"Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy! The songs were so sexy and raw and filled with beautiful, actually relatable teenage angst. The music and the production was all so immediate. My cool friends and my older brother were all listening to punk. I tried to be cool and tried to like the Sex Pistols, but I just couldn't get into the records. There just wasn't enough song there for me. But the Violent Femmes was like punk music that my brain could actually follow. I played that tape into the ground, just a non-stop soundtrack. Another thing I realised revisiting it was there's just not a bad song on that record, not a single moment that isn't essential. There's not two seconds of filler."

"I have to mention this as one of my favorites. I’ve been lucky enough to work with [producer] Joel Silver. It rewrote the rules on the modern thriller. It set the stage for the expectation that every question needs to be answered, and it has to be big, fun, and emotional, and a movie that can do everything. I try to do Die Hard in every movie that I do, by fulfilling that promise of delivering from the first frame. Obviously many more movies have done that — like Hitchcock — but as a movie that potentially could have gone many ways, it became a masterpiece. Before this movie, you could potentially believe that the bad guys are just bad guys; they don’t have motivation or are dumb. This guy had smart plans and dialogue, and set the bar high. Other movies have met it, but this was one of the first ones and I was blown away when I saw it. As much as I’ve liked other movies, at that time, Die Hard has had more of an influence on my work than the other ones of the time."

"This extraordinary series, based on the collection of books, portrays the story of two young girls and their friendship over time. What is astounding to me is the agency and the “voice” of the two young prepubescent girls that is shown in ways rarely seen on screen. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, wrote extensively of the ways in which girl’s voices are squashed and eradicated by puberty. Likewise, filmmakers rarely portray this vital stage in young girl’s development. As the series progress and the two girls age, their female characters are impacted, twisted, and crushed by the pressure of society. It’s rare that one actually witnesses the crushing of girls into adults in such an exquisitely truthful manner. How these two girls struggle to survive and thrive under the pressures of marriage and sexuality and lack of educational access clamping down on them with their identity intact is brilliant. At the end of season one, I had the rarest experience: I felt like I had just finished one episode, not eight, as if I was at the very beginning of the story, not the end, and I longed for more narrative to come."

"Iggy reminds me a lot of me. And it's all in that name; it's all in the title of that album. It’s raw power, you know? I like the funk that David Bowie was able to get behind Iggy. Believe it or not, I first saw an image of Iggy Pop at church, and they were talking about secret messages and backward masking - and they had [a picture of] Iggy Pop looking crazy. I didn't get into it until later, but I think how I was introduced to it was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. And what I like about Iggy is it's just genuine raunch. And the album seems like it’s all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album - or at least you'd like to believe that. I just read an interview with him in which he said he wrote a lot of it in Hyde Park sitting under a tree wearing pyjama's too, which gave it a cool twist as well. I just love 'Search And Destroy' and 'I Need Somebody' as well."

"Well, you know, it’s interesting because my favorite films are ones that I keep watching. I just don’t think there have been many great science fiction films made. I mean, 2001 is genius, there’s no question it’s a masterpiece, but I’ve already picked a Kubrick film. I find Dr. Strangelove a more user-friendly and enjoyable film to look at and watch repeatedly. I can watch it endlessly. Blade Runner is a masterpiece, but I don’t know that I would put it in my top 5 at this stage. Maybe at some other point in my life, I would’ve. I picked a Hitchcock film. Kubrick, Hitchcock, and Tarkovsky are my absolute Holy Trinity, you know? I’ve picked one from each person now. Oh! Okay, here’s a curveball. Um, no, I don’t want to say that one… I was going to say The Wizard of Oz, which I really like, but I don’t know that I’d put it in my top five, but in my top twenty. [Long pause] Godfather, I’d say. Just a flawless film, something that’s so beautifully crafted and so perfectly structured and designed, that I can watch it endlessly and enjoy it every single time."