"What can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said? Mike Nichols’s masterpiece precipitated the sixties youth movement in all its melancholic glory while also being a hilarious satire of contemporary consumer culture. My brother Jim has always been an early adopter of movie technology. The first Criterion release I ever remember seeing was the Graduate laserdisc in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen (we had seen the film previously only on a pan-and-scan VHS borrowed from our local library). It has one of the first commentary tracks I ever heard on a disc (maybe the first), by film scholar Howard Suber. I learned a lot about film analysis listening to that track in 1987. But the new Blu-ray also features one of Nichols’s many commentaries in conversation with the great Steven Soderbergh. They have done several together (Catch-22 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and they are never less than fully engaging and fascinating. When making my own film, I took to heart Nichols’s assertion that “a movie is about something, but it is also about something else.” And in this new transfer, The Graduate has never looked or sounded better. Robert Surtees’s brilliant compositions are a touchstone of modern cinema. Often imitated, never duplicated. By casting Dustin Hoffman, Nichols also flipped the idea of what a leading man was and could be, and changed the history of cinema."

"I've been a fan of his since the start, when I heard ‘Didgeridoo'... At our age it was an interesting time, because it was the start of dance culture as we know it, but also I was young enough when I first heard it that I didn't differentiate between hearing a Mary Chain song or hearing an Orb song or a KLF song or a Loop song. I guess of all the bands or musicians that I heard around that first wave of electronic music, I think Richard James is the guy that's continued and kept a high standard and evolved what he did. I mean, that Richard D James record, if you went and listened to half of the brand new IDM vomit they'd be shitty copies of that. What makes his music is so special is that as well as being amazing at concocting interesting sounds and rhythms, he's also musically always doing something brilliant. The piano songs on the Drukqs album are unbelievable. Talking about that, it's completely irrelevant to this, but the most annoyed I've ever got at a music review is the review of Drukqs in Uncut where the journalist said there's no point in making solo piano music because you'd never do anything as good as Satie or Chopin. Well let's just fucking go home then! But anyway. To be able to marry the playfulness with the beauty and the melancholic element, that's just incredible."

"This is the first movie that moved me to tears. I saw this in the theater with my mother when I was eight years old. I was a pretty lonely kid, who made friends slowly when I made them at all. So when I saw this masterwork in a darkened room, surrounded by strangers, spellbound by the flickering world onscreen that painted a devastating portrait of childhood loneliness, it felt like someone had ripped out my insides. I was sobbing in my mom’s arms, aware on some level that what I was watching was completely fake, but on another level was more real than anything I had ever felt or understood. It was the first time I became consciously aware of the power of film to make us feel something. Something I wasn’t even aware of was roiling around inside me. E.T. introduced me to the profound and melancholic truth that love and pain go hand in hand, that love both gives us strength and makes us vulnerable. But, above all, it made me understand that love heals us and gives our lives meaning. E.T. introduced me to an idea that, over thirty years later, would beat at the heart of my directing debut. An eight-year-old me wasn’t prepared for any of that. But watching this movie, clutching my mother’s arm, an overwhelming feeling of empathy washed over me, and it reminded me that I wasn’t alone after all. Someone out there felt just like I did. “Ouch” indeed."

"Baxter Dury was a big inspiration for me and Laurie. Back in the day when we were first touring we’d do loads of shows and I remember that on pretty much every journey we’d have the album Happy Soup on, not talking to each other, we’d just have that on full blast. ‘Claire’ was the one that struck a chord with me, I love the honesty and sincerity of it and the softness in his voice. The instrumentation is everything that I love about a tune, it’s quite melancholic and nice and sad. “I love Baxter Dury. I love Ian Dury as well, but I think they’re in completely different ballparks, they get compared quite a lot but I don’t think they should. I actually discovered Baxter Dury through my Mum, I feel like I’m dropping my parents into this whole thing! My Mum’s very much into new and current music, she’s got her finger on the pulse and she’s always introducing me to new stuff. When this came out she was the first person who showed it to me. She said ‘This is Ian Dury’s son’ and I was ‘Woah, this is fucking sick.’ “Weirdly, Baxter was doing something on 6 Music and he played one of our tunes. He ended up talking to Laurie about the tune, a song of ours called ‘Where's Your Car Debbie?’ and I think he wanted to know more about it. Much to our excitement, we got in contact with him and ended up doing a tune with him and becoming friends with him, it was wicked."

"That moment I had when I was young, listening to White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground… I mentioned there's a song called 'The Gift', and John Cale narrates it. It's about a man who mails himself to his girlfriend as a present. She opens it, and she fucking kills him. I remember… I didn't realise John Cale was Welsh when I was 15. I remember listening to that song and I was like, "Fuck me! That sounds like a Welsh voice!". My mind exploded: one of the pivotal members of The Velvet Underground was a Taff! Anything is possible baby… I really got into John Cale from that moment onwards. I think if you get into John Cale you go to Paris 1919, which is an amazing album and some would say his best, but Slow Dazzle really pushes it for top spot. Number one, it has one of the best covers of all time: he does a cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel' which is a brilliant, brilliant cover. And he goes from that to 'Ski Patrol', and there's another song called 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is almost like a Harry Nilsson, beautifully orchestrated, melancholic plea to a lover. So he goes from serrated acuteness of 'Heartbreak Hotel' to the lushness of 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is just one of the great motivational songs of all time. In a strange way it just motivates you so much. This is where John Cale got his game together: he realised he was an experimental musician who could also write amazing tunes. And this is where you actually hear him not scared of his voice anymore. This was the start of his true greatness. As a solo artist he's nearly unsurpassable to me."