"Every aspect of the movie is excellent. There isn’t one wrong move — from the script, to the acting, to the music. It’s such a beautiful human story about an individual struggle set against the corrupt unions screwing over the dock workers. So, you have this social background for the situation, and then you have the personal human journey of the brother of one of these union mobsters, who has to sort of turn on his own people. Marlon Brando pretty much rocked the cinema with this new style of acting, and you can never go back to Cary Grant. As wonderful as Cary Grant is, Marlon Brando changed the game. Karl Malden has one of the greatest movie monologues of all time as the priest in the docks, encouraging everyone to take a stand. He was like the first Norma Rae. I have the soundtrack on my iPod. I love great movie soundtracks, and I consider that one of those."

"Another movie that is hugely influential to me and I never get tired of watching it. The cinemascope photography is unbelievable, evolutionary and fantastic. The performances, the production design and the pacing – it’s kind of slow but it draws you into it and it makes you wish there could still be movies like that nowadays. I mean most movies these days are made for teenagers. It’s almost as if people’s brains work differently these days. Maybe its commercials and music videos and videogames and you just want more stimuli at a faster pace. Filmmakers seem to be afraid to trust the audience more. I don’t mean that movies should be slow and boring, but if you have a good enough script you should be able to use the power of the image to tell a story. It’s like if you look at Pixar movies like Wall-E, actually I do think they have a slower pace, there’s such richness in every frame."

"A classic musical exploitation film, only with a good script, a good director and The Beatles at the height of their first flush of fame. It's got a slightly bullshitty plot, but it rolls along at a fantastic lick and obviously you get a lot of great musical performances. But it's those scenes where they're chased through Marylebone station that are the most amazing. The phenomenon of public youth hysteria is really interesting. The book documents three historical moments of it. The first was August 1926, when Rudolph Valentino died and tens of thousands of kids came on the streets, there's a brief snippet of it in the film, we actually found some footage. Then in 1939, when The Wizard Of Oz opened in Manhattan - Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland arrived in grand central and were mobbed by kids. And then obviously Sinatra at the Paramount which is the climax of the movie."

"So, Raging Bull. We got a young De Niro, who put the weight on and took it off. “I got no choice!” I mean again, its something very specific to a culture and neighborhood. A young Pesci, Scorsese, all the acting in it, I just connected with it. I laughed and I got uncomfortable at the same time. I felt every emotion every time I watch that film. That’s a great night at the cinema for me when I’ve laughed, when I’ve cried, when I was angry, and when I was turned on. All of those emotions are happening when I watch that film. It’s like putting my favorite audio book on. Sometimes I can just close my eyes and listen to them talk, and there’s such a rhythm. It just feels so authentic and this is just regular conversation. It was almost like they didn’t even have a script. I think that’s a testament to the acting and the writing."

"I had a friend at school that was just as obsessive about music as I was. He was a huge New Order fan. He lent me a really badly taped cassette of Script Of The Bridge. At first I thought it was too dangerously close to prog rock. Around that time, I think I'd just gone to sixth form… What was great about that was meeting people of a like mind. But the place where I came from was a typical Northern small town. I think the idea was probably dawning that there was nothing there and I didn't really belong. I was stuck in my own world with no outlet for it. I spent a lot of time just wandering around and thinking about stuff, and that was the soundtrack to it really. Pissing it down in the North on dark evenings. It sounds like rain in the north-west to me now. I dunno what's good about that."

"Like many of these, this movie qualifies for me partly because it was an unexpected thrill when I first saw it in the early seventies. I’m neither much a Tony Curtis nor a Burt Lancaster fan, and I’d never heard of Alexander Mackendrick (he made half his relatively few films, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, in the UK; a later, strong U.S. job was A High Wind in Jamaica). Sweet Smell of Success, again, too, is quasi-noir. It’s a black-and-white, urban, small film about people’s bad luck and bad character, set in the Broadway cubicles and show-biz restaurants of New York’s sleazy show-world underbelly. Despite my prior relative indifference to the actors in it, they’re perfectly cast—against their standard types—in this, and do terrific jobs, and the script, by the highly skilled and literate Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is spectacular. James Wong Howe shot the cold-ass thing."