"Let me talk about Last Picture Show… that’s just popped into my mind. For me, that’s a movie that is kind of like no other movie, and no other movie is like it. It just kind of sits there by itself. I guess Peter Bogdonovich is to blame for that, and of course Larry McMurtry, the great writer. We had a chance, like Tron, where we got to do the sequel to Picture Show; twenty years later we shot Texasville. There are three more installments that Larry wrote, that I’m hoping will get made."

"Robert Altman really deserves his own number and section, so I am tying three of his films. He was one of the rare filmmakers experimenting with form within the Hollywood system. He infused his work with fluid zooms to easily enter in and out of spaces and made social interactions feel more organic. He also used sound in experimental ways, pushing the form with overlapping dialogue. It’s so impressive that a studio funded an entire film based on a fever dream he had, starring two of my favorite actresses, Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek."

"Probably the most famous countertenor of the 20th century – unless you count Frankie Valli – was the wonderful Alfred Deller, a major figure in the revival of original performance techniques for early and Baroque music. When I was a child we had this album,so I grew up thinking everyone knew and loved 'Where The Bee Sucks' and 'We Be Soldiers Three'. The liner notes, at least on the CD version, are woefully inadequate (who wrote what? when? for which play? Did Henry VIII really write 'Greensleeves'?) but the music is lovely. "

"I think Eva Cassidy falls more into the Enya category. When it first came out, I think the thing with Eva Cassidy - and I deliberately chose her - is that she was an amazing singer, and there's very few people who could sing like her. The songs on there - 'Autumn Leaves', 'Fields Of Gold' - it's an amazing covers record, and she really influenced me actually, as a singer. Her voice is so clean, and I'm quite a clean singer. I lived for that record for about two to three years."

"This is as close to a perfect film as I have ever seen. Thousands of years of humanity honing the blade of satire culminated in this searing parody from Stanley Kubrick. Typically his direction is the star of his films, but the performances here from Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden turn this into a perfectly pitched collaboration among artists who were, at that moment in history, each firing on all cylinders. Sellers in particular excels in three completely different roles. It’s a true master class in character acting."

"I like The King of Comedy by Scorsese. I like that one. It makes me laugh a lot. I think it’s very funny. I mean, I like the combination, the trio of Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard; that’s just one of my favorite trios in a movie. The three of them had a pretty amazing chemistry, I thought. I’ve heard that Scorsese was reluctant to make it, that it was on the shelf for a while; I guess that makes me appreciate it even more."

"I just love this book. When I was halfway through it—right around when one of the three daughters tries to talk to her father and he goes out into a storm—I was like, “Oh my God, this is King Lear.” I was so impressed with how Smiley was able to take such a classic tale and put it in rural 20th-century Iowa. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, it’s everything King Lear is—and it’s effortless. I was blown away by the imagination, intellect and talent it must have taken to do that."

"The remaining three are films that I just feel are nearly perfect. The Graduate, from top to bottom, visually, sonically, performance-wise, the energy, and the time when it came out, and what it represented – that whole Holden Caufield sort of aspect to it. I think the music, obviously; there are very few films where the music has been so married to the actual film itself, and I love that about The Graduate. It seems like that’s the way it always should have been. It’s just amazing to me how perfectly it complements the film."