Karen O and Barnaby Clay

“We got Elevator to the Gallows. This soundtrack is on heavy rotation in our household. One of my favorite pieces of music Miles Davis ever did, and he improvised it to picture for this. Jeanne Moreau walking the streets. Oh, that sequence. Unbelievable. “Je t’aime,” like… Doesn’t rain come down at some point? Yeah, she’s just walking through, and everything’s going wrong. She’s waiting for this guy. Absolute magic.”

“I’m going to go for this, Woman in the Dunes, because, interestingly, it was our first date movie, which is pretty fucked up, because it’s very weird and it’s very intense and it’s very erotically charged, and I invited Karen round to my house and said, “Do you want to come see this movie?” And she was like, “Sure, yeah.” And I was sold from that point on.”

“Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. This film has one of the most astonishing transformations on screen. It’s kind of the equivalent of seeing David Jones and then, over the next 20 minutes, him methodically making himself up to become Ziggy Stardust or David Bowie. The way that it starts off, Petra von Kant is waking up. After that point on, she’s basically, like, a Mesopotamian goddess for the rest of the film. As someone who’s in the rock sort of heritage, it’s been a major moment for me.”

“Eraserhead. All right, we have to do this because we are both obviously lovers of Lynch. Devotees. It all goes back to Eraserhead for me. It’s just, like, this is the perfect summation of a person’s artistic vision. This is it. It just, like, all starts here and ends here, and you can see it in every one of his films, and it’s just beautiful and really funny as well, so we’re gonna laugh All Night Long watching Eraserhead. He had, like, ten years to really make all that magic and go into his...”

“Night Porter. A friend of mine messaged me, saying, like, “Hey, do you know that Barney looks a lot like Dirk Bogarde?” I was like, “Who’s Dirk Bogarde?” And so I was like, “Oh, let’s watch some Dirk Bogarde films,” and Night Porter was one of the first ones. Quite the film. I would say that adept language of interiority and subjectivity. There’s a lot of brutality in it. The experience of these two people kind of going into oblivion. Like, they need each other like fish need water to breathe.”

“Night of the Hunter, yep. This is my favorite film of all time. It doesn’t really feel like anything else. It’s, like, this self-contained universe. And it’s got Robert Mitchum, which is, like… being just terrifying in it. It’s very fairytale-like, and it almost feels like a musical to me. There’s this incredible, magical sequence where the kids are floating down this river, and this beautiful song is being sung. Charles Laughton, so it was the only film he ever made.”

“I’m going to choose this for you because I think it’s incredibly beautiful. Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So that one’s for you. Thank you. It’s, like, visual poetry.”

“I’m going to grab Videodrome for Barney. He has a shirt that says, “Cronenberg for President,” so that’s going to go in the bag. If only. Yeah. Perfect. Thanks. Cool. Thanks, my love.”