"One of the greatest gifts I’ve even been given was when someone told me to check out Blue Nile. It’s extraordinary, they are such a great band. And you feel like you’re part of a little club once you get to know their music. They don’t get name checked very often, but I remember Guy Garvey mentioned them when he was picking up an award for Elbow and it’s like, you’re looking out for someone who knows their music and when you find them you have an immediate jumping off point. Hats has got that emotional element. It’s got a song called 'The Downtown Lights' - I’ve got to be careful not to say every song I mention here’s the great song I’ve ever heard, but 'The Downtown Lights' is certainly up there. What I like about Paul Buchanan’s writing is that his songs are like atmospherics or they’re kind of analogous. They don’t kind of necessarily describe situations very directly but he frames them in a different way. 'The Downtown Lights' is a great example, I suppose it’s saying that he wants companionship and that the world of the downtown lights and the busy streets and all of that stuff is a kind of representation of what it’s like when he’s with whoever he’s trying to describe in the story of the song. To frame a love song like that is really interesting. The production’s interesting with them as well - sometimes I wonder if people are put off by that. Especially the 80s stuff, it can be very synth-y and almost, it’s almost, really super middle-of-the-road! There’s something about it that can be really obvious but once you get into it, it’s the greatest gift because the lyrics are so subtle and nuanced. It’s something I revisit when I’m in a reflective or nostalgic mood."

"When Eraserhead came out in France, it came out with the weird title, The Head to Erase. It was in French. I remember I was reading my parents’ newspaper — it was a socialist newspaper — and there was a whole page of how much this famous film critic didn’t like the movie. He was really trashing the movie. But the way he was saying it was very awful, disgusting, it made me — I was a 14 or 15 year old kid — want to go to the other side of the city and see it. And then it was like my own secret. And I went there. And I loved the movie so much, that I believe I went to see it four times in one month. Then after two weeks it moved to another city and I went to see it again in a screening with my friend. Then maybe one year later, it was replaying near my house at the midnight screening, so I went again with another friend. And for me that was the confirmation that cinema could also portray your inner world, that cinema could portray dreams and nightmares. And I hadn’t seen, at that time Un Chien Andalou by [Luis] Buñuel but Un Chien Andalou is one of the rare movies that is written in a mental language, a dreamt language. Eraserhead is another one. Kubrick said once that he regrets he didn’t have the idea to do that movie. In any case, it had such a strong impact on me that I would say Eraserhead — it made me get into film school two years later. Maybe it was a mix of 2001 and Eraserhead. I don’t know how many times I saw Eraserhead in the movie theater, but I guess it was maybe 15 times. I had an addiction to this movie, which is the kind of addiction kids can have to their mother telling them a story. You want to listen to the same story over and over, and have a hypnotic feeling and relaxing feeling. It created some kind of relaxing feeling in me. That I would enjoy all these movies — that are nightmarish– as if it were a dream, especially when the girl comes out saying everything is fine in heaven. There’s a fact also that David Lynch made that movie with almost no money over a period of five years. Then when I was doing I Stand Alone, I had a lot of money issues. I had problems completing the movie, then doing the editing, also. All the time I had in mind that David Lynch did that movie in five years. And I said well, “Maybe it will take me 10 years to finish the movie. If it takes ten years I’ll do it and I shouldn’t worry.”"