"I can’t help but love Giant. A lot of people don’t take Giant seriously. A lot of people like Rebel WIthout a Cause when you’re talking about a movie with James Dean and it’s okay, but I thought James Dean was practically Soupy Sales in that movie. Very over the top. Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor were great in this movie. It’s a classic sweeping story, it’s got a Gone with the Wind kind of vibe, and once again, the little guy who strikes oil becomes this power mad lunatic. Then the whole way they dealt with racism and how it was at the time in Texas, with the Latino wife of Dennis Hopper and that whole thing. Great story and well acted and looked like a movie, you know?"

"One of the best joke-for-joke movies ever put together, and many people haven’t seen it. That’s part of the reason why I’d like to [mention it]. I don’t want to create a list of movies that everyone has seen before; I want you guys to dig it out a little bit. A lot of physical humor, a lot of intellectual humor, just an insane movie for Woody Allen to make. Tons of jokes. People remember Sleeper and they remember Bananas, and Take the Money and Run and stuff like that. Love and Death gets lost a little in the Woody Allen shuffle. He has better films, like one I’ll name in a second, but he does not have a film with more jokes — just jokes — than Love and Death."

"When I was in college, first year, I saw it and I really hadn’t been exposed to a lot of European filmmakers. It’s such a ‘film’ film. It wasn’t required viewing, it was just a film playing on campus and I hadn’t been interested in film before then. Nowadays people are deciding to get into film at age five when they’re sitting, watching the Oscars. I really didn’t come out of that culture — I was pretty much a John Wayne fan and that was it. Zabriskie Point was a time when I was in a lot of change and flux and these incredible visuals hit me like they had rearranged the organs in my body. The ending and the free-floating debris and everything is an image that burned itself in my consciousness."

"It's a beautiful record. It's the Neu/Can supergroup in a way with Jaki from Can on drums and Michael on guitar. It's the pop end of Krautrock and sounds like Utopian sports montage music or something! It evokes the future, even still, for me or my idea of what the future would be at that time. It's a record I listened to a lot in recent years and just a record that I really recommend. I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff until the early-1990s but it was something we listened to a lot of as the Super Furry Animals. I quite like listening to instrumental music as it means I can still think over it without lyrics interfering; there's a time and a place for lyrics!
"

"Cabaret is the classic work [from director Bob Fosse], but Star 80 I think is really worth visiting, because it wasn’t a successful film and it really dealt with a kind of heinous crime. The film itself is brilliantly made, in terms of rhythm and storytelling; if you look at it you’ll see that a lot of directors of my era have been influenced by the aesthetic. Bob Fosse’s great ability with rhythmic storytelling is very alive in the movie, and what’s so intriguing is that it takes a true chapter in the history of Hugh Hefner and the world of Playboy and tells it as a kind of psychological thriller — but with a whole lot of Fosse-like theatricality. So I think that’s a kind of little off-the-radar gem."

"I heard 'Novocaine For The Soul' on the radio and bought the album the very next day. And with their second record, I got it expecting more of the same. This was pre-internet, so there wasn't a lot of information about it, but it would appear that he lost his sister and mum, and so he wrote this record about being in hospital and watching people die. It was extremely sad, and for a teenager it was like, ""Holy shit! What is this?!"" Kids are always intrigued by sob stories of one kind or another - Nirvana being a perfect example - but this guy had clearly been through a lot. He writes very short and simple yet very affecting songs, not produced in a twee way, but very cold and using lots of samples. They didn't really sound like a band at all. Again, they were a three-piece, and a very simple band. He had a really cool voice and a story to tell, and that again really made me think about the fact that the band doesn't have to be that thing which I always thought they were: that you played your drums and you play your bass, when actually it can be anything you want. That really influenced the way I write music. I used a lot more technology after I got into that album. I started to integrate my live sounds - my guitar for example - with my laptop, and I started using a lot more sampling, thinking I want to be a lot more like Eels. I think an element of his very black humour has crept into my music. You always get the sense that he is talking about something very grave, but he does so in a slightly distracting way. Take 'Susan's House': it's got this ridiculous, quite clearly silly motif, which sounds like Neighbours - he knows it does! He's talking about his problems at Susan's house as he's walking past all these awful things in the street, like a kid who has been shot and a pregnant teenager, but it's couched in this happy, jaunty, slightly sarcastic world, and that is precisely where I'm at in my own music. Like the song 'Get To Heaven' is all about the same thing, walking past horrors but with a smile on your face, whistling a jaunty tune. I think a lot of influence came from Mr Everett, because of his outlook on life, where you can be in a very dark position but music doesn't have to abide by those rules, it can subvert it."