"They were a fantastic live band and I saw them loads of times. Watching the way Alex was onstage taught me to let things flow and not be so tight-arsed. He improvised a lot. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band had a sense of threat – this feeling that he was a gangster, a bit of a hard guy, a bit shifty. There was a sense of menace in their stage performance, with Zal Cleminson dressed as this wacky clown, which was unnerving. We went through a phase like that – Paul used to get made up, half his face white and half black – when we did a lot of theatrics and a lot of that comes from Alex Harvey. I used to nail Steve Dawson’s DMs to the stage and he’d lean forward because he was nailed to the floor at the back."

"When I was 10, I was in my own world. Getting a digital radio in my room was a really big thing for me. This tiny little speaker. It was really liberating, like there was something happening in my room at all times. I was obsessed with radio and knew everything that was going on. I’d listen to the Top 40 countdown every week, and there was this band Queen that kept coming up. I loved “Another One Bites the Dust.” A friend of mine told me that song was about war and killing people, and, again there was something about the evil and the fear of it that appealed to me. I remember the DJ saying, “This is No. 1 on the black charts.” So I thought Queen was black. Years later, I saw their record cover—and realized they weren’t black"

"I actually first discovered a lot of the films on this list, like News from Home, when I lived in New York, next to Kim’s Video, a time when I went a lot to Anthology Film Archives and Lincoln Center. Chantal Akerman has always been a big inspiration for me, and News from Home was the first film of hers that I saw. Watching it was so inspiring and made me feel like I could make movies myself, because it’s so simply done yet so affecting—just letters and an empty city. I have a very strong relationship with my mother, and she also used to send me letters when I lived in New York. I discovered Jeanne Dielman later, and a lot of the screen tests I did for Invisible Life were taken from frames from that film."

"So here’s where, for me, it comes down to either the second Godfather, Taxi Driver, which is [Martin] Scorsese’s best film, I think, or one of two or three Altmans, I guess. And of those three, I’d probably go with Taxi Driver. It’s pretty great, and it’s one of the most dangerous films ever to come out of this country, I think. And it’s got great performances, and it’s got such electric ambiguity in what it’s saying about this guy. For me, that film marks, probably, the end point of that great period of the 1970s. So many fine directors; Altman, Coppola, the freedom of expression. I almost didn’t have the resources to deal with Taxi Driver when I first saw it . I don’t go back to it all the time, because it’s such a handful, but I think that’s Scorsese’s best film."

"Bridesmaids. It is hands-down… That’s like the funniest movie that I’ve seen in a very long time. Girls Trip was really funny the other day. I loved that; I saw Girls Trip in my hotel room. Bridesmaids, I remember laughing out loud in the theater, like dying laughing over it. I mean, to watch how all of the actors interact, and the improv, and I love that they interact the way that my girlfriends and I interact. There’s a specific realness to it that I thought was depicted so well and I loved it so much. And I mean, we get to watch Melissa McCarthy in her Academy Award Nominated performance. I mean, she’s genius, she’s brilliant, and Kristen Wiig — all of them, every single actor in that movie is brilliant. I just loved that movie."

"I saw it when I was seven and it has stayed with me probably more than I’m aware of. I loved the Beatles and owned a bootleg single of “All My Loving,” so when the film came to my local cinema in Warsaw—called Moskwa (Moscow)—I queued up for half a day and got in. The film didn’t make much sense story-wise, but it was a mind-blowing experience. I remember it so vividly—the energy, the jokes, the crisp black-and-white shots, and above all the music. It’s a film that is carried by music, which was something new for me at the time. Was it the first music video? I think that British pop was responsible for some of the most inventive British films (OK, Richard Lester was American, but it’s still a very British film)."

"It may not be fair to say this is one of my top five, since it’s my dad’s film, and I’m in it as a youngster (playing Kevin Costner’s son); but even at 7 years old, when I first saw it, I remember sitting through the whole 3-hour film without moving. There’s something to the interplay of editing and dialogue that hooks me, no matter how many times I watch it, back into the investigation of the murder of President Kennedy. And perhaps because the crime remains unsolved, the film remains infinitely intriguing to watch, as though each time viewing it, you expect new revelations Instead, upon each viewing, I feel compelled to go out and research more about our country’s dark, hidden history. To create that kind of curiosity in an audience is a remarkable feat in itself."

"I would say the fourth one is Fast Times At Ridegmont High, which is like a really different version of the same thing at the same time. And you know it’s Cameron Crowe again, with Amy Heckerling, who’s amazing. I remember seeing that and it was kind of like gritty and so real. I think I saw it for the first time 10 or 15 years after it first came out, and it still was shocking and interesting. And we wanted to make sure that we had, in our film, real drug use — and the drug of the day was cocaine — and real boobs. We really wanted to go there. That’s something that I really admire in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. It’s hilarious, it’s not scared to go there and it doesn’t pull any punches. And the character work is so amazing."