"I saw him on the Jay Leno show, and I thought 'wow, this is a good band'. It was like the Kings of Leon, southern rock, and he came on with that thing and I thought 'I wonder where this kid's from, he must be from the South somewhere'. And then when Jay Leno says 'that was great', Paolo says [adopts Scottish accent] 'thank you very much', and I thought 'he's fucking Scottish!' So it's great, but the album he did as well, that's great. I play that - there's so many great things on there. Again, it's fresh, it's different from other things, so I hope he can come up with more, because he writes as well. And Ethan John [Jones's producer for Spirit In The Room] produced the album, which I didn't know, when I heard the album. There's a jazz band thing, a traditional jazz band thing. 'Simple Things In Life', I like that, about going round to his mother's for tea, it's great. He paints a picture, you can see him do it."

"After film school, I moved to Chicago. The first thing I did when I arrived in town was get a membership at Facets, the legendary video store and cinematheque. My membership allowed me to see everything that showed at the cinema. About two years later, when they put on a Pialat retrospective, I took full advantage of the membership. I had already made a few small relationship movies, and the descriptions of the films seemed right up my alley. As with most of my favorite films, I had a negative initial reaction to a lot of what I saw. The characters were abrasive, and all seemed to be stuck in never-ending destructive cycles. There were unexplained jumps in time, and I often felt disoriented. I came away from the series with a mixed reaction. Now, years later, it’s easy for me to recognize the impact the films had on me because I can see it in my work. No other filmmaker has had such a direct and visible influence on me, and I didn’t even realize it as it was happening."

"It has to be a tie. Laurel and Hardy simply because they are two of the funniest people who have ever been on film. I’m leaping over the entire Marx brothers collection to say this, which I also love, but I recently went back and saw both of these films, and just the combination of really brilliant physical humor and absolute charm when these guys are just standing there, and they’re so good together. Nothing beats weirdness for the sake of weirdness, like the Marx brothers were prone to lapse into. But just to see the scene where they’re in a bar where they’re way out west, and a cowboy starts singing “Trail of a Lonesome Pine” and Stan and Ollie just join in and do a dance and harmonize and Stan gets hit in the head with a hammer, it’s sublime. Sons of the Desert for the same reason. I don’t think there’s ever been a comedy team as good at what they do as these guys."

"It’s going to be a draw between Godfather II and Manhattan. Obviously, there’s no point in seeing Godfather II without seeing The Godfather, but Godfather II is the only sequel I like. It’s just a spectacular character study and the scope of it, the humor of it, the sex appeal, the action, and the twist of the story and Fredo Corleone and Robert Deniro in the flashbacks — all of that is everything you ever want when you watch a movie. Manhattan I saw in the 1970s as a teenager. Woody Allen was pretty important in my house. My parents are both New York Jews and Manhattan is just an incredibly beautiful movie with a deep expression of humor and existentialism together. It now seems more morally complex to me than I realized, but I just loved things in it like the camera being locked off and people walking in and out of the frame. I noticed that even as a kid and tried to bend my head around the corners."

"I really was trying to avoid Citizen Kane, but I would say Kane and the first fourth, the first half of The Magnificent Ambersons, for, you know, reasons that are obvious. I mean, it’s all miserably compromised after the first half — actually after the first third, I think — but I think the first twenty, twenty-five minutes of Ambersons is in many ways richer than anything in Kane, and that really is saying something. It struck a tone in American moviemaking; it was just absolutely new to me as a kid when I first saw that. I had never seen that kind of lightly ironic, very bittersweet, but achingly nostalgic… It’s just great, it’s just great. It’s also got probably one of my single favorite shots in cinema, that silhouette combined with the two couples after the ball. It’s the most incredible moment, and you just can’t believe you’re seeing it, and it lasts only as long as it could humanly last, and then it’s over. It’s great."

"You can’t draw up a list of movies without including Godard, because he is one of the greatest experimenters of the art form. He has always looked for something else, something that goes beyond, and he’s never stopped this quest. Breathless is very important to me because it was the first film I ever saw that actually surprised me and deeply impressed me. I was about fifteen or sixteen, and up until then I’d only seen commercial movies, so this really overwhelmed me and rocked my world. For the first time, my idea of what a film could be was broadened, and in my mind it took on so many different nuances. I was like somebody who had always thought that sweetness could only be found in sugar and then learned that there are thousands of different ways of tasting it. Breathless made me understand that what film allows you to do is explore many different territories and narrative possibilities and that there is an entire world out there."

"Jules Dassin’s gangster film about a robbery and its consequences is a French classic, noir before the word was in use to describe a certain kind of filmmaking. A word is in order here: I was educated in Switzerland, in an era when French-speaking people expected to see French films, so when we were allowed to go to the local cinema at Rolle or Gstaad, we mostly saw French films. British films, except for The Third Man, which is very “European” in tone, seldom played; still less big Hollywood ones. Rififi was a stunner, and an eye-opener, teaching us that French gangsters were a lot more interesting and attractive than our own mobsters, but just as tough, if not tougher. “Julie” Dassin was an American who moved to France, but he captured a whole, pungent slice of French life, and for months everyone at my school (le Rosey) went around trying to sound like Jean Servais, and to talk with a cigarette glued to their lips. Whole scenes from it still play in my fantasies."

"I know it's not cool to go with a soundtrack album but, if I'm honest, this is hugely influential. The film is so wrapped up with my teenage years; when I first saw it I was the same age as the main character and I was somewhat terrified of being somebody like that. To see someone who's so nerdy and yet full of himself is frightening at that age. You wonder, 'Do I do things like this?' You become so self-conscious at high school, you worry about what your peers think, you're terrified of looking weird, or being weird. Somehow the soundtrack represents those feelings. There's lots of British music on there, like the Faces' "Ooh La La" and "Making Time" by the Creation. I grew up in a very small town, so a lot of kids I went to school with mostly listened to rap and rock from the radio. But I did have a group of friends who appreciated films like Rushmore and music like this."