"I have a 1000… I have a top 100. I can tell you five movies that are important to me, but as I say, I could go on and on. Shampoo is important to me. Hal Ashby, one of the great directors of our time, died very young, and is sometimes overlooked; but he did The Last Detail, and Being There, and he is a great director. And Robert Towne wrote the script with Warren Beatty. It’s a brilliant script, a portrait of LA at a certain time and the United States when we were going through a spasm of political activity that was very discouraging — it ends with the election of Nixon and Agnew. It’s hilarious, it’s sexy; it deals with all the variety of complications of people’s behavior. Jack Warden is brilliant in it; hilarious in one of the greatest scenes ever shot: At the end of the movie when Beatty comes back to his house and he thinks that Jack Warden’s gonna have him killed ’cause he’s slept with both Warden’s wife and his daughter, Carrie Fisher. It’s a great, great film, but Warden is brilliant in that scene. The movie is full of great writing; it’s almost like a French farce, but very modern. Beatty is at his absolute best. Everybody in it is great. Julie Christie’s a knockout. So that’s an important movie that not enough people have seen."

"I think it’s always incredibly difficult to thread that needle between real pathos and comedy. And I think Postcards dances on that knife’s edge, not to go overboard with the metaphors, but it’s just so beautifully calibrated because the script, Carrie Fisher’s. There is no greater writing mind ever; Carrie Fisher had such a particular lens that she looked through the world with, and it just translated incredibly into her writing. I just thought the script was just so funny, but the performances! It’s one of those movies that for me is the whole package. Although I did not grow up with a mother who was in show business, the relationship between them was not dissimilar from mine in a way, and made me feel connected to the material. But it’s the kind of movie that I actually own still on VHS. I remember buying this movie and wanting it, so I have it for just memory’s sake, but I also have it on DVD, and Cody Fern, who’s an actor on American Horror Story last year, as a wrap present gave me an original poster. That’s how much I love the movie and that’s how much people around me tend to know I love the movie, because I do quote it a lot. And you just don’t want to sit next to me when we’re watching it though, because you won’t hear the movie. I’m just doing the whole thing, line by line."

"Here's a band that's influenced anyone who's ever heard them - including me! They were the teenage band that pulled you out of the muck of post-puberty. It made sense in a J. D. Salinger kind of way. Confronting the world, kicking against the pricks, all those sort of motifs that you get with teenage years. The Chameleons were the band that organised your attack through the crap that was going on around you. Here's a story: when we first came over in '89, I thought The Chameleons were so massive. So I thought I'd ask people, ""Hey, when are The Chameleons playing Wembley? We're here, I want to see them!"" And they'd say, ""Never heard of them mate."" So I'd be like, ""No, no, no, The Chameleons, y'know, Script Of The Bridge?"" I'd just keep asking what enormo-dome they would be playing. And I could not believe how small a cult following they had - I was stunned to hear that this band didn't have such a wide following. In my view this band was bigger than Pink Floyd. I'm now friends with Mark Burgess and have been for 30 years. I'm always marveled by the stories that he tells me from the twists and turns of the band to how they could've been big but weren't. Script Of The Bridge is one of those lingering drones in music that's always been in the background."

"Another one’s Coming Home, by Hal Ashby. I mean, I love all of his films — if there’s any filmmaker I would love to be, it would be him. It’s just an amazing film. You think about something like Harold and Maude, which is to me one of the most flawless films there is. There’s always the great films, like Harold and Maude, sure; but then there’s ones that people kind of forget about, you know, or they sort of get swept to the side a little — and I think Coming Home is one of those films. Even The Last Detail is one of those films. But Coming Home: amazing performances, it’s about something, amazing emotional stuff, and it’s just about people — people trying to connect. There’s a simplicity to it, but it’s really engaging the entire time. Waldo Salt wrote the script. I saw a documentary on him. I think just knowing how a film’s made makes me love it as well. He wrote a 200-, 300-page script for this thing, and went and talked to vets and recorded them for like a year. Jon Voight went and lived with paraplegics and war vets who had been injured and stayed in his wheelchair the entire time. It was just a good commitment to making a film, you know, whereas these days it’s like, “I’ll get my double to do it.” I feel like that was made at a time when people still had passion."