"And then, my fourth one is a comedy, and I was torn between Some Like It Hot, which I love, but my vote went to Spinal Tap, which I thought was more contemporary. It made me feel such an old man, but… One of the things about Spinal Tap — I was doing a documentary [The Long Way Home] about Russian rock and roll in, I don’t know, the late ’80s or something like that, and it was about a Russian band coming — it was around Glasnost when they came across to America to make the record, and it was about Glasnost, and the co-production, as it were, saw the closing of the gap between East and West, as it were. That’s what it set out to be, but it turned out to be a disaster. Not the film, but the whole object of the enterprise, because it split the band up, and the Russian band never made another record. They were completely disoriented by being in the West and all that. So it was one of those documentaries where what you set out to do, you don’t do, and you do something else, which is usually better than what you were going to do. The point of the story is that I showed them Spinal Tap. They fell about, and they couldn’t speak a word of English, but they absolutely got it. It was just, again, the power of the humor and the power of the images, and all this kind of stuff. I mean, we were in common ground — they never understood a word of it, but they were just laughing as much I would laugh every time I saw it. That was a kind of interesting experience for me, to see how universal films can be."

"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."

"I think one of the main reasons I picked Abattoir Blues and Lyre Of Orpheus was because, as a double album, you get more bang for your buck. Abattoir Blues has a more gospel feel to it, background vocals and big crescendos. Lyre Of Orpheus was generally a quieter record except for the title track, which is one of my favourites. I love the lyrics to that song. One awesome thing about Nick Cave is the darkness and the humour in his stuff. On Abattoir Blues, I love 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World', 'Hiding All Away' and 'Nature Boy'. Just good tunes man. At this point you can hear the Warren Ellis influence. I've always been a Nick Cave fan, since The Birthday Party. My roommate at the time, Charles Peterson [Sub Pop photographer], had a copy of Prayers On Fire and I've been listening to and following Nick Cave ever since then. First time I got to see him he didn't play Seattle, so me and my friends drove three hours north to Vancouver and that was on the First Born Is Dead tour. My favourite ever Nick Cave lyric was going way back to 'Deep In The Woods' [from Mutiny/The Bad Seed] - where it ends with the line, "Tonight we sleep in separate ditches"; that always cracks me up. 20,000 Days On Earth was the best music documentary I've ever seen. It didn't follow the normal " and then he did this and then he did that" of those Behind The Music narratives, it was a surreal and cool peak in to Cave's world. Something I learned about him that I didn't know already is that he likes to eat pizza in front of the TV!"