"The next one, I think we got to go to Bergman. We go to go to Seventh Seal. Seventh Seal just knocked me dead. On many levels, it’s such a simple film. You’ve got Mary and Joseph, the young people with their little traveling theater, and then you’ve got the knight. I think it was the way he dealt with the Middle Ages and intrigued me with Death there at playing chess. Those were images that just stuck in my head. It was funny. When I was doing Parnassus, I went back and looked at it, because I was trying to remind myself what Mary and Joseph and their little traveling theater was like. I had forgotten so much detail. That was just a really important film, and Max von Sydow was something… The first time I had seen basically a non-American actor at work. He looked different. He behaved differently. Because, you know, I grew up with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, Rock Hudson — shiny teeth and beautifully combed hair and all of that nonsense. Something profound was going on in that movie without pointing fingers at anything. It just did it. The squire — that was Gunnar Björnstrand, I think — was just a great character, the cynic in the midst of it all. I remember when he was talking, when he was in this church, and all the frescoes are there, and it’s just profound filmmaking."

"I was listening to a lot of Cuban music and salsa, a lot of Latin music. I worked with Selena on the last thing she recorded. And there was a whole series of Celia Cruz records I loved. I did a duet with her for a Jonathan Demme movie, Something Wild. Her early Cuban records were done with a band called Sonora Matancera; those are really great. Instead of going to rock clubs, I would go to Salsa Meets Jazz downtown and the Corso Ballroom uptown to hear salsa bands. There was lots of dancing. I liked the idea that you were dancing to live music, not just DJs, and grew to really love the music. It opened me up to a lot of sentimentality and feelings that maybe didn’t come naturally to me. I decided I wanted to do a salsa record, which I did in the early ’90s. And I did another one a few years after that. It was a little less strictly salsa, but it was still in that vein, and I had a wonderful time with a huge band, [Rei Momo]. We toured everywhere, and a lot of folks in the United States did not like it at all. Oddly, people in Latin America really liked it, but not because it was their music. For a lot of their rockers in Argentina or Mexico, it was like, “He's playing our parents’ music.”"

"I think it’s always incredibly difficult to thread that needle between real pathos and comedy. And I think Postcards dances on that knife’s edge, not to go overboard with the metaphors, but it’s just so beautifully calibrated because the script, Carrie Fisher’s. There is no greater writing mind ever; Carrie Fisher had such a particular lens that she looked through the world with, and it just translated incredibly into her writing. I just thought the script was just so funny, but the performances! It’s one of those movies that for me is the whole package. Although I did not grow up with a mother who was in show business, the relationship between them was not dissimilar from mine in a way, and made me feel connected to the material. But it’s the kind of movie that I actually own still on VHS. I remember buying this movie and wanting it, so I have it for just memory’s sake, but I also have it on DVD, and Cody Fern, who’s an actor on American Horror Story last year, as a wrap present gave me an original poster. That’s how much I love the movie and that’s how much people around me tend to know I love the movie, because I do quote it a lot. And you just don’t want to sit next to me when we’re watching it though, because you won’t hear the movie. I’m just doing the whole thing, line by line."

"And their next movie, Raising Arizona, came out and had this insane soundtrack. That crazy Pete Seeger “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling and it was totally mad. And every joke on it landed for me — one of the things about the Coens is there’s history in every shot. Some people say “Where do you want to put the camera?” but in the morning, they’ll draw up signs and give the actors with the lines and below a drawing from the storyboard of the camera angle they’ll be in when they have those lines. They have it all cut in their head when they do it. This is why they have control. Economy is the essence of art you know. I was looking at the detail in Raising Arizona and I thought, “We must have seen all the same films growing up because it was just speaking to me.” And it got to the part where John Goodman and his cohort come out of the ground and go into the service station to comb their hair and in the mirror you can see in spray paint OPE POE backward in the mirror. And I thought, “Really interesting this is how detailed they are.” They would take a quote from Dr. Strangelove like “Purity of essence, peace on earth” and put it backwards on a mirror and spray paint it on the wall somewhere backwards in Arizona."

"Carol Reed was a brilliant director and a sweet man, but he was not a one-man band like David Lean; he required a strong, patient producer who loved him, as my Uncle Alex did, and a gifted screenwriter, which Alex found for him in the novelist Graham Greene, as well as an art director of genius—my father. He was at his best surrounded by talented people who loved him, who were virtual family, and that shows in his best films, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man. One unusual aspect of Carol’s gifts was that he was among the rare directors good at working with children—go watch The Third Man and you will be astonished at the brilliant inclusion of the ghastly little boy who accuses Holly Martins of murder. Most of the great directors hate working with animals or children, but Carol—himself the illegitimate son of the great Edwardian actor and theatrical producer Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree—had a natural sympathy and understanding of children. He was in fact childlike himself—hence his choice, later in life, to make a film of the musical Oliver!—and this shows in his direction of Bobby Henrey in this, another of those English films in which good manners manage to hide passion and even murder, except in the alarmingly clear view of a child. Ralph Richardson, dear Ralph, is at his best in the role of the butler."

"This is another case of, "Where's my Radiohead gone?" Hearing Muse for the first time was like, "Holy shit, this is like Radiohead, but heavier, and more pop, but also darker as well", and I just absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I was at the perfect age, was just getting into actually being good at playing stuff, and Matt Bellamy was all over the place in terms of his musical talents, playing the piano and guitar, and stuff that teenagers love. Stuff that sounds flashy and complex and twiddly but is actually not. And the bass player! Fuck me, the basslines on the album! Bass players don't do that kind of stuff! He's the sort of main character in an awful lot of those songs. It was an absolute revelation. I was a bass player before I was anything else, and I remember thinking, "Holy shit that sounded ace"! They ripped up the rulebook in so many ways for rock music. It was so enjoyable as well. Every song had a real sense of performance and razzmatazz. Of course it's called Showbiz and it is a type of show. So I think, more than anything, that's probably what you would say about my band, particularly live - we're not subtle, it's over the top. Whether people like it or not, that's got into us now and it's hard to take a step back."

"This one is the opposite of eclectic! I was a Cult fan anyway. A lot of people at school were into goth and I wasn’t so popular because I was into rock, but I felt like the Cult fell right between the cracks of those two scenes. And then there was the Manor Sessions and the stuff that they recorded for Electric that was recorded in the more traditional cult style. And I love the story of Rick Rubin telling them to throw all that stuff away and to use Les Pauls and simple sounds – basically trying to make them sound like AC/DC. A lot of bands tried to sound like AC/DC, but the Cult doing AD/DC is its own thing, and it’s really brilliant I think. The first band I was ever in played ‘Lil’ Devil’ and that’s a pub classic, and if you’re writing pub classics then you’re doing something right I think. ‘Wild Flower’ is definitely the one for me, I love that song. The way the drummer [Les Warner] approaches it... it’s like, you know exactly what’s coming, there’s only one fill in it that’s unexpected and then you listen to it twice and you know when it’s coming. But every time the chord changes, he pushes so that he comes in slightly before the bar. And that’s actually brilliant. That’s how all rock drummers should approach rock drumming. It’s a masterclass."