"This is my favourite Smiths track, with ‘How Soon Is Now?’ a close second. Andy and I had a real shared history with The Smiths when we were growing up. We saw them at Maxwell Hall in Salford in 1986, which is remembered as being this legendary gig now, or so I’m told. The thing is, it really was that good - it’s in my top five gigs of all time. I saw them a lot of times, but there was something about that one, the energy was incredible. I think the place was oversold, so there was already a sort of danger in the air, and there was a sense that you were seeing a very special band at the peak of their powers, because it was just after The Queen Is Dead had come out. I can’t think of anything else that sounds like ‘The Headmaster Ritual’. The guitar tuning that Johnny Marr’s using is weird, so there’s this otherworldly feel to the way it sounds, but in terms of what Morrissey is singing about, that was very much rooted in reality; brutality in schools was still a thing during my upbringing and corporal punishment was still around, so this track in particular really resonated with me. I think any time you get one of the greatest lyricists of all time together with one of the greatest guitarists something special’s going to happen, but for me, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ is probably the top example of what that band could do."

"Kubrick has always been my keystone filmmaker. It was when I saw 2001 at age seven on opening weekend in New York that I first had my mind blown by a film. (And yes, I got to see the infamous nineteen minutes before they were cut!) I didn’t understand it, but I became obsessed with understanding it, dragging my poor dad back to it over and over. It changed my life . . . and I still have the Criterion laserdisc—my first Criterion purchase. The extras on the LD were—and still are—extraordinary, even if the picture quality has long been surpassed on Blu-ray. This film is why I’ve kept my rickety laserdisc player. (I’d love to see Criterion get ahold of 2001 again and what they could do with this greatest of all science-fiction films with modern 4K technology.) Paths of Glory was the second Kubrick film I saw, a couple of years later, when my dad took me to a revival house (I think it was the Carnegie Hall Cinema). He loved the film and its unflinching, humanist, antiwar stance, and it immediately became a huge touchstone for me. Its influence is all over my film A Midnight Clear, but I see it in other ways in almost everything I do. I was so excited when the Blu-ray was announced that I ordered two, so I could store one as a backup in case—God forbid—anything happened to my first copy and the disc went out of print."

"This is the first movie that moved me to tears. I saw this in the theater with my mother when I was eight years old. I was a pretty lonely kid, who made friends slowly when I made them at all. So when I saw this masterwork in a darkened room, surrounded by strangers, spellbound by the flickering world onscreen that painted a devastating portrait of childhood loneliness, it felt like someone had ripped out my insides. I was sobbing in my mom’s arms, aware on some level that what I was watching was completely fake, but on another level was more real than anything I had ever felt or understood. It was the first time I became consciously aware of the power of film to make us feel something. Something I wasn’t even aware of was roiling around inside me. E.T. introduced me to the profound and melancholic truth that love and pain go hand in hand, that love both gives us strength and makes us vulnerable. But, above all, it made me understand that love heals us and gives our lives meaning. E.T. introduced me to an idea that, over thirty years later, would beat at the heart of my directing debut. An eight-year-old me wasn’t prepared for any of that. But watching this movie, clutching my mother’s arm, an overwhelming feeling of empathy washed over me, and it reminded me that I wasn’t alone after all. Someone out there felt just like I did. “Ouch” indeed."

"This next one, there’s an actress tie-in. The next one is Alien. So, I clearly have a bit of a Sigourney Weaver fetish. I love the movie Alien. I wouldn’t say… I mean, I like sci-fi movies – I’m open to them – but I’m not a huge sci-fi buff, I guess. I really love watching the older sci-fi films that had the man-made special effects, the pre-CGI practical effects, and I think that Alien is one of the greatest examples of that. I think that movie is so cool. For the time when it was made, the effects, I think, hold up completely. You know, the scene with the alien popping out of the guy’s chest. It’s gripping. And also, it’s very dramatic as a film. It’s not as action-heavy as you might think it should be in your mind; because you’re setting up the whole thing, there’s a lot of silence. There’s a lot of people alone – you see them on their own. And obviously Sigourney Weaver is so incredible in it. I don’t think it was the first time I saw it, but the first movie that I saw in the Cinerama Dome at the Arclight was Alien, so I think it just cinematically took my breath away. You know, by that time, The Matrix is getting made, and you’re having these cooler effects and other things going on, and I still found it so admirable that something like that holds up and cinematically is so beautiful."

"The last one, well, I think for me — at the moment — it’s Come and See, the Elem Klimov film about the Russians fighting the Nazis. I’ve only ever seen it once, and I don’t know if I ever want to see it again, but it is an incredibly, profoundly affecting and terrifying experience. I just thought it was amazing. I saw it maybe two years ago, and it’s just stayed with me so much. It was a film I had and I was scared of watching. I don’t know why I bought it. I buy a lot of films all the time, and I’ve just got cupboards and cupboards of movies. I saw it on the shelf and looked at it at like midnight one night and thought, “I’ll just watch five minutes of it and see what it’s like,” and then at two in the morning I was still watching, going “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like this.” What I like about it is that it’s a mixture that shouldn’t work on so many levels, because it’s very arty and it’s very self-conscious, but yet it’s utterly realistic, and it feels emotionally realistic. It feels like you’re totally transported into that situation. I’d also double that with The Ascent, the Larisa Shepitko movie. She was married to Klimov and made a movie 10 years earlier on almost the same subject, and her film is just unbelievable as well, you know. It’s well worth checking out, that Criterion box set. Mind-blowing stuff. Have you seen Come and See?"