"I love European cinema. I made a proviso that you have to watch it with the Swedish subtitles on, not dubbed in American. It’s terrible when it’s dubbed in American. It’s really a drama. It’s the story of a young boy who meets a young girl who just happens to be a vampire. But the editing, the way they show the bleakness of the world, the way that they show a period in time which is nondescript — they say it’s the modern world, but it feels like the modern world that has gone by somehow. Very beautiful part of the world, it’s sterile and full of snow. I watched that one night; a friend recommended it to me. I was in my house on my own, at night, was very scared of it, and fell in love with it. I’m not a huge fan of horror movies, to be fair. There’s no reason for me to bring that into my life, that horror element. But with Let the Right One In, it was worth it because the performances and the story were both so brilliant."

"This extraordinary series, based on the collection of books, portrays the story of two young girls and their friendship over time. What is astounding to me is the agency and the “voice” of the two young prepubescent girls that is shown in ways rarely seen on screen. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, wrote extensively of the ways in which girl’s voices are squashed and eradicated by puberty. Likewise, filmmakers rarely portray this vital stage in young girl’s development. As the series progress and the two girls age, their female characters are impacted, twisted, and crushed by the pressure of society. It’s rare that one actually witnesses the crushing of girls into adults in such an exquisitely truthful manner. How these two girls struggle to survive and thrive under the pressures of marriage and sexuality and lack of educational access clamping down on them with their identity intact is brilliant. At the end of season one, I had the rarest experience: I felt like I had just finished one episode, not eight, as if I was at the very beginning of the story, not the end, and I longed for more narrative to come."

"Number two is Kes, Ken Loach’s film. I’d already kind of established myself in television, and I loved Italian movies and all that. And then here was a genuine British neo-realist movie, which I thought was an exquisite film. It dealt with incredibly complicated social issues, which I was very much involved in myself, with my Up series, which had already started by that time. But what I thought was so beautiful about it was that he found the metaphor of this boy and this kestrel, and he told the whole tale of the boy’s life — the stress the boy was under, and the unfairness of life — through the relationship with him and a bird, which I thought was just a brilliant filmic notion. I mean, I’ve always loved his work. He was very influential on my generation — not that he’s much older than us, but I think he was very much our man, and, you know, he has a huge body of work in his lifetime. He never seems to stop. Stop! Right? Otherwise, we’ve all got to keep going, if you keep going. God."