"Any Velvets album can be the best Velvets album. Any Velvets album can be the best album by anyone. You can't make a wrong choice. Max’s Kansas City is today's winner because it has the best story. It has multiple stories. It's a play. It's not an album. Layered narratives are fighting for your attention. First, there’s the stories in Lou’s songs: wastrels, vagabonds and dealers. Second, there’s the story of this being the Velvet’s last gig with Lou. He’s tired and listless between the songs; he knows it’s over. “This is a song about, ooh when you've done something so sad, and you wake up the next day, and you remember it. Not to sound grim or anything. Just once in a while, you have one of those days. I seem to have them nearly every day.” There’s the story of the band itself at this point – no Cale, no Nico, no Tucker. They don’t sound like the Velvets anymore. New drummer Billy Yule sounds like he’s never heard Mo Tucker and never intends to. Then there’s this strange story in the foreground. The show is an official bootleg recorded by Brigid Polk who is sitting next to Jim Carroll. They sound like they’re having a terrible night and he is an arse. He makes her get him Pernod from the downstairs bar and talks over the band about songs he doesn’t know. It’s all perfect because nothing is remotely perfect. I go out on this lousy date with Brigid and Jim over and over again."

"Another one that I was very inspired by and touched by in all its ugliness and brutality, but its daring story structure, was Gasper Noe’s Irréversible, which is an odd one, but I just found the idea of starting at the end and telling it backwards as such a conceit. And the world it took you in, and the way it took you in, I felt that was something new that I’d never seen before. It’s a journey through hell, starting at the end and working backwards to the beginning. So it’s sort of Paris’ underground, and it has a rape scene in it of Monica Belluci that’s one of the most frank, most brutal… You know, people kid about rape, you just say, “Yeah, I think you should watch this movie and see what rape really looks like. You should see how violent and terrible it is and then you’ll not make any jokes anymore.” It’s so balls-out, this film. It’s so unafraid. It’s so in-your-face. It’s one of those movies that, once you see [it], you will never forget it, and it keeps coming back to you and back to you. It’s not necessarily a pleasant thing, but it was definitely a filmmaker who said, “I don’t give a f— what anyone thinks. Anybody. Not the critics, not my friends, not the finance producers, nobody. I’m just going out to tell my story the way I want to tell it.” Vincent Cassel is so great in it, and Belluci. It’s really a very powerful movie."