"It’s one of the great ’50s melodramas, and it’s kind of like a musical without the music, but it has a great score, of course. I saw it in my early- to mid-20s, and it just really affected me. It’s about a guy who goes back to his hometown where his brother is a prominent citizen. He’s a stalled-out, blocked writer, and he’s been a soldier, and a worker, and a would-be novelist, and he’s kind of a gambler and a drinker — this is Sinatra, of course, the conflicted one — and he lives in two worlds. Because he’s a published writer, he has the respect of the local English teacher and her brother — the respectable world of literature — but he really has a soft spot for bars and gambling and floozies and the Shirley MacLaine character. And then you’ve got Gwen French, who’s played by Martha Hyer, who’s the uptight school teacher. So it’s all these opposites colliding — respectability, debauchery… It’s wonderfully melodramatic and beautifully made… It’s about male friendship too. I consider it kind of the first Rat Pack movie, although it’s just Dean and Frank with Shirley around too. It doesn’t have a lot of the other people, but it’s the first one to capture these guys gambling and hanging out and that camaraderie. They become roommates and go on, like, a trip to Terre Haute, IN, to go gambling. It’s just wonderful."

"Raising Arizona. It’s definitely in the top five. I remember seeing that movie as a VHS rental when I was, I think, 12 years old. I’d just had an operation, and I was recovering at home, and my mom just went and got a bunch of movies, and that was one that I could not… I couldn’t even comprehend it the first time I saw it. It was so weird. It was so beautifully weird. At least from my perspective, I had never seen a comedy toned quite like that before, and I just loved it, and I couldn’t get enough of it, and I wound up just watching it over and over again. It wasn’t just funny writing, it was funny looking. The acting is incredible, and the casting, the production design, the cinematography, the score… Carter Burwell, he wrote this haunting score that’s based on an old traditional tune, “Down in the Willow Garden”, which is this kind of haunting river ballad, and it’s the musical motif through the whole thing. It even plays during the diaper robbery scene in the convenience store. There’s like a Muzak version of that playing, and I caught all those little things. I was blown away by the specificity and the choices, and it was one of many movies that I kind of point to as being a moment that, for me, kind of stood out as, “Oh, this is what I want to do with my life.”"

"He was working with a lot of the young rappers, like Easy Mo Bee. They were laying down hip-hop drums and a few chords and apparently Miles would just improvise over the top and they'd add the vocals. That's a fabulous record, primarily because Miles sounds like he's really enjoying himself. He's more inventive on that album. He's getting more involved than on some of the albums that came before that. I saw him play live at the Hammersmith Odeon in the early 1980s and all he was doing was orchestrating. He'd stand up and play a little riff and then point at the drummer, who'd do a 15-minute solo. He was wearing a baseball hat on and was bent down and you couldn't see his face. Another one-minute solo, then point to the guitar player. The show went a bit like that. But everything he did play was well worth the entrance price. He plays great on Doo Bop. It was his last album. He was doing painting at the time, but he was really into working with these young guys and they were in awe of him. This was their dedication to him. The lyrics are all about how brilliant he is. Miles rose to the occasion and showed his chops. Every note is perfect. I've grown into jazz over the years, but it took me a bit of time to appreciate it."

"Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 is one of my favorites. It’s epic — when I saw it at a film festival, they literally had an intermission where they served pasta and red wine. It was wonderful. It’s a thin, handsome Gérard Depardieu in the prime of his youth, and Robert De Niro doing a great aging character, the rich boy. Depardieu [as] the poor boy. Probably one of the greatest entrances in the history of cinema for the beautiful actress Dominique Sanda. And Bertolucci uses this town, this little village — and you see it go from the turn of the century to WWII, and it changes with the seasons, and the time. And one of the best villains ever, Donald Sutherland, as this sort of grand guignol, a fascista, brown shirt — you know, black shirt — that is corrupted by the Mussolini movement in Italy. And he just completely surprises you with his performance. It’s really wonderful and kinky, and strange and beautiful. And the music is extraordinary. Yeah, it’s really a great film — a long movie, but a great movie — and it really left an indelible stamp on my brain. All these movies in my top five are what I call “desert island” movies. These are films that I can see again and again, and they have sequences or images in them, or they’ve left such a film memory in my imagination — such a stamp on my memory and imagination — that I can see them again and again."

"This was another sonic influence on the record - the saxophone, the guitar. If you’re painting a picture it’s like 'What colours do you want?' Every instrument is a colour and with this we’re only using a few different colours. It's in how it sounds and how it feels to listen to, it's not necessarily about the actual instruments, it's about what it visually feels like. “Yoko’s record was produced by Phil Spector and on Oh My God the subject matter is a little absurd and it's fun to be sort of playful with it. Back to the cinematic thing, it exists in this big, bombastic universe and mimics the Phil Spector sound. “I just read the Jeff Tweedy book and I really related to him saying that basically his whole life and everything he does is essentially influenced by two different records. One's a record of just train sounds like cabooses, it's not music, it's just train sounds. The other one, I forgot, I think it's Johnny Cash or something. ""Yoko used the heartbeat of her unborn baby on a song she made with John Lennon and I really relate to that; I'm really into the atmosphere of songs and how everything in the world can be its own music. I saw a quote from Neko Case recently where she said 'When you're an artist and work for yourself, your job never ends!"

"The first film would be The Professional. I think in France it’s called Léon. Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman; it was one of the first films I saw with Jean Reno and man, it just had this cool vibe and assurance. It was about this assassin with a heart of gold trying to take care of young girl he doesn’t even know – and Gary Oldman is giving this insane performance [as the villain]. [It was] the first time I discovered Gary Oldman, and I was like, “Damn, he’s like a dope actor. I’d like to be on that level one day.” Plus, it was shot in New York, and I was raised in New York and in Jersey as a young boy, up until I was 10, so that’s an element of familiarity to it. I grew up fighting, and both my parents were Marines, so I’ve always been into this element of super-spying and assassins stuff; and there were so many just cool, chilled-out moments in there where Reno was just so cool, man. He was the man. I just loved what he brought to it. I loved the whole film, and again, I loved the way Gary Oldman played this role, because he was the villain, yes, but he wasn’t any typical villain; you believe that he thought what he was doing was absolutely right. That performance was great."

"The Graduate directed by Mike Nichols. It’s just a perfect film. And it was, I think, the first non-student real film for Dustin Hoffman. It’s just a beautiful, perfectly written… perfectly shot, perfectly acted film, where you have Dustin Hoffman who has bedded both Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross and he breaks up the marriage. I saw it as a little kid because I lived with my mom and she liked to go to the movies. She couldn’t always get a babysitter and so now and then I would get taken to films that were quite adult. There’s not necessarily nudity, because there doesn’t need to be. The thing is so well written; the adult themes and just how screwed up adults are is on full display in The Graduate. You can tell all these people are just so damn talented, and you look at a young Dustin Hoffman and you go, “Damn, man. Look at the career you’re about to have, dude. You’ve got it.” His talent was just so huge yet so innate in that he’s not gonna fail. He’s one of those people like, “Man, you were born to act.” I’ve tried to get to Buck Henry to get him to tell me stories about The Graduate and I’ve hung out with him a couple of times. And I’m like, “You wrote The Graduate!” And he’s always very funny and kinda belligerent to me, “Ah, shut up… Rwagh, Rwagh.” I’m like, “OK [laughing].”"

"I saw this when I was in college, and there were a lot of things about it that made me swoon. I watched it over and over again. I couldn’t stop. It does this incredible thing where it stops the narrative, like Godard would, to comment on the story from an omniscient perspective. But where Godard does it in a really cold way, Cuarón does it with such warmth. It made me feel like you could do anything; you could stop your movie and do wild shit and still be incredibly emotionally engaging. The movie also depicts sexuality in a way that I’d never seen before. Long before our culture became obsessed with sexual fluidity and where people fall on the Kinsey scale, this movie said that it was just a reality that the intimacy between friends can also be sexual, that it’s not so cut and dry. It’s about the depth of a friendship, and it was just a revelation for me. That moment when the two men kiss was like, woah, that’s right and that’s real. And the cinematography is insane and showed how you can make beautiful images with so little. It’s a simple road movie about friends, but it’s so gorgeous. Why aren’t we elevating simple stories to the level of epics? Cuarón does that. All his movies are epics, no matter how small or big they are."

"To me, these are the two best resistance films ever made. And each is its director’s best film. I saw them very early, and they were very formative for me. They really show the complex nature of resistance, glorifying it but also showing the compromises you have to make when you’re in wartime. I love that The Battle of Algiers starts off with that line: “None of this is documentary footage.” What audacity to be like: this is going to feel and look so real that you’re going to think this is a documentary, so I need to tell you that it’s not. It’s a way of setting the bar so high, and then the film lives up to it and surpasses it! You feel the ambition in all of it. It’s just spectacular in every sense of the word. Army of Shadows is similar, though obviously it’s much more in Melville’s cinematic language. Something that has always struck me is that by the end of the film everyone does exactly what you would expect them to do, what they’re supposed to do, but it still just leads to fucked-up situations. It’s this real mess of an ending, but it’s all grounded in very real decisions that I can sympathize with across the board. It’s rare to see a film that gets to the humanity of every decision, to the point where they’re lived-in, not just plot points."