"I’ve seen this picture a zillion times but always find something new to wonder about. Graham Greene, Carol Reed, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Nazis, gangsters, Hitchcockian surrealism, innovative cinematography, a moody babe, Vienna, a zither for ear candy: it’s all here."

"My favorite essay in this collection is "Goodbye To All That." One quote has always resonated with me: "I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage." As a child, I lived all over the world — we moved a million zillion times — and I never felt completely happy until I was in New York City. Like Didion, I felt that I'd reached the mirage; I'd found a place where anything could happen. And she talks about that: "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."

"For years, this fairly obscure Russian movie has probably been my favorite movie. I first had a crummy Russian VHS with blocky Soviet-era lettering (in which the movie title was translated as Unmailed Letter). Then in the early 2000s, my friend somehow found me a bootleg DVD. (Shoutout to Bilge!) Miraculously, in 2012, I saw it listed on Criterion’s “Coming Soon” page. I remember when I saw that, I just couldn’t believe it. This story of survival in the Siberian wilderness is simply the greatest “tough terrain” adventure movie ever made (with apologies to another Criterion fave, The Wages of Fear). Both director Mikhail Kalatozov and his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, seem half-crazed, and my jaw drops repeatedly while watching. Kalatozov is one of cinema’s boldest stylists, and there are a zillion shots in this movie that blow me away. Yet, despite the cinematic fireworks, the most affecting shots might actually be the many meticulous close-ups of the explorers’ faces, which foreground the raw human drama unfolding before your eyes."

"This 1990 masterpiece is very much a travel album. It has all the hallmarks and some of the pitfalls of a life on the road: the single 'I Left my wallet in El Segundo' is a case in point. The advice lyric 'I don't eat no ham'n'eggs cuz they're high in cholesterol' in the classic cut 'Ham'n'eggs' is another highly unusual call and response rhyme - but again paints a true picture of the perils of a road life spent in diners. Over the course of the album we visit Lucien in Paris and traverse around the world of music with a zillion samples of classic sixties and seventies rock and soul albums. It's always optimistic and wide eyed - the best way to travel. I was talking to my friend Ben the other day about how this is my favorite Tribe album - (most people seem to prefer The Low End Theory?) - but I learned so much about music through this record - The songs are great and it's one of those albums that drags you into a different universe and world view and changes you for the better."

"When I’m not making my own movies, I’m usually working on a trailer for someone else’s. Since I was twenty-two years old, I’ve been a professional trailer editor. I began editing trailers for big Hollywood films (I was one of the editors on the trailer campaigns for the Scream movies, The Matrix movies, and a zillion others), but I eventually left that world and turned all my attention to art-house films. In recent years, I’ve had the unbelievable fortune to have created the trailers for several modern masterpieces now enshrined in the Criterion Collection, including Heart of a Dog, The Great Beauty, Yi Yi, Cameraperson, and Like Someone in Love. Another highlight in my trailer career was editing the rerelease trailer for The Battle of Algiers. Not only was there so much incredible material to use, but Pontecorvo’s masterpiece had always been one of my all-time favorites. It’s a huge influence on how I think about filmmaking, from the handheld camera work to its daring and quick editing to its strong use of music (Morricone!) to how Pontecorvo just throws a viewer right into the deep end from the get-go. Also, like the best documentaries (see The Thin Blue Line up the page a bit), it puts the responsibility on the audience to draw its own conclusions. The Criterion disc also includes some amazing extras, including a not bad rerelease trailer. ;)"

"We walk every morning down to the sea and along the coast, and every third or fourth morning we stop at the Real Patisserie. We were buying some bread in there and this music came on, so I shazamed it and it was the single, 'Clear', from this album. Matty is the best of a whole group of artists in North America who are drinking very heavily from the fountain of early 70s music, especially relating to George Harrison, Emitt Rhodes and biggest of all, Todd Rundgren. Now I've been a Todd Rundgren fan for a zillion years, and there was a point in the middle of the last decade when I realised that musical recycling is kind of okay as long as you're not doing it exactly the same. I could mention some other artists like Mild High Club and Drugdealer: they're not slavishly trying to make records that sound like they were made in the early 70s, but it's the same harmonic world, and I'm very much a harmonic world kind of person. That's how I hear music. The song 'Clear' touches on things that I just love, and the album didn't disappoint; there were four or five really good tracks on there. And then I was in the Small Batch coffee shop and this music came on and I thought what's that, that's great, and it was another track from the Matty album. I was like, wow, that guy's cool. He's the keyboard player in Badbadnotgood, who I don't know anything about apart from the name, and the fact that it's a really stupid name as well."