"It's about the quality of the star, those people who the camera just loves, and James Dean is really amazing. He's moody, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface. He doesn't go with the crowd which is always very attractive. When you're dealing with adolescence you've always got the kids with that strength of character. I think that's very important. I watched Rebel Without A Cause in the eighties with a group of kids and they thought it was really funny and old fashioned. When you look at it it now it is obviously a bit melodramatic, but that's partly because it's influenced so many films since. It's also a very strange film, a fated film, because the three main juvenile leads, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood and James Dean, died prematurely. Sal Mineo was murdered in the late seventies, Natalie Wood drowned in an accident, and of course JD was too fast too young."

"The Girl Can't Help It isn't about the status of teenagers, but it had huge impact on teenage audiences. On one level it's like one of those terrible Don't Knock The Rock films - just a compendium of performances. But it's got a more sophisticated plot that alludes to mob involvement in the music business. And it's got Tom Ewell, who's a very fine comic actor, and Jayne Mansfield, who's a fascinating and fated character as well. You get Eddie Cochran and Little Richard – neither of whom played in the UK for another few years – so you can imagine what it meant to The Beatles when they went to see it. All that early rock & roll period is so un-self conscious, people didn't know what they were doing and The Girl Can't Help It showed British teenagers the American lifestyle. America is the thing that everyone aspired to at that point. Glorious Technicolor in every way."

"The Godfather. That’s two. One and two. Oh, it’s just epic, you know. It’s the best soap opera. It’s all those — you know, it’s the human drama and it’s exciting. And if it was done badly it’s like a soap opera in the afternoon, and you just realize that there are only so many stories that can be told, but when they’re told in the right way they’re beautiful and effective. So much of it is good, you know: The acting is good, the directing is subtle, withheld — so much of it in wide shots, with very few close ups. It takes balls to do that. I mean, it’s a different world now; close ups are the way people tell stories now. I don’t mind close-ups, I like them, but they’re kind of forceful — you see a lot, you get a lot of information in a close-up. There’s less mystery."

"There is a film called Jeremiah Johnson that was directed by Sydney Pollack with Robert Redford. It’s about 1830s mountain men, and I’ve always been fascinated by those guys who, in the 1830s, when the West was still totally wild ? there were no homesteaders, no settlers ? guys who would go out there and live in the mountains amidst the Indians and carve out a living, catching beaver and muskrat and whatever else they were catching, skinning them and bringing the hides back, so they could be turned into hats for fashionable people in London. There’s some really great music in it. I loved the nature and the Rocky Mountains; I think it actually was shot in the early days of the Sundance institute out in the Salt Lake area, although the story has it happening in the Rocky Mountains, probably a little east of there. Montana, Wyoming, that area. So, love that film."

"I would be embarrassed to begin to talk about Dr. Strangelove, because there has been so much written about it. It’s so bleak. And Peter Sellers is perfect. He’s just perfect. Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick built this doomsday political satire, in the fists of the Cold War, and made the end of the world hysterical. We’re bumbling idiots, all of us. We’re all walking through dark rooms of our life, bumping into furniture, and it’s shocking. I think we all enjoy watching people who are in authority positions act like bumbling idiots; it satisfies part of our ego, I’m sure, on some level. Sellers’ commitment to those characters… the scene that stands out is when he’s trying to get change to make the phone call to stop the bomb, and that security guard won’t let him break government property to get the change. The frustration of that is as painful as it is hysterical."

"The first one is The Gold Rush, by Charlie Chaplin. It’s the apogee of his genius. I saw that film when I was 11 or 12 years old in a cinema in Ramsgate, Kensington, and there were three people in there with me. Nothing has ever made me laugh as much as that. I remember, literally — in those days they used to have a velvet kind of cover over the balcony — and I remember hanging over and laughing at the sheer f–king brilliance of the comedy in that film. The one I saw was just black-and-white, too; this was before Chaplin put a voice-over on it, which I don’t enjoy — I don’t think it serves the film well. There are certain things in there, you know — around cooking and survival and stuff — that kind of are in my soul now, as someone who tries to tell stories too."

"It’s astonishing; one of those soundscape albums where the songs barely hold together, but somehow they do, so beautifully and so delicately. They’re like hymns, all of them. There’s a very spiritual quality to the chord sequences, straight from the church. It’s worshipful and soulful. In some ways it relates to Talk Talk’s last works. But they have that dark, dubstep feel to them as well. I just love the way he deconstructs songs. After I’d bought the album, it was on in a people carrier when we were being driven to a festival somewhere, and everybody was saying, "this is really dreary", but I had to pipe up and say, "actually it’s one of my favourite albums at the moment so can we leave it on?" I felt connected to it. I thought, "this isn’t dreary; it’s making me feel uplifted." I like what he does. I like anyone who takes songs and challenges the notion of song structures."