"Downtown Train was the first song that I remember hearing by Tom Waits. It’s a great song. It also said everything that I wanted to say. I was 17 years old and I realised that I was never going to be a great singer because I had this weird voice, so I started looking at all the guys who had weird voices: Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Tom Waits. I aligned myself with those guys and said, ‘OK, let me see what they’re doing. What can I do to add to it?’ Tom Waits really put the icing on the cake for me because he was all about the lyrics and the delivery – nothing else mattered. He showed me that if you mean it enough then you could do anything you want. I loved his hobo dress sense as well. He looked like all the things that I was doing at the time because I was working on cars and I would wear the jeans and the boots and the blue shirt. We’d wipe our hands on the shirts because they were thick and you could wash them and the grease would come out; we’d wear the jeans so when you were leaning on the floor your knees wouldn’t rip; and we’d wear the boots so if you dropped the carburettor it wouldn’t break your toes. So there was a purpose for everything, and that’s why I sought of had a connection with these guys. I felt like Tom Waits was my friend, and I went down the rabbit hole after discovering him."

"My personal favorite from Jim Jarmusch, one of our finest American auteurs. If as filmmakers we’re all just laboriously trying to simulate the rush of texture and emotion you get from listening to great music, no one has ever come closer to smacking the heart of a Tom Waits tune up there on the screen than Jarmusch."

"When making One Breath, I did listen to Rain Dogs. I love the way that Tom Waits uses really unusual instrumentation, like tuned marimbas, to sort of suggest chords instead of just the obvious guitar strumming changes. “Doing this was a real influence on me, using marimba and not relying on the guitar as an accompanying instrument, but treating it as a character that comes in as kind of a surprise. Tom can make the guitar sound wild – I really like that"

"One of my favorite films from Jim Jarmusch; I can never get enough of it. Beautifully shot by Robby Müller in Louisiana, a jailbreak with Tom Waits, John Lurie, and the first time many of us were to see the amazing Roberto Benigni. The Defiant Ones meets the Marx Brothers and even better. Jim is one of the last true stylists left in this “sad and beautiful world.”"

"A late-night friend right up there with Cosmos and Hearts of Space. I’m sure I wouldn’t like this series as much without the Matt Dillon segment (episode three). The camaraderie in the other pieces is great, but the tension of that segment is built in real-time improvisation. The story unfolds right before you—one of the coolest, most magical feelings you can get. I still get really uncomfortable at the fish/trousers part in the Tom Waits episode, though."