"This play represented such a turning point for me as an actor. I'd just come out of drama school and I was playing opposite Geoffrey Rush. I had to leave my own baggage at the door and take on this character who would be understood by some and hated by others. Mamet has taken all the extraneous stuff away and left you with just this searing, polemic essential battle to the death. Geoffrey and I keep saying Oleanna is an inkblot test, because your reaction to it reveals to you your own sense of politics. It's so provocative — afterward, people were shouting at one another passionately. To see that happen in the theater lobby, which can be such a bourgeois, polite space, I just knew this is what I should be doing with my life."

"All of his albums are just collections of songs because this was in the pre-album era, but I guess there was one in Mississippi called Key To The Kingdom. He was a spiritual blues singer who played an instrument, a fretless zither. Even though it's the blues era, he can't bend the notes like a guitar player would. He's sometimes known as George Washington Phillips. His music is really serene and otherworldly and pure. It's all very religious but it has its own atmosphere that I've not really heard anywhere else. I think when I really got into Washington Philips was when Sonic Boom put a song of his onto a compilation album called Space Lines. My sister painted a picture of him for Christmas. My sister the painting goth."

"I’m going to cite probably a really odd one: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Catherine Deneuve – it’s a musical in the 1960s, and I think that’s the best example of utilizing color and production design in a film that’s been done in the history of cinema. Basically it’s stunning and it’s a really delightful, buoyant film about love and friends. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful movie and probably not what your readers would have thought I might have picked. I use The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as an example of how color can inform a character’s internal head space. I’ve used that many, many, many times in my projects — I’ve pointed production designers, writers, and cinematographers to that film as an [example of how to use] color. It’s a cool movie."