"I could have easily filled this list with ten Bergman movies. (Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, The Magician, Persona, Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, Through a Glass Darkly, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries—there, I did it anyway.) His filmic artistry, his seriousness of purpose, his love of actors, and, above all, his literate examinations of the human condition never fail to inspire me. I think I’ve stolen more from Bergman than any other writer. Cries and Whispers is a masterpiece. Visual storytelling, a lean narrative, exacting characterization, formal experimentation—all in the service of painful, honest humanity."

"Firstly I’m going to go for The Virgin Spring. It’s a film that may surprise people but it really had an impact on me and I was just amazed by it. I saw it in a relatively short period of my life when I was teaching at college. When I was younger I hadn’t been allowed to watch any because I went to a Baptist College, but by this time I had put the religion behind me and that was one of the first art films I saw and I was very impressed by it. I mean, I could list you a dozen movies from that era by European by European film directors by Godard, Truffaut – Breathless, 400 Blows, all those wonderful European movies.”"

"Tokyo monogatari, perhaps better known to non-Nipponophiles as Tokyo Story. Any film by the great Yasujiro Ozu will do, especially if it has Japan’s walked-away-in-mid-career huge star, the divine, mysterious, heart-seducing Setsuko Hara, who, Garbo-like and at the peak of her popularity, vanished into obscurity, never to return to the screen. I discovered her hideout in Kamakura, Japan, and briefly glimpsed her, refuting my cabdriver’s assurance that she was long dead. She lives yet, in her mid-nineties. Don’t pass this way without losing your heart to Miss Hara—Japan’s “eternal virgin”—on the screen. Also, same film, the great Chishu Ryu, who teaches the entire acting profession how to play, at a still youngish age, an ancient and enfeebled oldster. He is, one critic said, “old in his bones.”"

"People who didn’t live through that period or weren’t old enough to know what was going on somehow imagine that there was this fantastic post-punk thing going on. That’s all made up in hindsight. Really, everything was pop of the most plastic kind. And a lot of it was quite terrible. Though I did like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which came out in 1984. There was a real thing in the early-to-mid ’80s about modern classical music; there was a lot of that stuff around, and those were the more interesting things. If you know Tabula Rasa and know anything about the music that I’ve been involved with, you might struggle to find how I would connect with that kind of music. But it’s not really experimental music. It’s very emotional. It doesn’t have the form of a song but it’s not far from the world that Eno was exploring with his Ambient series."