"Escape From New York, because that’s the one that made me want to make movies. It was a fantasy world. It was like, “What? There’s a wall around New York? It’s a prison? You can do that? You can just make stuff like that up?” That’s a lot of freedom; I thought that was very freeing. I was twelve when I saw that, twelve or thirteen. And I saw that [John Carpenter] wrote it, directed it, and did the music, and I was just like, “This guy’s doing everything. You can do that?” It just felt like, it was so renegade. It was independently done, and it made me want to start making movies, and I started making movies from that point on. It was just very inspiring. I knew I had a lot of interest, and that made me… That was movie that just really marked my life."

"I kind of briefly threw The Shining out there, so that gets its own due, which means I can fall back on 2001, I suppose? I think that film speaks for itself, if I could explain that film to you, then I’d be… I don’t know what I’d be, one in ten who could explain it to you, but there was a followup called 2010 with Roy Scheider, which wasn’t a great film, but if it did anything, it helped explain 2001 a little bit, but 2001… I remember my father took me to see that in the theater, and that was so awe inspiring, and just to see where the imagination and creativity could go on screen as an 11-year-old kid, or however old I was. And to have seen that film over and over and over again and ask new questions every time I do, it’s been a pretty profound staple in my house for years. Then you get into all the conspiracy stuff. You attach the lunar landing — Kubrick shot the lunar landing stuff in it, and the rear screen projection that was used in the space scenes and in the ape scenes in the beginning, and how conspiracy theorists surmise that that’s what he used to shoot the moon landing. Did you hear all that? The theory is that NASA got a hold of the footage from 2001, saw it, and got Stanley Kubrick to shoot all the moon landing stuff in his studio and broadcast it across the country. Now, they’re not saying that we didn’t go to the moon, they’re saying that what the people in America saw was shot in a studio, because at that time we didn’t want to broadcast to the world what we may or may not have found on the moon — which actually makes more sense then it just being… It’s not, “We didn’t go.” We went. But we didn’t want the Russians to see, or we didn’t want Japan to see, or China to see what we’re discovering, you know? In case there’s anything there, or anything that we could weaponize, so Kubrick shot all this stuff in a sound stage, and that was the agreement. That’s why NASA gave Kubrick a super, super special space lens that he used for Barry Lyndon, because Barry Lyndon wasn’t shot with any lights. It was all natural light… candles, or sunlight, or whatever, so he used the lens, and that’s what allowed the light to get in for the film process, but there’s so many layers to the Kubrick stuff and I just, as a conspiracy theory fan, I like to have that in the back of my brain while I’m watching those films."

"The Future came out at around the same moment I discovered Maria Callas, and I got into it somewhat, but it was really Martha who was affected most by that record when it was released, along with a few of my friends. I could see it having its effect on the world around me. But I didn't really understand it for a long time, and then years later when we did the Leonard Cohen tribute shows in Australia, which were filmed for the I'm Your Man film, I really started looking at his material, and I realised that record was so seminal in his career. It was really when he became Leonard Cohen, in a lot of ways, in terms of how he ended up. I can pinpoint that transition as a useful guide in terms of my own career, where you hit a certain age and you have to kind of reinvent yourself – not totally, but you have to settle into a theme, and Leonard really did that with The Future so successfully. I think there's other albums that do that: Paul Simon with Graceland, Neil Young with Harvest Moon, so that's what I admire the most about that record."