"For my mentor Roy Andersson, De Sica was someone who was looking at individuals within a social structure. His films were looking at societal problems in a very political way, with a very realistic style of shooting, but at the same time, they were very self-aware about their set-ups. I love the scene when the father and son go to a restaurant to spend the last of their money to eat something, and at another table is a different family, with a young boy who is looking at the son. I’ll never forget the way they look at each other and the look of the other boy, who is used to being in fancy restaurants eating pasta. It’s so touching and such a humanistic way of looking at things."

"When I was at school, Raymond Pettibon was one of my favourite artists. I'm not into comic books and I don't really like comic book artwork for records and some people probably would describe Raymond Pettibon in that style. And yet despite that, he just has something else. He has ideas. That particular picture on the cover of Goo was an image I was familiar with before I even knew who Sonic Youth were, which is probably a bit unusual. I came across it in one of his books. As a sixteen-year-old there were so many of his images, especially when those images included text, that really sparked off my thoughts. I found them really evocative. Sonic Youth are obviously a brilliant band but I only came to learn that a lot later."

"It’s another one of those movies that just feels so real. You watch those scenes and you’ve got tanks and armies, you know. It’s the first film I saw, as far as docudrama film style — you know, hand-held, very real, in the streets, in the world. And if I’m not mistaken, he only made a couple of films; the filmmaker made it and then he disappeared. He stopped making [fiction] movies. He made one with Marlon Brando and then that was kind of it. But the fact that he pulled off this movie — it’s a masterpiece. I remember watching the movie and feeling like it was a documentary, it felt so real. It’s so amazing. The performances of the actors, everything — it’s mind-blowing when you watch it."

"It was my mother's favourite song. He has one of the smoothest voices in music ever. There's a strange sort of reverb going on there that's also present in 'Blue Velvet' by Bobby Vinton. Subconsciously, some part of me wanted to emulate what my mother found to be romantic. Again at a young age, I found that this was romance. Here was what made the girls smile because he was a huge heart-throb as well. So that early crooning, soft romantic style was a blueprint for us early on. From time to time I dive into it, as it's one of the constellations that's always in the sky for me. In fact, it's always on the radio and played more than Britney Spears or Alicia Keys, but only on oldies stations."

"In preparation for my Christmas film, White Reindeer, I watched this movie and wrote down a description of every single shot, including each camera move and change in blocking. Not only is Heaven Sirk’s most fully realized, subversive takedown of suburban hypocrisy, it’s also the best Christmas movie of all time, and such a marvel of style and camera direction that you barely notice how intricate its construction is until you force yourself to examine it. Sirk said that, in cinema, “motion is emotion,” and that ethos reaches its zenith in the zoom in on Jane Wyman’s reflection in a television screen. This is nothing less than the greatest dolly movie in cinema history. If anyone ever tells you irony and sincerity can’t coexist, tell them they are painfully, tragically wrong."