"Then I would say the next time I remember going and seeing a movie and having my mind f—ing blown was A Clockwork Orange. I was probably about 15 or so when I saw that. At that point in time there were no DVDs, there was no VHS. As a movie fanatic, I could only look at pictures and go, “Oh my god, A Clockwork Orange! I have to see this movie!” But how do you see it? It’s not playing anywhere. Eventually it was playing at a college, and I went to go see it at this college. I was only fifteen years old and it was all college people and they seemed real cool. And it just f—ing blew my mind. And ever since then I’ve been fanatic for Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell. That’s why I love working with Malcolm, because he loves talking about that stuff. You can ask him anything, and he’ll give you all the dirt on how… What is amazing for me too, hearing the stories about the movie, is just how much time they had. Now you have, “Oh, you have an hour to shoot that thing.” And he’ll go, “Oh, we shot that in five days.” That Singing in the Rain scene. They didn’t even figure out the song until eventually he said that Kubrick was like, “Do you know any songs?” And when Stanley would be at a loss for what to do, he would go up to Malcolm and go, “You’re probably going to be sick tomorrow. You won’t be able to make it to work for probably about a week.” And they would shut down and Malcolm would pretend to be sick so Stanley could figure out what he was going to shoot next."

"I can say that, in thinking about it, I was thinking five favorite-ish movies that seemed to be relatively inspiring to me as a filmmaker or something like that. One is a movie called Bad Taste by Peter Jackson. The reason that movie is one of my favorite films is because… two things. One, I saw it when I was very young because it had a very sort of provocative box cover of an alien giving you the middle finger, in the video store; that was very charming to me. It seemed like something that needed to be rented for a sleep over. It’s one of the grossest movies ever, so it was always the benchmark of, like, “Is there a more disgusting movie than this?” And also not a lot of people had seen it so it was like a badge of honor. But more importantly, when I decided that maybe movies was something I wanted to do, that movie was actually the first movie that I think made me think I could maybe do this. Because it was the first time I’d ever seen a movie where I realized how the movie was made. And I realized, “He’s just putting a camera on the back of the car;” “Oh, that’s just him with his friend doing this;” and, “I can see how he built that effect” or “I can see how he used ketchup for blood” or whatever. It was so rough around the edges, yet still compelling and well-made that it kind of gave me this sort of inspiration and confidence to be like, “All I have to do is go do it, like this guy just went and did it.” So that movie is, like, the number one movie that made me think, “Maybe I can try this.”"

"One of the first records I ever bought was Chubby Checker's 'Twistin Round The World'. He was a cultural phenomenon because the twist in those early days was a really big thing. He had an afternoon TV show every day called where he would show people how to do the twist. All it was was a green screen in those days and him doing all that stuff. I studied him, like anything else. Ernest Evans was his real name, and Kal Mann wrote those records, but the irony is that 'The Twist' was not originally recorded by Chubby Checker. It was recorded by Hank Ballard And The Midnighters, that was the original and he sounds just like Chubby. Chubby changed his name from Ernest Evans to Chubby Checker after Dick Clark's wife says, 'He reminds me of a young Fats Domino'. Fats, Chubby. Checker, Domino. Again, 'Twistin Round The World', with the globe behind it and everything, it showed me that this was a global phenomenon. That told me something. That's when I started to be aware that there are songs, then there are artists, and then there is the informational gathering of how you tell people how big you are, how famous you are. I remember later on that I saw an advertisement for Sabbath in Rolling Stone, and the ad said: 'Black Sabbath: Louder Than Led Zeppelin', I thought that was genius. It didn't say it was better, just louder. Chubby Checker had so many hits. Obviously 'The Twist', 'Let's Twist Again', 'Pony Time', 'The Fly', 'Limbo Rock', lots of stuff! He must have had 20 hits. Great music isn't just songs; it's also a social tool, like a favourite song that people used to get married or something like that."

"It was really difficult to choose a David Bowie album. I didn’t want to put more than one on. For me, it was a choice between this, Low, “Heroes” and …Ziggy Stardust… – all equally magnificent records. This record I like because it was before he became a superstar. There’s a lightness and lack of self-awareness on this record, which I think disappears slightly on the later records. Songs like 'Kooks' have this real sense of fresh openness, which maybe he lost on later records, which I really love. There’s also some pretty odd moments on there as well, like 'Andy Warhol'. I don’t mean so much the ‘sample and hold’ start on the ARP synth – which is really cool – but melodically it’s really odd. It’s more like an Eastern scale than a regular rock & roll scale. It will go from that to something that sounds more like a music hall moment. The songwriting is incredible. I think it’s probably him at his best. Also, when I was going through my choices, I went for records I enjoy from start to finish, even though there’s a couple of songs that I don’t think are spectacular songs on this album, as a whole it’s a really great record. I remember distinctly buying it from the Oxfam shop around the corner from school when I was a kid, and I think it was the first Bowie album I ever owned. My mum had the compilation Changes Bowie which I’ve always loved, so when I saw this I was ""ooh, I like David Bowie, I should try this"". I put it on and thought, ""God, there’s a lot more going on here than just catchy pop songs""."

"I thought I don't like it as much as the one I mentioned before, and maybe I still don't, but then once I heard it in the 'phones again, there's something. Then I was listening to that one a lot in the car when I was driving around LA. It just opens your mind. It's undeniable music, untouchable music. Those three people, you just can't really touch them. If you were supposed to pick the greatest musician in the world, I suppose I would have to say John Coltrane. But they're all lumped together because obviously Alice Coltrane does things that John Coltrane can't; same with Pharoah Sanders, it's an extension of John Coltrane. They were put on this planet, they were special beings. I'd appreciated jazz since high school, I played in the jazz band. Then I got some jazz records and enjoyed them, for sure. Growing up, I think the Miles Davis later records hit me first, when I was a late teen, early twenties, Bitches Brew, the classics like Kind Of Blue, and then someone in Boston that I knew turned me on to In A Silent Way, which I really like, it had that Fender Rhodes on it and Chick Corea. But then I read the Miles Davis autobiography, circa 2004: that's like a lesson in jazz in a way, in his cocky way; he saw it all. I remember when I was in Boston, I bought this Thelonius Monk record, Underground, and there's a scatty song on there called 'In Walked Bud' and that always blew my mind. I got heavy back into jazz, and then back into Coltrane circa 2005, 06, 07, I just had some resurgence recently."