"This trilogy was rereleased at Film Forum in the summer of 2015, right before we started shooting Menashe. I went once a week and cried in the theater by myself. A universal story of birth, death, love, and coming of age. So many moments I can never forget: the joy of the school montage, and the famous scene in which the children see a train for the first time, a symbol of the arrival of modernity."

"I was having a hard time between — I’m a Big Quentin Tarantino fan — having a hard time between Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained. I really like Django. Inglorious I can watch, like, pretty much all the way through. Just something about the way Quentin Tarantino writes and films his movies that I love, so it’s hard to pick one, but I definitely… I have Inglorious Basterds written down here first so I have to go with that."

"I love Kurosawa’s crime movies. The first half of High and Low is so well told, paced, acted, and shot—and it’s all in one room! Then you get into this fascinating police procedural where Toshiro Mifune and his family vanish and the cops take over. I mean, this movie has the “guy unloading crates while being questioned by the cops” scene that is in every Law and Order episode. Kurosawa’s influence is always being felt!"

"He becomes obsessed with some Charlie Chaplin character that disappears in the 1930s, and then he gets a strange letter in the mail, and his life changes. I tried to get more people to read it. The first time I read it, I was like 18 or 19, and I loved it. I really like Paul Auster. He’s hit or miss, but I love his books. I read them even if they are shit and they go nowhere."

"I always go back to Death on the Stairs, the Libertines song. I love that tune. It’s the story it tells, it takes me to a place so far away and yet so familiar. It’s really hard though - I don’t believe in first or best or worse, I'm into liberty and verse - as Pete once sang [in a demo for The Libertines’ The Man Who Would be King]. It’s like going through your kids and picking your favourite child"

"My wife, Sofia, recently published her first book. I'm incredibly proud of her for all her hard work and dedication in writing this and don't know how she did this whilst being a great mom to our both daughters. The book is about her experiences being a young western woman living and doing business in a dictatorship, and it's a story of love and hustle in a land where nothing is what it appears to be."

"I can’t leave out Kubrick. I think my favorite Kubrick movie is kind of tied between A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The Shining meant a lot to me. It was the first movie that made me really want to act. I love Jack Nicholson in that movie. I didn’t know who Jack Nicholson was at the time — I was like 11 when I saw it, but something about what he was doing in that movie just fascinated me."

"In turns moving and funny, Backman’s novel ventures into the life of Ove, a man in late middle age who has adapted to his lonely new world by becoming, frankly, a crabby old fart. But I wager that you’ll soon fall in love with Ove and be deeply moved by his situation, and after spending time with him, may perhaps gaze at the world around you with a little more empathy than when you turned the first page."

"They’re not peers, they’re older, but when I came to New York to college I interned at the studio they used to run in Harlem. This first LP came out before I went to college, and it had such a distinct, reverby, warm sound. I love every song. It’s the band I’ve paid most in my life to go see. This LP is one of the best things to come out of New York in 10 years."