"Those Éthiopiques reissues were so amazing. This was the 21st one of those - it was a collection of some of her recordings. She was known as ""The Singing Nun"". The reissues introduced me to Ethiopian music. I'd never heard any before then, and I think that's probably true for most people. I was so bewitched by it. When I heard the Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou album I was totally blown away. The first thing I thought of when I heard it was Thelonious Monk. He was an obsession of mine when I was a piano-playing teenager. It also made me think of Debussy and Satie and stuff - the way the harmony just hangs there in suspension. Her playing - the manual element of it, like the way you can hear her fingers moving around the keyboard, reminds me of Monk and Mingus and those more idiosyncratic jazz musicians. It's so beautiful. This was the beginning of me thinking that Ethiopia was a really interesting culture that I knew absolutely nothing about. My wife and I moved to London into a little flat on Caledonian Road and there were lots of Ethiopian restaurants around there - it was a little hub for the Ethiopian community. Getenesh, the owner of this restaurant Kokeb, we were there so much that she took us in and adopted us. We still get phone calls from her if we haven't been there for a long time. I think it was the music and that, and right before Swim came out, my wife and I were basically not going to see each other for a year because I was going to be away so much, so we decided to go on a trip and do something special together. So we went to Ethiopia and I fell in love with this record all over again. It's such a distinctive place with a distinctive musical culture. When you're there all you hear is Ethiopian music. There's no Bieber or Western music. I thought the album was a totally undiscovered gem, a rare thing, but I heard two people that had my favourite track on the record as their ringtone! That blew me away. Imagine if somebody over here had Benjamin Britten on their phone. It gave me a sense of what a deep-rooted and proud musical culture it is."

"I spent my moviegoing life avoiding Ingmar Bergman movies. A few glimpses of The Seventh Seal or Persona made me think they were not accessible. I also knew Woody Allen worshipped him, so surely they were over my head. It was while working on my Ikea-sponsored web series Easy to Assemble that I thought: Well, if I’m going to be satirizing Swedish culture, I should watch some Bergman. He became the director from whom I have learned the most. He gave me the courage not to shy away from pain, which is the core of all comedy. The results are apparent in “Finding North,” an episode in Easy to Assemble’s third season, and all my writing since. I chose Wild Strawberries because in it I found the key that changed my work forever. I always lived in a daydream, where sometimes things felt real and sometimes they felt imagined. So much of an actor’s life is imagination. Wild Strawberries is a road-trip movie about an old man who looks back at his life, his loves, his regrets, and has to face certain truths about himself. The story is not revealed by flashbacks, though. It’s revealed by going from reality to daydream. He reflects on his past with a nostalgia for childhood. This makes reality feel more present and his relationship with his grown son and daughter-in-law more uncomfortable. Have you ever been in the presence of someone having an argument and thought, I can’t believe they revealed that to me? That is every scene in a Bergman film! After his wife died, Bergman said, “I was in a room built of my own sorrow.” No other sentence expresses the pain of losing a loved one in such a poetic way. His words are so revealing, and coupled with the right emotions, the right images, they bring me as close to the human experience as anything I have experienced in a film. There is another reason Wild Strawberries has a special place in my heart. In 2013, because of my involvement in Easy to Assemble, I was cast in a Swedish-American show called Welcome to Sweden. I like to imagine that Bergman had a hand in that. I shot a scene with Lena Olin in which we picked wild strawberries. It was not imagined, though. That really happened!"

"Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese. Growing up, most of my friends were interested in becoming bankers or working in a company. I, however, wanted to become a movie director. This was something that I couldn’t be open about with my friends and oftentimes I felt lonely because I couldn’t share those aspirations. I lost my father when I was quite young. My mother was working and I was a latchkey child. Even if I talked to a lot of people, I always felt a little lonely. I thought maybe I’m sick, maybe I’m ill. There was no counseling, or there were no therapists. It was not a trend at that time. So I thought maybe I’m really strange. After watching Taxi Driver and seeing Travis, I felt this immense similarity between the character and myself. He lives in New York, surrounded by so many people, but he still felt lonely. This surprised me, and I thought “Here is this guy, living in America, who is like me.” Seeing his character, I felt relaxed and realized there are others like me. I felt I was okay. And I wanted to put that feeling in Death Stranding. Like, you’re all alone, trying to connect the world. Everything has been connected by the internet recently. In so many ways, everyone is battling each over the internet. If you play online, you get head shots, but, like, you don’t know who you actually shot, right? To connect is a very positive concept. But there are people who don’t want to feel connected anymore, and I think a lot of people play games that don’t offer human connection. I can’t tell anyone that I feel lonely or I’m in solitude, and I have this big problem which I couldn’t share with my friends. It’s a big load to carry, just like Sam Bridges. And you’re kind of traveling, you’re sent orders, you go to this place, you trip over, and drown in a river. But at one point, you have this indirect connection system where you know you’re not alone. It’s not an isolated, lonely planet. There is someone who creates a road. There is someone who has made the coffee. It’s not just me, and I wanted to put that in a game. This is the same feeling I got from Taxi Driver."

"If I were to have one at the moment, I think Chris [Cummings, AKA Marker Stalling] is my favourite composer. There's a lot of depth; there are a lot of nooks and crannies and obscure pockets to dive into, not at first listen but with each repeat. The album reveals its beauty after many listens, and each time you listen more it's like, ah yes! It's another one of those records that you can listen to forever, whatever mood you're in. I remember last year I took a long road trip to France and I was meeting friends, so each time I would play it, and in whatever circumstances, the music would fit. In happy circumstances it was great, but on another occasion I remember a friend had lost their dad, and it was very soothing and healing. It's another album that holds a lot of magic and is forever comforting. If it's hot it freshens you up, if it's cold it warms you up! It's great. He wrote a song for my last album as well. I'm a big fan. And live it's extraordinary. His backing band is Batch: we just did a residency together, they're amazing. I was watching their video last night actually, a little live thing from a festival, and those guys are brilliant. I can't believe how great they are, in terms of being really good musicians with great songs and also the heart, how they play. They are very implied in what they play. A lot of musicians I've seen in the past are just going through the moves, there's no energetic involvement or heart in their playing. Technically it's probably quite good, but to me it's very boring. But with these guys, I remember seeing them and I thought they were so good, but part of me wanted to make fun of them, but I couldn't because there was so much heart in their playing that I could only love them. So when Chris comes to the UK or tours Europe usually Batch are his backing band, and it's brilliant. But there are usually only ten or twenty people watching them. Maybe now it's a little bit more, but it's like, come on people, this is really amazing! He's an amazing performer who's full of surprises. He's very warm and super funny and excellent: I can't recommend him enough."