"A boy I had a crush on gave this to me to read at university. In a way, it was my first taste of America and of New York, where I now live. It really affected me. A tragic tale of the life and death of Edie Sedgwick, the charming, broken, sophisticated, naive, sexy, innocent muse for a generation of geniuses—Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. The Queen of the Scene and its victim, too. I couldn’t stop looking at the photo of her on the cover in all her eye make up, and trying to work her out."

"In 1950s Baltimore, my parents were pretty open. They read The New York Times and listened to Woody Guthrie records, so you can imagine what kind of a household that was. They were immigrants from Scotland, and their taste included a lot of American folk music like, Woody and Pete Seeger, both of whom made children’s albums, so that’s what I would hear. Later, I heard their other songs, which obviously had a political slant and a story to tell and a point of view. That was something to realize at a young age: that a song could do that."

"Well, England is to my taste a great, great film country. I don’t think any filmmakers have been greater than Hitchcock, fabulously represented in the Criterion Collection by The Lady Vanishes and a great box set, Wrong Men & Notorious Women; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, represented by many films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (one of their very best, also made during World War II); and of course Mike Leigh. Topsy-Turvy is so fascinating, because Mike Leigh celebrates precisely the approach to acting that he has driven his own actors farther and farther away from in his own films."