"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."

"And number five, I’m going to say Smokey and the Bandit. I’m back on the comedy. It’s between Smokey and the Bandit and OSS 117, which is a French movie — it’s sort of like their version of the Naked Gun movies, but their agent’s really good; he’s actually very good at many things. He just happens to be a complete moron. But he’s a lover, he knows many languages… Anyway, Smokey and the Bandit, Jackie Gleason’s performance and Sally Field’s; she was amazing. It’s also a good snapshot of America when being a truck driver was cool. [laughs] Being an 18-wheeler truck driver was like, “That’s a good job.” I mean, they were badasses, and you don’t really think of that now; they don’t have that same mystique. But Jackie Gleason as Buford T. Justice… He has his own f***ing entrance music; every time he shows up, they’ve got this tuba playing, he’s there on the scene, and he’s doing his schtick, doing the best stuff. He’s another character, like the Joe Gideon character in All That Jazz, who’s despicable. He’s a racist, he’s a terrible father, he’s a sh**y cop, and you just can’t wait for him to get back on the screen. He has a line in there, talking about Sally Field, who runs off, and she’s a dancer, and he says, “That’s what you get for poontangin’ around with a bunch of hippie show folk.” [laughs] That is the quality of stuff he’s doing in that movie; it’s just so brilliant."

"I saw this one as a kid on PBS, I think. It was weird timing for that movie when it came out, and it was perceived in many different ways. I think it was probably one of the boldest statements from Charlie Chaplin. And I remember as a kid being very confused because I was terrified of Hitler. My mother’s family, her aunt, went to Auschwitz and a couple other places. And she wasn’t Jewish, but she was captured and thrown in with everybody else and went through some pretty heavy shit. So all of the stories I had heard, and the symbol of that being Hitler, was terrifying. I knew what he was trying to do, which was show the absurdity of people who have so much power built off of insecurity and what they’re willing to do, and then just showing him as an imbecile. As a kid that was an important thing to see, because it took the mickey out of something that was incredibly terrifying. I don’t think any other film can really touch what he did, and I don’t think you can really do that again. It was a first in a way, and there is not really a comparable thing in history that’s so singular that you could make fun of. So I think for me, as a kid, it was nice to know that you could disarm something so terrible. I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan, and I loved seeing all of his slapstick comedy, but that one did me in."