"Huge fan of Marlon Brando. For this man to come out of the shadows playing Don Corleone was just captivating. And it never disappoints; to this day it doesn’t disappoint. That movie is still a spectacle of Americana storytelling with a performance by him which is just inspiring. And he was an inspiring actor, he was certainly somebody who I still go back and watch and… the music, the story, the whole trilogy — It was very much connected to my youth as a young man about to go off to drama school."

"I would say Unforgiven is probably top of that list. What about it, is simply the way that Clint Eastwood demystified and destroyed our notion of a Western. I mean, demolished the genre; he turned it upside down. It was marvelous acting, and at times, his use of monologue and dialogue — that doesn’t ever take place in Westerns. He just took a baseball bat to the genre, and it was just incredibly profound to me. Wildly entertaining. He did things in the storytelling that hadn’t been done in the way that they were done. Incredible."

"I think… No Country For Old Men. It was my introduction to Javier Bardem, and I think he is such a powerhouse on screen, but that performance, specifically, just kind of blew my mind completely, and it’s such an incredible thriller. It’s a film where not a huge amount happens. You could call it an action film, I suppose, but without — there’s not masses and masses of explosions. It’s a quite simple piece of storytelling, but it’s so beautifully done. And the Coen brothers [Ethan and Joel] did it. So I definitely say that."

"Like Melville, Michael Mann is a master of silent storytelling, but he is also one of the best writers of dialogue I know. There’s a scene between James Caan and Tuesday Weld in a diner that goes on for ten minutes, but you never get bored for a second. They go from being virtual strangers to lovers in the course of a conversation, and you don’t question it. Not only do his criminals feel authentic when they talk about their profession but their inarticulate attempts at declaring their love feel just as true."

"One of the greatest books ever written by a woman, especially in those early days. Although Mary Anne Evans gave herself a male pen name, she showed incredible ambition and scope in her writing—the world she created, the characters she imagined. I love that line in the book that reads: “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew, if you wished it.” It was hard to be a woman in those days, but her storytelling was exceptional."