"Alexander Mackendrick is probably the least well-known genius director to ever live. Nowhere is his brilliance more evident than in the down-and-dirty depiction of high-class gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker and lowlife press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. The great James Wong Howe films the gritty streets of New York in the style of the tabloid newspaper photographs that the protagonists traffic in. The movie was shot entirely on location, a rarity in 1957 but probably allowed due to the triumph of Kazan’s On the Waterfront just a few years prior. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis give career-best performances in this noir that depicts the fall of the mighty Hunsecker (Lancaster) and the sniveling, conniving Falco (Curtis) as the former tries to retain his crown and the latter tries to make it to the top of the heap of garbage he so aspires to reign over. The screenplay, by giants of the trade Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, crackles with what is commonly considered some of the best dialogue in the history of cinema. I just love every single thing about this gem of sleaze. Also featured on the disc is a great documentary, Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away, about how the director, fed up with Hollywood, took a job teaching film at the then nascent CalArts and became a great influence on his students—among them James Mangold, who is featured in an interview here"

"As a drummer, Klaus Dinger was important to me: [he taught me] how to make one riff last a lifetime! It's a great riff though, don't get me wrong. Neu! was absolutely brilliant; it's another record where the first time you buy it and put it on, you think 'I've never heard anything like this before'. I was into Krautrock and that's why I bought it - I bought anything that came out of Germany - but Neu! were just completely out there. I had no idea who was in the band, there was just a big 'Neu!' image on the front… it was striking, kind of punk. The way that they used cut up music, and bits of ambient sound… as soon as I heard it, I thought 'If I ever start a band, I'd like them to sound a bit like this - as adventurous as this'. A lot of Krautrock was trying to plough its own furrow, but there were other bits that were trying to Germanize Western things. And the odd thing about it is, I never knew that Michael Rother lived in Wilmslow for a time - which is just around the corner from me - in the 70's. I was watching a Krautrock documentary and he was saying: “I've always been surrounded by flowing water, there's always been a river - the Rhine, the Elbe, the Bollin.” And I said: “Hang on, did he just say the Bollin!? That's just down the road!”"

"In the recent documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, the painter speaks at length about being a young artist emerging in post–World War II Germany. He says that he always considered painting to be nothing more than a trade that one dedicates oneself to day after day. Working is, above all, very respectable. Perhaps this attitude can be attributed to the fact that postwar Germans were faced with the arduous (but perhaps liberating) task of writing a new history for themselves—trying to come to terms with the past while simultaneously looking toward the future and the endless possibilities therein. With such daunting business at hand, a workhorse spirit would be a must for all German artists. Fassbinder most definitely had that spirit, leaving behind forty feature-length films and playing countless other roles over the course of his short career. Lola alludes to some of these particular pressures and concerns. Lola herself is a woman with a troubled past pressing forward with her life. It is a great, classic story, and a lot can be read into it. But on a purely aesthetic level, Lola is a sumptuous visual journey. So many textures and colors . . . if Zéro de conduite is a Dadaist masterpiece and The Scarlet Empress is expressionism on film, Lola is pure Technicolor pop art, and one of the best late Fassbinder films. Coincidentally, Rainer Werner Fassbinder died the day before I was born."

"Another one’s Coming Home, by Hal Ashby. I mean, I love all of his films — if there’s any filmmaker I would love to be, it would be him. It’s just an amazing film. You think about something like Harold and Maude, which is to me one of the most flawless films there is. There’s always the great films, like Harold and Maude, sure; but then there’s ones that people kind of forget about, you know, or they sort of get swept to the side a little — and I think Coming Home is one of those films. Even The Last Detail is one of those films. But Coming Home: amazing performances, it’s about something, amazing emotional stuff, and it’s just about people — people trying to connect. There’s a simplicity to it, but it’s really engaging the entire time. Waldo Salt wrote the script. I saw a documentary on him. I think just knowing how a film’s made makes me love it as well. He wrote a 200-, 300-page script for this thing, and went and talked to vets and recorded them for like a year. Jon Voight went and lived with paraplegics and war vets who had been injured and stayed in his wheelchair the entire time. It was just a good commitment to making a film, you know, whereas these days it’s like, “I’ll get my double to do it.” I feel like that was made at a time when people still had passion."