"I wish I could choose something cool and artsy. I’ll tell you what I saw, which I think kind of shot into my list, and I only watched it recently — I’m ashamed that I didn’t see it earlier — was The Squid and the Whale. It was absolutely fantastic. Again, I guess, similar in tone to the other films I’ve mentioned. A sort of, you know, domestic comedy-drama, but very, very truthful, and brilliant performances again. Is it Jesse Eisenberg who’s in that movie? Yeah, I just thought that was tremendous. Luckily, my parents never got divorced, I never went through that, but it really takes you into the experience of watching your parents split up. And I think cinema’s at its best when it makes you feel an experience that you’ve never had yourself, and sort of understand the emotions of it. I was really impressed by that movie. Just a great, kind of… shot through with this black spine of humor."

"Mulholland Dr. was probably the nerdiest experience I’ve had. Just watching the film and then thinking about it, listening to commentaries, then researching online what other connections I missed and seeing all these deeper themes and meanings, I realized that’s how you can make a film! This was the first Lynch film I ever saw. That Naomi Watts performance, and the performance within the performance, still haunts me. The movie felt like it was just kind of fucking with me, and I really enjoyed that. Being John Malkovich was another one of those formative films that expanded my horizons on what film can be, what it can comment on, how many layers you can attach, and how meta it can get. Mulholland Dr. and Being John Malkovich came out around the time when I had already cemented in my mind what a movie was. Then for all that to just blow up in my face was really awesome."

"Mulholland Dr. was probably the nerdiest experience I’ve had. Just watching the film and then thinking about it, listening to commentaries, then researching online what other connections I missed and seeing all these deeper themes and meanings, I realized that’s how you can make a film! This was the first Lynch film I ever saw. That Naomi Watts performance, and the performance within the performance, still haunts me. The movie felt like it was just kind of fucking with me, and I really enjoyed that. Being John Malkovich was another one of those formative films that expanded my horizons on what film can be, what it can comment on, how many layers you can attach, and how meta it can get. Mulholland Dr. and Being John Malkovich came out around the time when I had already cemented in my mind what a movie was. Then for all that to just blow up in my face was really awesome."

"As much as it seems like it's a go-to song if you're into someone and you want to show your affection, “Sign Your Name” is actually from my mum. She's a huge fan of Terence Trent D'Arby, to the point of sending him fan letters and stuff when he first started out. “I grew up listening to the first album, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby, and he was the first artist I saw play live, at the Guildhall in Southampton. I was at the front and I was like ‘Who is this guy? He's got this Marvin Gaye vibe, but there's Prince there, and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder in the vocal.’ “This was his big hit. Lyrically it said so much, it was a very poetic and eloquent way of saying ‘Let's cherish this love I have for you.’ It was a really nice way of approaching it, and it was a good way to learn how to write my own songs."

"I’m going to go with The Godfather. It’s weird — I didn’t see The Godfather in theaters. I actually saw it on television. I think when I was a little kid, they ran it in a series. It was on over three or four days on television. I remember just being immediately sucked in, and I was a young kid. My mom was actually amazed that I was just so sucked in. I kept asking her all these questions about the film that she had no answer for, and didn’t really care to sit down and watch it, and couldn’t answer the questions, but I was just so curious and I just loved all the drama of it, you know? And it still, it holds up. My wife and I were just watching it on HBO — I think it was HBO — like last night or the night before. They play part one and part two together now. It’s like five hours of The Godfather."

"One of my favorite films is Red Sorghum, by Zhang Yimou, who’s an incredible director — just incredibly visual. The way that he shoots a film and takes a time in history and connects it to somebody; he takes a moment in somebody’s life and also connects it historically to what happened between the Japanese and the Chinese during the war. I just think it’s so elegantly done. It sort of shows not just what’s going on in the family itself, but links that personal story — you get involved in that and then connected to the backdrop of the war, how their family, how their business all kind of connects. It’s incredibly heartbreaking and very real. It was very impactful. I saw it when I was in college, and I was destroyed. [Laughs] Destroyed by that movie. There’s a quality in his movies that really stands out, that I haven’t really seen in a lot of other movies."

"Then there’s another documentary that I saw last time at Sundance, which is called Position Among the Stars. This is a Dutch-Indonesian director who has made a portrait of one family over the course of 12 years in Indonesia. His name is Leonard Retel Helmrich. I talked to him for a few hours on the last day, before he won the award in Sundance, about what he was doing and how he was doing it, because the way in which he conducts his camera is completely different. He said, “I wanted to make a very simple portrait about a very poor family in Indonesia and see if I could find a link to the bigger picture, so to speak, and the alignment of the stars above their head.” And he succeeded. It’s an awesome documentary. It’s just a portrait of a small family, with a universal theme coming out of it at the end."

"Number one is easy, Bedazzled. The original 1967 piece with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It’s pretty simple. It’s really funny, and strange____. It’s like I think it was a big influence on my. I saw it in the ‘80s when I was a kid. I think it was on my grandma had, I mean she has seen it before we did, and she had few, we had video types, and I remember seeing the words all handwritten in ____ “Bedazzled”, and it big effect when I’ve seen it, and even the word interested me. Dudley Moore is a meek man who’s in love with this woman, and he makes a deal with the devil, played by Peter Cook to keep trying to change himself to be the kind of man that she would like, and I don’t know of course none of them are going to work. There’s always something wrong with the situation."

"The way their styles went back and forth was some sick street shit. Their beats were ill and they had like a slur, a slang style going on that resonated with so many people on the street. When I first heard 'You're A Customer' I was hooked; every single record was so tight and so completely banging. I think they had four or five gold records in a straight row which was such an incredible achievement. They were on some ill roll that just continued. They also listened to the dopest shit too and you could tell that from listening to their music. As well as being influenced by so much themselves, they influenced a lot of people too. Bands like us, Public Enemy, Run-D.M.C were just talking about EPMD so much. Back then, you had to make music that sounded real because if you didn't, people just saw straight through that shit. Most motherfuckers didn't make it but then artists like EPMD showed you how."

"I’m actually going into my favorite filmmakers and trying to pick the best of their films. Because it’s really hard, it’s very very hard to pick your five best[-loved] films. And it would change; if you asked me next week, it would be different. Psycho because…the moment where — and it’s a film I saw on television; I can’t imagine how impactful it would have been to have seen it theatrically when it was first released, but even seeing it as a kid on TV — the moment where Hitchcock, about 30 minutes into the film, kills his leading lady, and you go, “We’re in the hands of a complete madman, and all bets are off at this stage,” was such a powerful thing for me. It’s kind of haunted me ever since, and again, you can only dream of making a film that has that level of impact to an audience."