"This has a bit of an H.P. Lovecraft feel to it. We were stuck, because there were two albums, the other one being by his band, The United States of America. That one’s much more weird, and we like it a lot, but this one we always found harder to listen to, so for that reason we chose it. Because if it’s still hard to listen to, there must be something in it that’s playing with my expectations, whereas The United States of America is fairly funky. So, it was a struggle to choose one, but in the end we picked that one for the singing."

"Let’s see, number two… see I don’t know what order to put these in, but let’s have [laughs] — it’s going to be a really weird top five — Muppet Christmas Carol. It’s just so good. It’s got a bit of everything: brilliant characterization, great songs; just beautifully shot. A warm, cozy, nice feeling, I think is what that film is. And Michael Caine is good. I think it’s great the way they used a lot of the different Muppet characters in the story, and they kind of fit with the characters — you know, you’ve got the old guys as the ghosts; it just all worked so well. Beautifully done. Love it."

"Ordinary People is a really important movie to me, because it was a movie I watched and had the spark of idea that I wanted to be an actress. Basically because of Timothy Hutton’s performance, and the visceral nature of that movie, the rawness of the emotion. I think at a young age — I was fourteen or fifteen — I felt like I could relate to him, and then this weird thing happened where I felt like I was him. While I was watching the movie, I felt like I was feeling exactly what he was feeling, and I thought, “Wow… I would love to be in a movie like that.”"

"A Married Couple is the first Allan King movie I saw, but I think I watched Warrendale right after that, on the same day. Somebody had lent me the Eclipse set. It’s a very frustrating movie; it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. Sometimes you even like these people in a weird way, but then you also sometimes detest them. You know they’re playacting in front of the camera and that they know it’s there, but when you start to realize just how much they’ve been playacting with each other in this marriage, it’s very disturbing. It makes me start to think about how much people playact in life and in relationships."

"The novel begins “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.” It’s in the bombed out London of 1945 at the end of the war in a shabby, genteel boarding house for young ladies called the May of Teck Club. We meet the various girls of slender means and follow their lives and love affairs. I love all Muriel Spark’s books and think she is witty and elegant and spiky and weird. I met her once in Italy when I was a teenager and she told me, “For the next ten years all you should do is sleep and go to parties.”"

"Oh, The Godfather. If it gets any better than that… I mean, it’s so beautifully shot. I’m not a fan of violent movies, but that one is such an epic film. The violence is part and parcel of the story they’re telling, so, it’s legitimate. In a weird way, I find there’s no gratuitous violence in it. Even though there’s a lot of shooting in that thing, every time there’s a shootout, I found it upsetting and horrifying as opposed to films which just trade on mowing human beings down. Those I find pornographic and not sad. I think it does damage to our society, personally."

"Directed by the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet is yet another film made in 1955 to which I’m deeply indebted. There is a stunning scene of literal resurrection that inspired my own visual approach to The Exorcist and gave me the courage to stage a supernatural event as if it were actually happening, without scary lighting or weird angles. Like many of Dreyer’s other films, including Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet is based on literary source material (in this case, a play). But all his films are deeply spiritual in their examinations of the mystery of faith, and purely cinematic."