"Now I’m going a little more up-to-date modern. My fourth one would probably have to be Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal. I just really liked it. It was one of those movies that’s creepy but really entertaining and just different, and I really, really enjoyed that. When I saw the previews for it last year, I was like, “Man I really want to see it.” And I never got to because — we go to the movies often, but not as much. But whenever I do, I always want to go see a good movie; I want to see a movie I’d been wanting to see. So since I wasn’t able to watch it, I rented it the first day it came out, and I thought wow this movie is really, really good."

"As a piece of modern cinema, I would love to mention Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, which I thought was a brilliant, brilliant film. I think in a year that saw Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson have another science fiction film out as well, it was such a great reminder of how smaller, more thoughtful, more intense, grown-up… It’s an example of the combination of those things, in a way, a kind of more science fiction in the vein of 2001, a more cerebral, literally cerebral kind of science fiction film that was and just how beautifully performed it is. Alicia Vikander is amazing in that film. It’s a film that I’ve watched many times because I just, I don’t seem to tire of it. I think it’s excellent."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"I saw it on TV again recently and was just bowled over by it. In it's own way it's very intense: you've only basically got seven characters and they're all in same set up. There's very little break out from the library where they're all stuck. And so you really get the character development and the inter-relationships, and you really get to the heart of the kind of teenage cruelties and the way it all dissolves with their common plight. It's a very clever film. It's one of those films that creates a whole genre, not all of which I like – St Elmo's Fire, for example, was so sentimental it made me want to puke, but The Breakfast Club isn't like that. It's taut and it's very much about the teenage condition."

"If David Thewlis in Naked is my favorite male performance, then Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that. I’ve always felt that the first films he made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances. But when he moved over to France with Code Unknown and then The Piano Teacher, something happened where he started making very passionate filmmaking. The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality."

"Let me start with the last one I saw that I was really taken by, which was Gasland by Josh Fox. It’s an investigation into the pollution of the drinking water all over the States. It’s a guy with a camera, somewhere in the middle of America: he got a letter from an oil company saying “We want to buy your land for a hundred grand, are you game?” and he started to investigate what they wanted; and just from one thing to the next he started finding out all these things about the pollution of the water. I just admire this guy and this documentary, and I’ve always been a major fan of good documentaries. It couldn’t have been done with a sh***ier camera, and I love that about the sh***y cameras."