"I saw him [The Fall's Mark E. Smith] at Shepherd's Bush last year playing the last album, and only playing new songs. It was absolutely brilliant. I just sat and watched him, he's a genuinely strange person. He doesn't fit into the stereotype of the arts school drop-out, or the working class cliché either. It's a strange place he occupies in between. Just seeing him march around the stage turning the amps down, it sounded absolutely brilliant. You can tell he's got the ability to know how to make things sound amazing in quite a simple way. I could have chosen any Fall album from that period, Wonderful & Frightening World or Bend Sinister or I Am Kurious Oranj, but I chose ...Saving Grace because it has a really personal meaning to me. I grew up with it, and when I was at Sixth Form College I really started listening to the Smiths and The Fall. I had to find out myself about The Fall. I remember reading about them somewhere and going down to the record shop and buying a Fall record blind. Listening back, it's got some nonsense on it, like all his records. It's not some perfect artefact, there's something very instinctive about it. I love the track 'Paintwork'. As soon as I heard the track I assumed it was autobiographical, it's about the way he messes the music up. I can imagine the musicians saying, 'It's Mark, messing up the paintwork', but what they don't get is that that's the beauty of it, that he is messing up the paintwork, and the track in itself is strangely autobiographical because suddenly someone presses a tape recorder in the middle. He was always a huge, huge influence for me, growing up and then in Suede. You can't actually hear it in Suede, but we were massive fans, Justine and I especially, we were obsessed. When Matt, Justine or I were just mucking around we wrote the song 'Implement Yeah!', which was a sort of comedy song about him. Then there was the Fall song 'Glam-Racket', which the NME or someone said was about us. Who knows what anyone's songs are about, let alone Mark E. Smith songs? I think it was a timing thing: it came out in 1993, and people just assumed it was a criticism of Suede. Mark E. Smith's too smart to write a criticism of anyone, apart from people he's been in a band with. A great artist utterly defines their own genre, and that's what Mark E. Smith's done. He's got a patent on that sound."

"Another masterpiece about Sicily, another meditation on eternity, and an endlessly rich historical tapestry, meticulously composed in color and on 70 mm. Luchino Visconti based the picture on the Count Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published novel, about a Sicilian prince at the time of the Italian unification, or Risorgimento, who steps away from power and influence because he realizes that the life he and his family have led is coming to an end, that he has to get out of the way for younger and more ambitious men like his nephew Tancredi. Visconti and his fellow screenwriters (there were four of them, including his frequent collaborators Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Enrico Medioli) took Lampedusa’s novel and fashioned a whole new work on a grand scale, an epic but of a very unusual type. Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened. The landscapes, the extraordinary settings with their painstakingly selected objects and designs, the costumes, the ceremonies and rituals—it’s all at the service of deepening our sense of time and large-scale change, and the entire picture culminates in an hour-long sequence at a ball in which you can feel, through the eyes of the prince, an entire way of life (one that Visconti himself knew quite well) in the process of fading away. Like Contempt, The Leopard was initially overshadowed by the circumstances around it, namely, the casting of Burt Lancaster as the prince. Here in America, we saw the picture in a shortened and dubbed version (Lancaster was speaking English) that was a little unsatisfying: you could clearly see that the movie Visconti had intended wasn’t quite all there, and it was jarring to watch Lancaster speaking in his normal voice surrounded by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa dubbed into American English. When I got to see the whole thing, I was astonished by the picture and by Lancaster, who gives all of himself to the role and to the world of the film. Visconti had wanted Laurence Olivier, and he was initially very curt with Lancaster, but the actor won him over and they became lifelong friends. I could go on and on about The Leopard. It’s a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by."

"I’m very proud of my movie, Nebraska. I don’t really know what a great film is. I don’t know what the ingredients should be. But I certainly think Nebraska is a credit to the industry of filmmaking and it’s done very, very well. And both he [director Alexander Payne] and Quentin [Tarantino, with whom Dern has worked three times] can make a f–king movie, trust me. Alexander said to me the first morning, “Do you see anything here, you’ve never seen before?” I went looking around – we were in Nebraska in some little town in the middle of October, cold, freezing – and I said, “Yes I do.” I said, “It seems like everybody here is putting their oar in before 8am.” And he said, “Well hopefully, that’s because we have 91 crew members here and 78 have worked every day on every film I’ve ever made.” He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “So you, sir, can go take a risk.” And he said, “This is Phedon Papamichael; he’s your cameraman.” I met him the day before. And he said, “I wonder if you’d do something for Phedon and I, that we’re not sure you ever did in your career.” I said, “Well what’s that?” And he said, “Never show us anything. Let us find it.” And I knew for the first time in my life I had a partner. Al Pacino came up to me — I’d never met him — at a party and said, “You know, I’ve not seen your movie yet, Nebraska. But everybody back at the Actors Studio – ’cause we’re both members – is talking about your performance.” So Brad Grey is at the party, and he ran Paramount then, and I said, “You know, Al Pacino has not got a screener,” ’cause it was Christmas time. So he said, “Tell him he’ll have one tomorrow morning with his newspaper.” At noon the next day my phone rings and I pick it up and he says, “Bruce, Al Pacino.” I said, “Oh wow.” He said nothing for about 10 seconds, and then he said, “How did you do that?” I told him what Alexander told me about “let us find it.” And he said, “I have tears in my eyes, because you knew you had a partner. I’ve never had a partner.” He said, “Bruce, I never ever saw the work. You were just the character.” And that’s the greatest compliment to me I ever had."

"This one is down to my best friend, my dearest friend from when I was three years old – we met at nursery school and we grew up together. We grew through our teens and went through puberty together, starting to experiment with alcohol and cigarettes and boys. She had very lenient parents whereas my parents were really old-school and sort of conventional; she had a very unconventional family life. She and I used to be able to just do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, up in her attic bedroom. 

 Because I'd been caught smoking by my parents, I didn't have any pocket money but my best friend Sarah did. She was able to buy records that I couldn't get my hands on – she bought The Scream – I'm not entirely sure why she bought The Scream, but she played it in her bedroom and I can still remember her putting the needle on the vinyl and just that record beginning, starting: I was mesmerised. I just was like, 'What the fuck is this? And who is this? And what is it?' 

 We just became quickly obsessed. We finally saw them on Top Of The Pops and I just fell madly and obsessively in love with Siouxsie and the whole band for that matter: I just loved how they looked like nothing I'd ever laid eyes on before.
 
 Up until that point I'd only been exposed to very conforming women in music. I'd never seen someone who identified as a female but looked somewhat androgynous and referenced Native American Indian culture, which excited me for whatever reason. She had this incredible, strange style that seemed very confrontational and rebellious. She just excited me visually and musically. 

 I've been obsessed with her ever since and my love for her has never waned at all. She's another artist who's never, ever let me down. I still go back to those records over and over again because there's a certain power in Siouxsie's delivery that's very hard to find amongst most female-identifying artists. She still sounds unique, and she still sounds like she can wipe the floor with any of us.
 
 I was starting to experiment with what my version of what adulthood meant and I think I was 13 or 14; I became obsessed with 'Suburban Relapse' and 'Nicotine'. 'Suburban Relapse' had such a strong narrative: I just could see everything in detail through her lyrics. She was very erudite and I was just so mesmerised by her."