"It’s a pleasure to write this particular piece about Rian Johnson as over the last 10 years or so, he’s become one of my best friends in Hollywood; the perfect person to talk to at 8 a.m. over coffee or at 2 a.m. over some other brown liquid. He’s terribly clever (but never annoyingly so), a good listener, and a generous laugher. He’s also always dressed like a cool college professor, which makes him both easy to draw and dress up as for Halloween. In the interest of full disclosure, I did make a cameo in his “Star Wars” episode and my last movie, “Baby Driver,” is alluded to in his new one. So you’d be forgiven for assuming all this chumminess would result in Rian’s movie getting a glowing review from me no matter what. But here’s the thing. Not only do I genuinely LOVE this film, but it’s exactly the type of movie that Hollywood needs and audiences are crying out for. “Knives Out” is superb entertainment that proves you can please a crowd without ever talking down to them. It’s endlessly smart, fiendishly plotted, and populated with a cast clearly loving every acid-soaked line flung their way. So much cinema is divided into just two food categories these days. There’s the empty calories of the bloated green-screen pantomimes that clog up every auditorium at your local multiplex. Then there’s what I call broccoli films; those worthy, good-for-you productions that can be very nourishing, but sometimes (whisper it) a little dull. Rian’s murder mystery straddles the line perfectly; an entertainment for grown-ups that nods to classic studio thrillers but with an invigorating 21st century overhaul. Rian is making the brainy, big screen crowd pleasers we truly deserve. For that alone, give him all the awards."

"The first one would be Souls For Sale, which was actually written and directed by Howard Hughes’ uncle, Rupert Hughes. It was based on a novel that Rupert Hughes wrote. He had been an author and a playwright and he had been brought to Hollywood in 1918 as sort of an effort that Samuel Goldwyn did to bring famous authors into the movies to try increase the qualities of movies. Rupert Hughes had just fallen in love with Hollywood and once it started being attacked after the scandals of the 1920s, he wanted to defend what he felt was an industry that was getting a bad rap. He wrote this novel and they made a movie out of it called Souls For Sale, and it’s about the daughter of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who escapes her brand new husband, who she has a bad feeling about, and ends up in a movie and immediately becomes a huge star. It basically tells the story of this girl encountering the movie industry, and at every moment where something sort of dirty or scandalous could happen, she actually finds that the people in Hollywood are really hard-working and upstanding citizens and are a higher quality of human than – for instance – her treacherous husband. It’s a really interesting movie. It’s definitely an artifact of its time and place – and you could say that more literally about it than many other movies because it has kind of a documentary element about it. The director really goes out of his way to show you what the studio lots looked like in 1923, and he films other directors like Charlie Chaplin working. It’s a movie that I had never heard of before as I was doing research [for the book], and I think it’s probably the earliest sort of Hollywood movie about Hollywood."

"Records is a big one for me. When I first moved to New York in 2000, I tried to see him play any time he was playing. Some of my favorite shows I've ever seen were a couple of Marclays performances, solo or with DJ Trio. This record embodies the spirit of those live performances He's another absolute hero of mine – if you haven't seen him perform you should. He played on a Late Night show as this kind of novelty. And this was in 1980. As DJing is, it's just re-contextualising sound, music. But he does it with such a keen ear and there's a point to why he mixes certain things. He destroys the records by putting tape over them. As interesting and as funny as that is but musically, the results he gets from this are really, really exciting. His shows were some of the most exciting shows. I saw him play at a club in New York called Tonic, that closed down years ago, where a lot of new music was played. I saw him play in 2002, when it was him in what was known as DJ Trio which is 3 DJs, playing in the collage-y nature of what he was doing. And it was so mind-blowing. So I was obsessed with him. He was a guy that I had no shame fanboying out with. I'd see him out on the street and I'd go "Hi Christian!" He's a major artist – he did this piece called The Clock, which is toured all over the world. What's that big gallery in London right now? White Cube. He now has installations all over the world for his video art."