not into the whole religious aspect of the band but I’ve been a fan since I saw them on Top Of The Pops doing ‘Fire’. The reason that I picked this over Achtung Baby - which is one of my favourite U2 albums from my favourite period of U2 – is that it’s just a massive album for me. When I get time to have a quiet moment on my own, I could sit and play all the songs off this on an acoustic guitar for ages. They’re just great. You don’t like it? I don’t give a fuck! Everyone that I’ve ever known – EVER KNOWN – apart from my wife – hates them. Me and my wife love them. It wasn’t the reason we got married… But everyone else I have ever met from my earliest memory in Manchester to right now talking to you has gone, 'They are fucking shit. They are what’s wrong with music.' For me it’s about the songwriting. If I could write a song like ‘Running To Stand Still’ and ‘Nobody’s Home’ by Pink Floyd then I could die happy with never writing another song again."

"From the moment Lou Castel literally falls from the sky into the film, one knows that one has signed up for one darn crazy ride. Of all the films in the collection this is the one that spells y-o-u-t-h with the greatest virulence. It captures its never abetted sense of social claustrophobia and, its consequence, its recurrent fantasies of murder and mayhem. For anyone, anywhere, at any time, who uttered, “Families, I hate you!” this film should be the Bible. Nervy, hilarious, and bleaker than bleak, it manages to make you believe the impossible, namely that a filmmaker could take a trip on the Rimbaud side of the street and not come out looking ridiculous. And, as an added bonus, for those who want to understand the sixties beyond the banalities that are ritually uttered about them, every scene of Fists in the Pocket, with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in."

"I was working on a film with another writer friend that didn’t happen. It was going to happen in Europe if it happened, and I had been scouting for it, and I saw this film when I was thinking about that movie, and that maybe kind of bled into First Cow. Suddenly First Cow did come together, and they were both in the same period, and they both were sort of films of peasants in their little hutches. [In Wooden Clogs], this is like a little community of workers who are working on the property of their landlord; the Chief Factor in First Cow isn’t really a property owner, but he’s more like the CEO of Firestone going to another continent and using all the resources; he’s holding this kind of power in the region. There were some thematic things, but again, it’s people in their little houses working all day – always sewing, fixing things, feeding the animals – and then around the candlelight at night telling stories and cooking in their fires and everything is very tactile. All the hay, the thatch roofs, the wooden floors, all those things – the chores, the chores, the chores."

"I went to music school and this piece is probably given to every music student as a main example of what medieval music is, so it's not obscure in that world. It's almost funny that I'm putting it in here but I do love Machaut. To me, he's probably more notable for having written these secular love songs, which was pretty cool for that period. But I chose this piece because it's so powerful in an obvious way, just sonically, and what's cool about this performance is that they have these inflections in the voices which they think, I guess, is authentic. But I think that's debatable. It might be true, I'm not really sure. The singers bend the notes: they sing in kind of straight tones and then they bend the notes in a way that you don't really hear in other performances of this piece. It just sounds incredible, authentic or not. There are revolutionary things about this piece and why it's important but I don't remember what they are. When I was writing my song 'Marienbad', I was into madrigals and that straight-tone singing with lots of different voices"