"I’d bought this record years ago and had forgotten about it. But the movie came on TV in America, and I went oh my god and immediately had to hunt it down. I’d left it in London; I went to London just for the Barry Lyndon Soundtrack. There’s a Mozart piece on there that is just stunning. It was different to the usual classical renderings, it just seemed to have more heart and soul and harpsichord. It’s still there now on the top of my pile, it’s one of those albums that doesn’t collect dust. I have a weird association with it because my mother’s maiden name was Barry, and Lyndon is obviously Lydon misspelt. It also reminded me of my mother’s death and all of that. I wanted to play this at my father’s funeral a few years back, but my dad had a specific Irish record that he loved, so we played that."

"I’m going to go with The Godfather. It’s weird — I didn’t see The Godfather in theaters. I actually saw it on television. I think when I was a little kid, they ran it in a series. It was on over three or four days on television. I remember just being immediately sucked in, and I was a young kid. My mom was actually amazed that I was just so sucked in. I kept asking her all these questions about the film that she had no answer for, and didn’t really care to sit down and watch it, and couldn’t answer the questions, but I was just so curious and I just loved all the drama of it, you know? And it still, it holds up. My wife and I were just watching it on HBO — I think it was HBO — like last night or the night before. They play part one and part two together now. It’s like five hours of The Godfather."

"A lot of these are acting. A Woman under the Influence. I just think Gena Rowlands is absolutely incredible, and the sort of vibe of that movie. You can just feel the closeness of the actors and the crew and the people making the film. Again, it’s so incredibly alive and spontaneous, and that sort of weird, intimate, long-lens voyeuristic stuff and their fights, it’s just absolutely incredible. Also, just long takes of allowing actors to be, and to not cut out the white noise of superfluous action that doesn’t necessarily contribute to the plot. The purpose and the heart of the movie is stated over and over again in every tiny action, in every little thing they do, in every smile Peter Falk gives to her or look she gives to him. The messiness of it is just absolutely incredible, and that dinner scene with them all together is just stunning."

"I’m going to put in a strange one now, Any Body Can Dance. This is my favorite movie for the last two years. It’s a Bollywood musical dance movie, and I don’t watch enough Bollywood movies. I watch them on the plane sometime, and you know because I travel a lot from place to place, and this one has been my favorite Bollywood films. It’s nearly unpredictable, you know if you’re coming from a Western point of view, but I _____ the same way Bollywood has a different theater role. So for me it’s always surprising what happens in the story, at least it still is, and this is amazing music and dancing in it. It’s like 20 Indian Michael Jacksons. I’ve seen it twice, and parts of it I’ve seen three times. It’s crazy. It’s unusual for a recent movie for me. Yeah, it’s a weird one. It’s not going to be for everyone, I know."

"That’s sort of the oldest movie I still love, meaning a movie from my youth that I still can’t get enough of. It’s just so exciting, and – this is gonna sound douchey – there’s more propulsion to that movie than any movie that’s ever been made, it feels like. It’s just so fast. It’s like a car accelerating, and it just never stops accelerating. I mean, think about the beginning sequence of that movie: It’s so fun, and it ends with the coke sequence. I can’t imagine a movie that just keeps going that hard. It’s tremendous. Obviously, [there’s] such a performance from Pesci. I am deathly afraid of this small man. And Bracco: She’s amazing. That to me is another thing – I love portrayals of weird marriages. I feel like Husbands and Wives is my favorite Woody Allen movie. [Goodfellas] is a perverse love story at the end of the day, and I love it."

"Jim Jarmusch film. So wonderfully done in black and white. John Lurie stars and does the music. It’s weird because there are no close ups in the film, it’s an objective viewing experience, and yet it’s subjective in the way that Jarmusch points you. You’re given anything to look at, but you’re always looking at the right things. And the idea that it began as a short, just called The New World, but they raised money to make the other two or three acts, is really interesting to me. Great performances, a lot of humor, really slow pace. These were things I wasn’t really used to — the European pace, even though I love The 400 Blows, it was a revelation at the time in 1984. And I saw it when it came out in Austin, and just I think it opened up a new world of storytelling and filmmaking to me on some level."

"Science, art, and philosophy are never separate. If they seem so, it’s because one has implicitly absorbed the ideology of another. I think we’re in a moment now that’s making our nature documentaries worse. With HD, HDR, and CGI, they seamlessly illustrate already decided-upon science, making the un-human world seem as knowable and digestible as a Pixar fable. This is why, as impressive as they can be, they’re disposable. We abandon the HD doc when the 4K one comes along. In Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’s aquariums, microphotography, and time lapses, you see how the scientists know, instead of a hyperreal demonstration of what they know. Rather than getting a God’s-eye view, you experience this other world as a limited human trying to figure it out. The visuals are murky and weird—they need interpretation, as much from background science as from poetic metaphor. There is a sense of discovery, humility, and mystery in these films, and for this reason, they convey something spiritual."

"That one was really a brief summing up of the concept of Ziggy and the Spiders, but kind of done in a futuristic type of way. I was really into King Crimson at the time and I loved the drummer. He used to play things, strange drum rolls at strange places in the song. I used to think it was a bit weird, but then I learned how to do it, and I thought that would really work for this song. So, I definitely took a bit of inspiration from King Crimson for my playing on that one. And it worked! It kind of left it hanging at certain places and didn't make it sound like a 'normal' rock song. That one always went down amazing live. People would be waiting and waiting for that song. Like when we were in Japan and he would sing that line 'like some cat from Japan' and the place would just go berserk! Absolutely mental."

"The opening 18 minutes of that thing, I mean, when the door dropped on the Higgins craft and it all of a sudden was World War Two in color, seeing blood, seeing guys walking around looking for their arm that had been blown off. Weird poignant scenes where the medic was like stopping the bleeding and the bullet would just go right through the guy’s head. Also the story was strong too; there’s a bunch of guys named Ryan spread out all over the place and they think they’re finding him, and his guys kind of going, “Why are we killing ourselves trying to save one guy, and we’ve lost two or three of our own?” That thing that would never go on today. And all the stops along the way, there’s no way an hour into that movie I went, “Nah, I don’t care if they find him or not, I’m moving on.”"

"There was a compilation that came in the heady days of Electroclash, it had a track of theirs called 'If I Gave You A Party'. It's hard to put a finger on what music it is, it still sounds quite modern actually. The guy behind it hasn't done that much but everything you can track down by him is really weird and accessible as well. That record does trail off on side two as there's a silly track called 'Exercise Your Ass Off', which is trying to be Jane Fonda or something, but apart from that it's good. Again it's a bit like the B52s in that it's quite a simple sound, you can tell it's being made with not much money and it's just using a few elements in such a way that it really works. You'd not get away with being called Sexual Harassment any more - that's from a bygone age. "