"“It’s predictable, but Performance, the Donald Cammell movie, contains one of the great cinema performances from James Fox. Mick Jagger is in there too giving a very good performance, and I know that by heart too. The soundtrack is epic, it’s beautiful, including a great Mick Jagger song called “Turner’s Song: Memo from T” which is a great, great song with some beautiful lyrics. It’s just a film that I have a soft spot for. I always remember watching Mean Streets, which was the first time I ever heard a Stones song in a movie. It was on the jukebox in the club, Jumpin’ Jack Flash was the song, and it was shocking that the Rolling Stones would allow one of their songs to be in a movie. But Scorsese has always had them in there; he’s a man of taste. They have a long relationship, because the Stones don’t use to let just anybody use their songs, you’d never get a Rolling Stones song in your movie. I also enjoyed Shine a Light, I thought it was wonderful. I loved the guests, Christina Aguilera, my god! What is that? She’s got so much talent, she’s so brilliant, and she looks so beautiful. You can see Mick’s face; he looked like he was so happy. Not only is she sensationally beautiful, glamorous and sexy, but also she can really, really, really do it, and the two of them pumping out that song was just beautiful. I’ve never seen a man look more happy or more grateful than Jack White, standing there singing Loving Cup. If you ever want to see a portrait of a young man looking as happy as it’s possible for a young man to look, check out Jack White in Shine a Light. At one point they’ve both got a microphone, Mick’s got one, he’s got the other, but he can’t bear it, he rushes over and shares a mic with Mick, because you know he wants to be able to say, “I shared a mic with Mick.” Then at the end he shakes everybody’s hand, Charlie, Keith and everybody, and if he was a dog he’d wag himself to death. If he’d had nine tails, it wouldn’t have been enough."

"I love the scope of the movie; there is something in David Lean that I like very much. He’s always of the macro worlds and the micro worlds; he didn’t only do it in Lawrence of Arabia, but repeated it in Dr. Zhivago and other movies. [In Lawrence of Arabia] he made a movie with enormous scope and events that were known in the world — the Turkish-British War, and at the time, the taking of Akaba — things that were very spectacular and very epic, but in reality he’s talking to us about the homosexuality of one of the characters and something really minimalistic and very precise. He gets into the soul of a man through this spectacular movie and this union of these two worlds. He did it again in Dr. Zhivago as I said before, because in a way he put together the entire Russian revolution, which is also very big, while in reality telling a love story. So this kind of union, joining, he does between the macro world and the micro world is something that I was always interested in, and he was a master of doing the type of job. It’s one of those movies that always remain in your mind. Also, he gave himself permission to do it in a way that probably no studio would buy in our day; just to see a man coming from five miles into the camera for two minutes and a half — no executive producer would allow that to happen! He gave himself permission to do that, and I had the luck of seeing a remastered version of Lawrence of Arabia in a theater in Spain 10 years ago, and it was magnificent because it gave you the possibility of thinking, which is unusual. We also have the performance of first time movie actor Peter O’Toole. That was the first movie that he did, which I didn’t know until I worked with Omar Sharif in a movie that I did years ago called 13th Warrior, and he told me that. At the time, he was a very prominent theater actor in London, but that was the first movie that he did. I will never forget those blue eyes on the big screen. Amazing!"

"I sometimes worry that I don't like current music. I remember when I was thinking about today's interview that I was so glad this is a current album. Well, actually it's four or five years old. When I first heard this album it blew my mind – it has hit after hit. There is a conviction he has when he does things that could possibly be deemed as being cheesy or not cool and this conviction overshadows all of that and it is wholly satisfying. I knew of him before, but it was a wonderful surprise to hear this music. You hear a song like 'Round And Round' and it is epic – it's like a mini-musical with all the different parts – and everything is so intricate, be it the percussion or the different vocal parts. I think it is a masterpiece. It was really wonderful discovering him and finding that he had a trail of all these really bizarre records that he had been doing for years. You could buy all these weird albums - he was beatboxing on some of them - and I loved generally finding out all of his history. He would tour and not turn up at gigs, or just lie on the ground and shout ""I'm too ill to do this!"" and leave, or he would just turn up with a bag of mixtapes and put them in a tape machine and sing karaoke. I think there are a lot of faux eccentrics knocking around, so it is nice to find someone who is genuinely eccentric. It's satisfying to know it comes from a real place. I was lucky enough to see him play in a church in Koreatown [in Los Angeles] about eight months ago. There is always a worry when you really love a record that a gig might not be as good. He came on stage wearing leopard-print trousers and a floral shirt and carrying a basket of flowers and told us he was Little Miss Riding Hood – it was just wholly entertaining. He is a real treasure."