"""Alright, I’d say the first would have to be Goodfellas. I know that’s probably one you get a lot, but I remember it came out, and I was probably in about the 8th grade. Me and my buddy Dougie Thornel probably saw that at the theaters 30 times. I mean we would just go, and we would watch it, and then sit in the theater and watch it again. I can’t say enough good about it. It’s horrifying, it’s hilarious, it’s so unbelievably honest. Look, I mean, Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker. You know, the fact that I got the chance to work with him [on The Wolf of Wall Street] was sort of the mountaintop, the kind of crowning achievement of my career, and I don’t mean that in sort of how I’m perceived by the world. I just mean in terms of experience. My brief time on that movie really changed the way that I work as an actor. He’s one of these guys that makes you feel that anything is possible. I’ve studied in the Russian theater, and one of the main ways that we study was you get a scene and then you do a big improvisation about the scene and what the scene could be. That’s precisely how he worked. Each one of these scenes, you create this unbelievably vivid reality, you really take yourself to the place, and everybody feels like they are one hundred feet tall. It doesn’t matter whether you are background or whether you are craft services or anything, but everybody is so full of ideas. You make it on the day, and then he just sort of takes what he wants from that. I feel like that method of filmmaking that’s so Scorsese, so uniquely his, shines brightest in that movie. That sense of anything can happen at anytime, it’s happening right there in the moment. I think it really, really just shines brightest in that film, and that’s why it’s my favorite film."""

"A lot of Todd Haynes’ “Dark Waters” is shot from a distance. Lots of squared-off rectangular compositions, lots of corners and windows, lots of flat tracking shots. The colors are muted, greenish-gray and black. In contrast to the imagery of other films in the good old American David vs. Goliath tradition, Todd sets his hero’s very human struggle with the giant corporation DuPont in a visual framework that always looks a lot more corporate than human. It’s a really interesting choice. The handheld camera-work and bleached deserts of “Erin Brockovich” are as far away as the lighted ceiling squares and shadowy parking garages of “All The President’s Men” — the two most-famous exemplars of this genre. Instead, “Dark Waters” looks expensive, angular, and soft-edged. Even the interpolated closeups of Mark Ruffalo as he uncovers one terrible secret after another never break or mottle the movie’s palette. If it’s not stretching the point, “Dark Waters” looks a bit like it was shot on, well, Teflon. It’s a chilly, chilling approach to a drawn-out, turbulent, often soul-crushing struggle. But it makes perfect sense, considering the size and character of the corporate culture Mark’s Robert Bilott both works in and pits himself again. He’s not building a lawsuit house by house from behind the wheel of a pickup truck; he’s a corporate lawyer pursuing a huge corporation from expensive corporate offices. And whenever the movie does linger over the human costs he’s trying to redress, the effect is as gruesome as a mutilated body on a slab in a very clean morgue. These choices are a stark reminder that ultimately, even Bilott’s spectacular, hard-won legal victory is a drop in DuPont’s bucket. And it speaks to the pervasive character of the problem (not to mention the chemicals in our drinking water) that even when the good guys gain some ground, the world Todd captures in this movie is one of cold grays, smooth edges and gleaming surfaces to which nothing ever sticks. Not yet, anyway."

"I think the greatest film of all time. It doesn’t even care about anything. It has the best MacGuffin. The audiences in the west — if you’re going to transfer somebody from one place to the other, you want to spend all the money on the big gadgets that do all of the — as Monty Python says “the machines that go BING” kind of stuff. Whereas in La Jetée, just two guys lie down on a hammock, they drug intravenously, and they go, “Voila! We’re in the future.” I just love that. It’s just a Macguffin in a different culture, the different time — they’re used to different things. And for me, having traveled a lot, I always have to find out — when you show a movie to people they just say, “Would you buy this?” That’s one of the reasons you have origin films — like Superman or whatever — that takes so long in the west whenever you start to originate one, because you have to set up that this guy can fly because he is from another planet, has a nemesis, you can make him grounded when you give him kryptonite, and all that stuff. You watch a Hindi movie, and they just say, “Hey this guy can deflect a bullet with his ring because he is [Indian film actor] Amitabh Bachchan, so next question.” Literally, it is all about what each culture takes — to take as a MacGuffin and where they want the money spent. And La Jetée just doesn’t care. It’s got the greatest story and the movie — the images don’t even move except in one particular instance — I don’t want to spoil it for someone who hasn’t seen it. But it is just one of the greatest. It was made the year I was born, I was obsessed with it forever and when Terry Gilliam made 12 Monkeys I knew it was done."

"There are many compilations of Greek Rembetiko music, but I chose this one because it has some classics on it that I’ve been aware of for a long time. In the early 20th-century, after the First World War after Kemal Atatürk came to power in Turkey, there was an exchange – to put it politely – an exchange of population between Greece and Turkey and was extremely unpleasant at the time for both countries. At that time, a lot of Greeks who had lived in what’s now Turkey for a really long time, moved over and came to Piraeus as refuges and brought this music with them which was a mixture of Greek central European and Asian or western Asian sort of music and it evolved into this form of street music played by these guys called Mangas – the wide boy, gangsters, hoodlums of Piraeus in the 20s. It’s funny in Greece still today; some people don’t like to be reminded of that side of Greek history. It’s seen as anti-bourgeois – it’s the only way I can put it. The songs were about whores, smoking dope, stabbing your mates or being done over or sticking up for your mates – these classic themes – but because they were sung not only in Greek but in an impenetrable dialect that most modern Greeks would find hard to get their head around, though it didn’t really get that far past Greece itself. The history is fascinating but the music is like nothing else that I know. Also, even though I grew up in Scotland, I still feel this strong connection to the Greek side of my background, and when I listen to this music I feel I can connect with this history that I know preceded me and I don’t have a direct contact with myself, it’s a way I can understand a little bit of where I came from."

"So the The Wolf King Of L.A. and There's A Riot Goin' On were both recorded in the same studio. John Phillips bought Jeanette McDonald, a Hollywood actress, a mansion in Bel Air. And he illegally built a studio in the attic, which was huge. I guess there were building restrictions, but he just wanted to build a recording studio in there. He recorded the album in that place. Now coming on to the transcendent, joyous, pop glory of The Mamas & The Papas, The Wolf King Of L.A. is a very strange album. I think John was hanging out with Gram Parsons and as a result, the record is a country-soul-pop album. In The Mamas & The Papas, he was writing for a pop audience and I guess that was a message to Michelle Phillips because they're both adulterers, I think. John would write a song and get Denny Doherty to sing it because he knew he was having an affair with his wife. John was quite a dark guy! They were very personal songs, but also universal because he was writing for a pop audience. But with Wolf King, he went solo. Phillips became deeply addicted to heroin, coke and everything else. He was a very advanced drug addict. Wolf King Of L.A. is a very soulful album. John wrote and arranged the songs for The Mamas & The Papas but his voice was hidden in the mix as Denny and Michelle had incredible voices. But on this album, it's just his voice. And I believe that the session musicians were Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew and are the same guys who played on The Mamas & The Papas records. They loved John Phillips and thought he was a fucking great guy. It's one of those records I haven't stopped playing for 30 years and a great document of rock and LA culture in the late '60s. It's also got a great cover with John wearing a top hat standing on Malibu beach with the sun setting looking absolutely wasted."

"When you inevitably are asked about your favourite record, you can scratch your head and go through a list, because your taste changes from year-to-year or through different periods of your life. However, I have always been able to say that Raw Power is my favourite from the moment I first heard it, and I don't think it has been equalled since. A couple of friends recommended it to me. At the age of 14, I was starting to play guitar in a certain way and the name [of Stooges' guitarist] James Williamson kept cropping up. A couple of guys I knew assumed I had been listening to Raw Power because of the way I was playing riffs. So I thought I had better investigate. I knew all about Iggy and The Stooges but I wasn't aware of Raw Power. I got the album in about 1976. I had heard so much about it that eventually I want into town to buy it and I picked up a copy for about three quid, which was all I had. The cover alone made me want to buy the record, and, when I heard it, I realised why my mates had been saying what they had. In particular, the song 'Gimme Danger' started off with a riff that was very much like one I was playing with the band I was in at the time. As a guitarist, James Williamson's playing struck me as having the technique of Jimmy Page but with the irreverence and attitude of Keith Richards. I have since become friends with James and have talked to him about what he was doing back then. He knew exactly what he was doing and it was very deliberate, which is always quite impressive. There is a lot more I could say about Raw Power. It gave me a path to follow as a guitar player. It was an opening into a world of rock & roll, sleaze, sexuality, drugs, violence and danger. That's a hard combination to beat."

"""This would've been in my top five for sure - it's a big, big record for me. It's incredible on so many levels. If you want a record that illustrates what music can do in a very different sense, this is it. It's progressive and weird, but it shows you can make a concept album that isn't awful. I grew up in this little town called Dundas in Ontario - actually, I lived outside it, but all my friends lived in town. And this record is like a mythical record in Dundas, because one of my friends found a copy of it in the middle of the road - just lying there - and he brought it home. I wasn't doing any drugs at that point, but it was around that time my friends were smoking weed and doing mushrooms and whatever, so finding a beat-up copy of this record and putting it on it was like: ""HOLY SHIT!!!"" I still can't really listen to that track that's just an infinity symbol - I find it uncomfortable. And then there's 'The Four Horsemen' - that's like the Dundas theme as far as I'm concerned. It captures something of the eccentric spirit of this weird place that I grew up in. At the time that I found out about this record, the only reason I knew about Vangelis was because of the Chariots Of Fire theme, which was pretty terrible or definitely naff. But I love introducing people to this record because it's so far away from what they think Vangelis or Demis Roussos would do, even if you know the Blade Runner soundtrack. It's so far removed from anything that either of those guys was involved in. The music on there is so diverse; each track is completely different. Leading up to the release of the new album I was doing a DJ mix, and because of doing this feature there are now two tracks from this record on that mix! I'd forgotten how fucking good all these tracks are."""