"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."

"Before the segmentation of TV brought on by cable, I first saw this on one of the UK’s four channels. Back then, you could always stumble upon strange and wonderful movies like this . . . and the whole family would watch. Often this made your enjoyment all the sweeter if a parent or sibling didn’t get it. I watched 3 Women with my first girlfriend and her mother. When the movie finished, the Ma said, “I couldn’t make head or tail of that, but I do know it was sick and perverted.” I said to her, “It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.” She didn’t much approve of me as a beau for her one and only daughter before we watched the movie, but afterwards she thought I was the anti-Christ."

"I think it's their most pop record, it's got three or four minute tunes. I'm really into pop music... I've got all of their albums, but this one is almost like a best of. I saw them perform it live twice, years and years ago, in south London and Leicester. The first time I heard Kraftwerk was when 'The Model' came out, that was a riff that everybody could play, so that's what we played [laughs]. Obviously all bands start the same way, they don't play their own stuff, they're trying to play like other people, and 'The Model' is a really simple song to play. I'm sure there is a tape of me playing it somewhere out there, I don't know. Perhaps someone will do an impersonation of me doing it."

"I played Marty because I was Marty. I was the kind of guy that was a wall flower. I didn’t know how to dance. To get a girl — my goodness, that was beyond comprehension for me, because I could see myself being turned down and I wasn’t the kind of person that liked to be turned down, you know? Why bother to ask if you’re going to be turned down? So I never asked. That was it. But time went along and I went into the service, and I grew up. When I saw that script, I said, ‘My God, that’s me.’ I was very happy to do it, because it gave me the opportunity to play something that I could easily play, and I knew that I had in my heart exactly what happened."