"I found out about Leonard Cohen from Nirvana, from Pennyroyal Tea. I was vastly too young and I didn't understand [his music] at the time, but you still want to be into what's 'in' and it's tough to make such bold strides, whether you understand it subconsciously or not. When you've got someone that has a voice, that voice only gets better with age and… fuck, there's so much character on this record. It was a tough album to listen to after he died, the same with Bowie's Blackstar. When you go back into a record and listen to someone talk about mortality on a level where they're really trying to understand it because it's imminent… that's an intense listen. There's been a lot of media attention because of his passing, and I got to catch some documentaries on his life with some really beautiful moments I'd never seen before. There's a show he was playing in a university for this crowd. He walks off and is out the back smoking, and they're chanting his name but he's got nothing left to play. He walks back out and he's crying, playing one more thing, and everything's silent as he's still drying his tears, overwhelmed by this love from strangers."

"In the same [kin] as Ordinary People, I have to throw All the President’s Men in there, which is a completely different film for Redford to do, but probably one of the greatest journalism films of all time. There are so many elements to that film that are unique to it. The relationship between [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein, the way those are portrayed, and then just the whole mystery of the Watergate being spilled out for us. When that happened, I was… I don’t remember, I must have been three or four, five. Those were the years — that was the first time I can remember in my lifetime of something going on politically, and so I actually have memory of that time. And I don’t remember what it was, but I remember the words “Watergate” meaning something. Meaning something big, even though I didn’t understand what they were. Just for that film to be so dialogue heavy, and so all about performance, and the written word, it is one of the most on-the-edge-of-your-seat thrillers that I can think of that is pretty powerful… It’s the most riveting film about people who sit down and type, you know what I mean? You can imagine, it’s pretty intense."

"Like I mentioned I love the desert. I have a video somewhere of my wife and I listening to this record driving in Joshua Tree. It really does sound like how it looks. To be honest, I knew of the soundtrack long before I saw the film. And that's how it is for me with a lot of Morricone scores. I went through a deep Morricone phase in my twenties, and just any soundtrack he ever did I bought. The movie's already there – you can see it. And I bet he would agree too – a lot of his music is far more cinematic than the films he's actually scored. He has this intense visual element to his music which is always exciting to hear. So that record in particular, I remember I first heard it in my twenties and it really blew my mind. The production – the fact that it is so produced – sure it's a recording from the 60s or something. But it is a studio album. So you hear him getting really great sounding recordings in some old-school microphone (old-school now). Really getting such a rich, beautiful sound. And then you get that fuzz effect, which is just quintessential Morricone sound, probably because of this record."

"I found Devin when he was around seventeen years old and I needed a singer for my band. So when I heard tapes of him singing I thought there was really something there but the music he was playing was bizarre; it was really heavy and industrial and I thought, “It’s really good but I’m not supposed to like this because I like this…” But when he was working with me the poor guy was stuck under my thumb because my music is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship. I want things a certain way. Devin wasn’t writing at that time but when he went off and did his own thing and when he did… I’m going to use the ‘G’ word here… I think he’s a genius, I really do. He’s so passionate, so intense and – at times – so tormented, but there’s this redeeming quality of deep, deep beauty about everything he does. I think that in the future when people evolve, if they go back and actually listen to musicians of the past, when it comes to metal, he should be number one. There’s stuff in his catalogue that nobody else would have the balls to venture into."

"Yes, there was quite a controversy kicked up last year over the restoration. And while it’s not an uninteresting issue, it doesn’t distract from the gratitude we who hold Fassbinder dear feel when we hold this handsome box in our hands. This is the epic he was racing against destiny to complete; poring over the extras, you can’t help but sense that he knew it too. All of Fassbinder’s period pieces are, of course, about the Germany he lived in, the Germany I would begin visiting regularly just a few years after he’d gone, a Germany at ferocious odds with itself, arguing in the streets and in the papers and in classrooms and over dinner over what sort of country it’d make of itself, even in those later stages of starting all over again—not too long, of course, before starting all over yet again in 1989. An intense love-hate relationship with the German character, with German history and culture, and an ongoing recognition of the inextricability of the personal and the political, for better and for worse, permeate all of Fassbinder’s work; here, all that’s practically on parade. And the fireworks at the end are gruesome and gripping."