"I’m going to put Hitchcock’s Notorious on there — the Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant film — because I think that was one of the first films that I saw as a child where I felt like, “Ok, that’s my favorite movie.” I thought it was the most romantic movie I had ever seen. It’s impeccably written, impeccably constructed, and her performance in it, I think, is really peerless actually. She’s so simple and detailed. It’s a kind of perfect spy movie. I really love that genre and I think she’s incredible in it. I actually think she’s a really under-rated actress."

"I was a young, precocious seventeen-year-old and this was what I listened to all the time on my Walkman. I had grown up with it. There were deep musicians around us all the time, painters and people into jazz, so I knew I had a feeling for it. The flat was a hub of bohemian appreciation. I learnt that John Coltrane was better than everyone else because he was melodic. Some of the atonal ones, that was all a bit too much. That’s what was played here all the time. I moved out of home when I was 16 and we had a house in Shepherd’s Bush. A shithole, one of the rooms was the dustbin, and that was what I listened to, to the absolute horror of everyone else there, smoking their shit spliffs."

"I actually first discovered a lot of the films on this list, like News from Home, when I lived in New York, next to Kim’s Video, a time when I went a lot to Anthology Film Archives and Lincoln Center. Chantal Akerman has always been a big inspiration for me, and News from Home was the first film of hers that I saw. Watching it was so inspiring and made me feel like I could make movies myself, because it’s so simply done yet so affecting—just letters and an empty city. I have a very strong relationship with my mother, and she also used to send me letters when I lived in New York. I discovered Jeanne Dielman later, and a lot of the screen tests I did for Invisible Life were taken from frames from that film."