"I tend not to read anyone unless they’ve been buried, but this is a book that reminds us of the most important value: ‘You are not a consumer, you are a creative person.’ As someone who was bought up in Africa with no advertising at all, I find it striking how relaxed my attitude is compared to lots of people brought up in the western world. How to be Free is a joyful call to arms to care less about materialism: ‘Learn how to whistle, throw your watch away, forget career, spend a summer reading books.'"

"A compilation from South Africa in the 80s of Soweto sound at the time. My mum's from SA and she had it on double cassette and would play it in the car as she drove me to school. It's full of unashamed joy and has a kind of cheesiness to it that I love. There's an innocence to the songs, which is interesting because you can sense the strange American influence in SA music at the time - which is similarly mirroring some current musical trends from abroad. You can hear Prince, a bit of Michael Jackson and American pop, but retranslated through musicians and equipment that they had access to at the time. It's a killer compilation."

"I left Africa and childish things, and went to live in Paris, where Thérèse Raquin kept me on the straight and narrow. Read at an impressionable age, it’s a very important moral life lesson about guilt and consequences—without ever having to stick your finger into the pit of hell itself. At the time I was going to the American Library, and looking at the handsome boys who didn’t know I existed because I was a little chubby teenager. The descriptions of Therese sitting there with Laurent, playing dominoes in their house above the shop, and that burning desire for somebody rang very true for a little plump 14-year-old on the banks of the Seine."

"I definitely have films that, for whatever reason, had an impact on me. One of the first ones is The Goonies, which I watched when I was a little kid growing up in South Africa. I actually came home from watching The Goonies and planned a whole movie that I recorded on the tape recorder. It was about some kids in a gang. They stumble upon a stolen piece of art. It’s actually not such a bad idea now that I think about it. [The Goonies] was definitely one of those films that I distinctly remember pushing me into, “This is what I’m going to do.” I’d been playing around with the camera, but that was like the turning point for me, The Goonies."