"I didn't know much about Sly and I'd only heard the two hits that he'd had, which were 'Everyday People', which I loved because of that bass line which goes all the way through without changing once, and 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)', and I loved them but I didn't think that much of them. Then one evening in 1971 I was round the house of this bunch of London musos who I'd kind of fallen in with and they were all sort of jazz-influenced people. They used to smoke a lot of grass. I didn't, but the room was full of enough stuff to probably affect me. They were all talking about this album and how it set the scene for something totally new, and I was interested because they were the very serious people who were into Coltrane and Charlie Parker, yet this was a pop record. It's so sketchy, the whole thing, it hardly holds together. It's like little flicks of paint. Instead of an organised composition, it's just people throwing in these little touches and somehow it coheres. It's like the first time I saw a Jackson Pollock or something. Another interesting thing about this is I had just started experimenting with rhythm boxes, which were considered completely beyond the pale by most musicians. They had like six rhythms on: bossa nova, Latin, rock & roll... something like that, and they had these terrible sounds [mimics rhythm box] but I really liked them and I was starting to write things over them, and everyone was asking me, ""Well, you'll replace that, won't you?"" and I said, ""Actually, I don't think I will."" Then I heard this (first track, 'In Time'), where one is playing alongside Andy Newmark, one of the great drummers of all time. But there's nothing really holding it together except the rhythm box."

"I used to think of Godard and Antonioni as the great modern visual artists of cinema—great colorists who composed frames the way painters composed their canvases. I still think so, but I also connect with them on the emotional level. And for me, Contempt is one of the most moving films of its era. At the time, people talked a lot about the unlikely combination of artists involved: a multilingual Carlo Ponti production of an Alberto Moravia novel, starring Brigitte Bardot, costarring Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance, set at Cinecittà and in the Casa Malaparte in Capri, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, with Fritz Lang as himself. The film itself got a little lost in the fixation on the details. It’s interesting when circumstances that seem so relevant and important at the time of a film’s release just dissolve as the years go by. I didn’t care so much about all of that background information at the time, I just responded to what I saw on the screen, but over the years Contempt has grown increasingly, almost unbearably, moving to me. It’s a shattering portrait of a marriage going wrong, and it cuts very deep, especially during the lengthy and justifiably famous scene between Piccoli and Bardot in their apartment: even if you don’t know that Godard’s own marriage to Anna Karina was coming apart at the time, you can feel it in the action, the movement of the scenes, the interactions that stretch out so painfully but majestically, like a piece of tragic music. Contempt is also a lament for a kind of cinema that was disappearing at the time, embodied by Fritz Lang and the impossible adaptation of The Odyssey that he’s directing. And it is a profound cinematic encounter with eternity, in which both the lost marriage and the cinema seem to dissolve. It’s one of the most frightening great films ever made."

"It's such a tune! That's the main reason it's on this list, I want everyone to listen to it more. I love the vocal delivery – that crooning is my favourite – that really smooth, male, cheesy-sounding vocal: I love it. “I love the sentiment. I don't know exactly what it's about but I'm guessing it's about when you meet someone for the first time and you screw it up and you gotta start again. Or you meet someone and you're too awkward to be cool and you're like ""fuck! I just wish I could meet you all over again and be a cool, normal person.” I love the lyrics ""When I next saw you, my heart reached out for you! My hands stuck like glue to my sides."" It sounds like the feeling you have in a dream where you can't run. It's another one we listen to in the van all the time. It's just such a banger. “We always wanted to do a cover of it but we haven't quite got round to it yet. I really enjoy covers. It's really fun to take someone else's song and rip it up, pull it apart and add new music into it, whole new parts, or take lyrics out and put new lyrics in and just fuck it up. I love playing covers live and surprising people with them, because we can see it in their faces: they know we're playing something they know, but they can't work out where they know it from, because we're playing it so differently. “At the moment we're covering Bonnie Tyler's “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and it's just so bombastic: I didn't wanna totally change it. We used to play a cover of Madonna's “Beautiful Stranger” and that one was really different from the original. If we did ‘Rip It Up’ I'd definitely sing it in that crooning voice, because I love it so much. I'd get Celia to try and play that weird bubbly bass line with some cool pedal."

"I think I’m going to go with Singles, and it’s because of a very specific time in my life. Soundtrack is really important to me, and I’m a child of ’90s grunge. That movie was Seattle, Nirvana, Pearl Jam — it’s the greatest soundtrack. My favorite band was Smashing Pumpkins and my favorite song by Smashing Pumpkins is “Drown,” and that’s on there. Plus, I loved all the different storylines being woven together. I love Cameron Crowe, and the idea of these people living in Seattle and looking for love. I was a senior in high school when it came out. I mean, I saw it in the theater like three times. I was like, “Oh my God, this is gonna be my life. I’m gonna move out of my parents’ house, and I’m gonna go and try to make it in the city somewhere, and it’s gonna be like this.” And, you know, Bridget Fonda as Janet was just the greatest character. I was like, “I’m gonna be like her. I am kind of like her. But not the pathetic parts of her, the great parts of her.” But everyone was just was trying to find themselves, find love, find a career, find a path, find their life. It was really aspirational for me at the time that it came out, so it really scratches that itch that I had then, and it will always be that meaningful to me. I recently made my husband watch it. I can’t remember if he had seen it or if he just didn’t remember it, but I just could tell, even though he loved it and appreciated it, like, it didn’t kill him the way it killed me. And you know, he was like, “Yeah, no, it’s good. I like it.” But he is obsessed with Almost Famous, and I love Almost Famous, but that was more meaningful for him. Singles is just… the movie, the music, the time, the look, the actors, the wardrobe, the backdrop of Seattle. Just all of it."

"My first concert! I rode my bike to the city, because I lived in the suburbs and I tried to meet Angus Young outside the tour bus, asking the security guy, [imitates younger self] "Can I meet Angus Young?" "No, he's not here!" "Hey dude! What the fuck?! Don't talk to me like that, I bought a ticket!" Also, it was my first experience of how loud - it was the loudest shit I've ever heard! And in the suburbs, they were a dangerous band. It was like, "Oh fuck, the devil", it kind of made Kiss look tame, and it just powers. And when Angus Young solos, it's just magic. I saw them on that tour when Bon Scott had died; he'd just died and Brian Johnson had just taken over, and I was totally sceptical, and then it was like, "Oh, he's fucking good!" And actually, when Kim left the band, and we're going, "Aw shit, we're fucked", and we're talking about what we're going to do, and then we're like, "Fucking AC/DC replaced the fucking lead singer! We can do this! [sombrely] We shall overcome!" And we thought about replacing Kim with a dude, and then we went, "What?! They replaced Bon Scott with a guy that sounds exactly like Bon Scott! Let's not break the plate! We're not broken, we're not broken at all. Give me a fucking break." So I was totally adamant [laughs]! Song two ['Girls Got Rhythm'], it's like: "SEX!" It's about "SEX!" It's not like Foreigner, where it's obvious but it's fucking stupid - come on, you can do better than that! It's like, "I want to have sex with you, what's the problem?" I think it's the ultimate way to get attention: "Come on, we're not here to meet up, let's cut to the chase. I'm not going to waste your time, don't waste my time! Let's fuck, come on, I don't have time for this!" [laughs]"

"Next choice I’d say would be The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Pasolini. I saw that movie for the first time when I was 23 years old. I’d gone to church every Sunday and catechism every week for my whole childhood, but I never paid attention; I was always daydreaming in church — and all of a sudden I went to go see this movie, and I knew everything in the movie. I guess all of my Catholic upbringing I had absorbed through some sort of osmosis. Here was this movie which was this Biblical story which was told so beautifully: the cinema was so simple and so beautiful. He had, you know, Odetta playing “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” as the three wise men found Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. It was, you know… I started sweating while I was watching the movie. The whole left side of my body went numb while I was watching, and I was sure that I was having a heart attack. It was all that I could do — you know, I didn’t want to because it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen — but it was all I could do to crawl out of the movie theater and knock on the projectionist’s door and ask him if I could call my girlfriend. I called my girlfriend and told her I thought I was dying, ’cause I was seeing the greatest movie I’d ever seen, and she showed up. I remember it had been snowing in Colorado and she had all this dirty snow on the roof of her car and I was eating all this dirty snow because my mouth was just parched. And I remember being in the emergency room and thinking that when the doctor walks through, if he looked like Jesus from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, I knew that meant I was dead. Fortunately the guy didn’t look anything like Jesus."

"It’s the first Fellini film I ever saw, so I think it’s my favorite. My Italian relatives always told me we were distantly related to Fellini—not sure if there is any truth in that, but that’s one of the reasons we went to see it. “Oh yeah, he’s our cousin,” they would say. Growing up with Italians, you see that life is absurd: it’s a circus, with some sex in it, and Amarcord simply confirmed that for me. I can watch this movie again and again; it’s that enjoyable. And although some scenes are over the top—and yes, Fellini is obsessed with big-bottomed women and very large breasts—it’s a movie about his childhood. And by learning about his childhood, I learned to appreciate my own. When I was young, I spent every summer with my Italian relatives in Astoria, Queens. Here’s what I learned: every day is a drama, and it all ends with everyone laughing and drinking wine and eating spaghetti. There was an unbelievable tale to be heard about every third cousin. Somebody would whisper, “That’s Rose—the day her mother died, her face froze into a scowl. And that’s why she looks like that.” We never questioned these things. Listening to stories was part of the immigrant experience. Amarcord feels that way. Fellini is telling stories about people in his village, but I related to all the stories. This was a movie my Italian relatives took me to, that they wanted to see so they could see themselves and laugh. I think that by watching how much they enjoyed the movie, I began to understand and appreciate my own culture for the first time. Watching Amarcord was also the first time I experienced the music of the great Nino Rota. When you think of Fellini, you always think of the music, which acts as the perfect bridge between the stories. I challenge anyone to see this film and not want to make love. Amarcord means “I remember.” You will remember."

"The story, the acting was sublime. [Director] Mike Nichols did an incredible job. He just did such an amazing job. The story of the old woman and the young student was so new — we had never seen that onscreen, a depiction of that. Once again, I thought this was just a brilliant character study of these people. The story was extraordinary. I loved the relationship with Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. I just thought that was staggering. And Dustin Hoffman’s performance was so sweet, and he was so insecure and a mumbling fool in so many ways. And she was so seductive. You know, she was a counselor at my camp? She was a drama counselor. When I was nine, she was 17 or 18, and she came to the camp and I was the only one who really took to her of all my camp friends. She would have me lie on the ground and we’d be in this bunk — like in a rehearsal hall or something — she would have us lie on the floor and picture the sky and picture all the different things that could come from the sky [laughing]. She just inspired me. Then I watched her on The Goldbergs — not the new Goldbergs — but The Goldbergs with Molly Goldberg, the brilliant, brilliant television show in the 1950s. Then I saw her in The Graduate — I was a young woman — and I was just — oh my God, she was so beautiful. And I couldn’t believe I had known her. She inspired me to act, she really did. As did Francis Coppola. I went to college with him — Hofstra University. He was the person who wrote all the plays. He wrote the shows — all the original shows that I was the star of. I’d be hired to do all the shows that he had written and his uncle would write the music, so it was kind of great."

"Night of the Living Dead was one I saw with my dad. I was 18 years old. It scared the s— out of me. I think my dad and I had to sleep together that night. [laughs] I said, “No, that’s it. I don’t care how big I am!” And what I loved about it, too, was how [George] Romero could just take this film, and do it clearly on a budget, and yet make it work, have this sort of tongue-in-cheek humor with it. So part of what, I think, attracted me to the films I mentioned was not just the films themselves, but how they were made, what they meant politically, on all levels. I’m attracted to all those films that, in a way, engaged us across cultures. So, you look at Night of the Living Dead and you put these people in the 1960s in this pressure cooker, and one of them is the black guy, one of them is the white guy, one of them is the chick, and the brother and sister, and you see what happens. The unspoken subtext of it was huge. It was huge, it was revolutionary. Mutiny on the Bounty was the same thing. And even in films like Redemption Road, where I’ll take the black guy, and he’s the one who’s into country and western, and the white guy, he’s the one who’s into blues, and both of them, along the way, are going to encounter music that informs their personal narrative, and it also informs the musicality of the film. So, along the way they pick up some blues, some gospel, some jazz, and that feeds into the song they play at the end of the movie, the sort of redemptive song. So I think those movies actually speak to what I’m attracted to in film. I just like something that, on some level, even if it’s a horror film, is interesting and redemptive and makes you think."

"I’m not in love with John Ford’s movies. They are staples, and it’s like saying you don’t like bread—Ford’s films are in all filmmakers’ foundations, somewhere, it’s inescapable. But when it comes to being in love with movies, I’m more of an Anthony Mann girl. Having said this, Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln is one of the most beautiful films ever made. The images early in the film of Henry Fonda in his thick, unruly, natural environment of rivers and briars and brambles strike my heart in ways so deep I can’t even explain. The majestic landscapes Ford would be later known for are much more grounded here, more personal. What he shot reminds me of a home so far ago lost. And there is a feeling of that, deeper than nostalgia, running all through this film. It’s like a grand American ache. Henry Fonda explains on the commentary how he initially turned the film down, then the screenwriters went to his house and READ HIM THE SCRIPT! Out loud! What balls! I can’t imagine anyone doing that these days. Then he said yes to the part, did the screen test with the fake nose and flipped out when he saw himself as Lincoln and felt he couldn’t do it—he couldn’t play someone with that weight that Lincoln had and still carries and holds. Well—I won’t spoil it for you—you MUST hear what very simple ingenious thing grumpy old Ford said to get Fonda to do the role. Supporting Fonda’s performance is an incredible cast—Alice Brady in her final performance before her early death, Ward Bond, and Richard Cromwell (whom I had a real sweet thing for)! The booklet is just as poetic as the movie, with essays by Geoffrey O’Brien and Sergei Eisenstein between the pages of lovely quiet stills of a very accessible yet long-gone American landscape."