"There are a few different ways to experience the Twin Peaks franchise. One is as pure vibes—as Brenda Walsh puts it, “it’s not hippie witch, it’s Twin Peaks and it’s very in.” That’s easy to dismiss, but honestly it’s often what gets me to watch. Another way, and this seems to have gotten increasingly dominant lately, is as a puzzle-box mystery-mythology, a more arcane Lost. And that’s wonderful, if only because it encourages a communal conversation to untangle it. But Twin Peaks is also about a teenage girl who was repeatedly raped and ultimately murdered by her father. About how the ongoing abuse shaped her whole world, creating desires and addictions that terrified and excited her, and drawing in a circle of men fascinated by the prospects of saving and/or exploiting her. About how the tortured energy she exuded made the other girls, even her best friend, jealous. It’s a scenario so human and awful that those people—or a viewer—might need a whole fantastic mythical framework just to be able to take it in. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me foregrounds this last aspect. And that’s why, to me, it’s the beating heart of the series."

"Let’s go with Unforgiven. Again, I believe that was an Academy Award winner. A number of things were so fantastic about that film. The Western genre had died — it had gone away by that time — and here comes Clint Eastwood, who was known for Spaghetti Westerns, which were of course Westerns often with Italian directors, or whatever the reason they call it that. And whether those were good or bad, they defined an era of filmmaking, a certain type of movie that came out three or four times a year, and then they vanished. And then in walks this guy who’d done that era and was a major star, a major, major star, and I believe he directed Unforgiven. How entirely different from any other Western we’ve ever seen. And you care for this guy who spends the entire film telling people he’s changed. He’s not the guy he once was. And then, just when you care about this character, you realize he’s the same guy he always was. When push comes to shove. It was a bit of a surprising ending. And yet, to me, resonates to the overall quality of the film. And it’s one that stays with me."

"I didn't get into him at all for ages. For years and years I just thought, what is all the fuss about?' I just could not get into it. And then one day someone said: ""Have you listened to Hunky Dory?"". I hadn't checked that out at all. I really got into Hunky Dory. I transcribed and analysed nearly all the songs on it. I got into Low, and I quite like 'Heroes', and Scary Monsters. But there's a lot of stuff I don't like. I could probably list 10 Bowie songs that I think are amazing, and the rest of it I'm not too bothered about. I'm really obsessed with him as a character, as an artist. To me he's incredibly impressive and really exciting, his relentless drive to reinvent himself. Probably one of the most inspiring people I can think of. But musically, it's not quite as abundant. That last album: it's quite weird. I was really into Death Grips, he was really into Death Grips, and Kendrick Lamaar as well. It's an album that owes a lot to those guys, but then it's also got a saxophone player on it. This track 'Girl Loves Me', he uses the language from Clockwork Orange. It's just a brilliant idea."

"And then, I guess, The Sting is the next one I gotta say. This was for me, and probably for a lot of people, at least of our generation, our first exposure to con men movies was from The Sting. It really holds up. Like a lot of the movies on this list, it holds up because of the central relationship, because of the Newman-Redford thing. Watching those two guys together, even though at this point, plotwise, I would be fairly… Well, I don’t know. I wonder, if someone saw The Sting clean for the first time today, now with all the movies that have imitated it in the years since, whether anyone would actually kind of say “Oh my God” at the end of it. I don’t know, but I don’t know that it would matter, because I think the fun of the film is in the game playing, and specifically in the way that these two guys play off of each other. It seems like something that’s particularly vulnerable, just because of the twist, the nature of the end. But like I said, that’s not really what makes the movie tick, oddly enough. It holds up just as a really fun ride."

"Well, maybe that’s why David Heyman and Paul King cast me in Paddington, I don’t know [laughs]. You’ll be surprised by my fifth one, then. OK, try and find the link with this: Pulp Fiction. I think that’s the exception that proves the rule. I think it was great, it was such a breath of fresh air. That same year, I remember, I was completely enamored by two films: The Lion King and Pulp Fiction, so you couldn’t get more extreme than those two. They both have death in them, I suppose. But Pulp Fiction was such a great breath of fresh air when it came out, and I think it still remains such a cool and fantastic piece of the cinema. Obviously it was the second film after Reservoir Dogs that brought Tarantino into the fold, but I think it’s a gloriously slick and entertaining piece of movie-making, structurally and cinematically, with these great, legendary performances that were instantly loved, and instantly classic and endlessly imitated. The number of people I’ve seen doing Christopher Walken impressions — or Bruce Willis impressions from that movie — or indeed Samuel L Jackson… It’s sort of a great cinematic feat and [it’s filled with] dark, dark humor."

"I think that tune is such a perfectly crafted piece of music. The funny thing is there's two mixes. There's the Jamaican mix, and the Jamaican mix is tough but I do like the other mix too. I got to work with Tony Platt who was like the engineer at a lot of those sessions and he was telling me all sorts of stories. And then what the song was about, when he was living in London and he was hanging around in Soho. It makes so much sense now because when I was really playing this a lot was when I was spending a lot of time in Soho, going to Ronnie Scott's, learning my craft, learning to play drums and jazz, going to clubs, hanging out ‘til 4am. So I felt it, I could picture him being there like ‘Rahtid…’ Everyone's been out on the night bus and seen something and think did that just happen? So I've always had an affinity with that particular track, sonically and content wise. I think people don't often talk about that side of Bob, and they’ve made him out to be this ganja-smoking, peace-loving guy, that’s not really what he's about. He's very political and does a lot of social commentary."