"It’s been years since I’ve read Patrick McGilligan’s Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, but if I recall correctly, toward the end of his life, Lang was coming around to the conclusion that M would be the best film he ever made. If so, I certainly wouldn’t argue with the man. If he were making films today, Lang would probably be known as something of a geek. An artsy geek, maybe, but one with, besides a remarkable sense of composition, a penchant for state-of-the-art technology, its possibilities and implications. Which makes the use of silence in his first talkie all the more impressive. The other major asset M’s got, of course, is Peter Lorre."

"I remember seeing A Clockwork Orange as a very young kid — probably too young to be seeing it — and there was something kind of dangerous about that world. It was like I know I should have been watching, but there was something about the style in which it was shot. Maybe it was how long the camera stayed looking at one thing, but it didn’t move very far. It captured a certain theatrical nature of something. There was almost a vaudeville quality to it all as well. I think I’m drawn to that because I have a love of theatre, and of pictures that are perhaps a little bit larger than life."

"This record was the precursor to my operatic downfall when I was 13. Before opera there was Annie Lennox - she inhabited that realm of drama and beauty and the ephemeral. So I was obsessed with that record and I think also, even though at the time I wasn't necessarily aware of my sexuality, it definitely spoke to this self-discovery that was bound to happen, regarding the tenuous nature of gender. That album cover with her looking like a man was just so life-changing – I imagine a bit like when people saw Bowie's record covers. For me, Annie Lennox in that macho pose made so much sense without me knowing what the hell it meant."