"For me, the most devastating childhood remembrance film—if that’s what it is. The story is too remarkable and strange to be fiction. Six-year-old Brigitte Fossey—trying to make sense of her just-witnessed parents’ deaths by urgently assembling a beautiful little animal graveyard—might just nudge out Dean Stockwell as my all-time favorite child star, and she makes me cry a lot more! Comedy mixed in with such sadness, sadness, sadness!!! This is early childhood distilled and put in a very dangerous bottle!"

"For my last Black Ball (which is the fundraiser for my organization Keep a Child Alive) we did a tribute to George Harrison and played a lot of Beatles songs. It was the first time I really had an opportunity to breakdown each song and see why the Beatles are so amazing. They have this way of creating something simple and deep at the same time. Something easy and complex simultaneously is actually mind blowing—how good they are! This album is surely one of my faves."

"I first saw This Is Spinal Tap when I was seven or eight, and it totally changed my life. This was comedy. This was how you performed comedy. It gave me a leg up at an early age. The Criterion disc is a must because they do commentary out of character. Listening to those three guys talking about how they created and related to these characters, how they approached scenes, and where the inspiration for each scene came from taught me a lot. Thanks, Criterion!"

"I love Roland Kirk's stuff, it's always got these mad quirky bits in it, a bit like Mingus or like Monk, but very unique to him. It's a really sweet record, really beautiful, and again it has a link to nature and spirituality. It's deep but it has a lot of humour. Charming arrangements and melodies and a real lightness of touch. I love all those things where you hear him growl on the flute or shout or let off one of his conches."

"Number two would be also Boris Karloff, as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein. That was another performance that left me just chilled and with such imagery that’s emblazoned in my mind, and he channeled something completely different for that. He was a completely different character. It showed his diversity as an actor, and his subtleties. That was an era of filmmaking where people over-did it a lot, and he found subtleties as Frankenstein’s monster that I just thought were [wonderful]. Less was more, and he knew that."