"I went to see Blade Runner when it came out in the cinema; for me it was the perfect melding of sound and vision and a kind of dystopian future that seemed quite compelling. Almost a place you'd like to live in, because of the idea of replicants and who is human, and WHAT is human? Also, the beauty of Harrison Ford. Him and - whatsername - Sean Young, she was styled to perfection. Ridley Scott, although he reckoned it was a torturous film to make - the budget got cut and all kinds of jiggery pokery went on backstage - the one enduring thing, for me, is the soundtrack. Bizarrely, the soundtrack album didn't come out until years and years and years afterwards [1994], but you could get the film on VHS and everything. In 1990, I got summoned to work with Vangelis in Paris, and we wrote the title track on my album. One of the first things I asked was, ""Can I have a copy of the soundtrack?"" We recorded 'Europa' in Studio Omega on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, which was originally earmarked for Hitler's occupation should things go pear-shaped during the Second World War. The Bois de Boulogne is where all the transvestites and transsexuals would come out at night. It was quite an atmospheric place to work. At the end of the weekend they gave me a tape of the track we'd recorded, and a metal cassette of the Blade Runner soundtrack that I've still got today. It's a real treasured item. I remember reading And Suddenly There Came A Bang!, where it talks about Blade Runner, Harrison Ford and also Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2, and I remember seeing it soon after and thinking, ""Oooh. Yes."" That was mindblowing. It was kind of a blueprint for the early look of Frankie for me. That whole cyberpunk and S&M... The baddies were more attractive than the goodies, obviously, and Max himself was somewhere in between the both, neither good nor bad - just out for himself. Another soundtrack I think needs mentioning is Midnight Express by Giorgio Moroder. which is also on a par, I think. Although it's more disco - especially 'Chase' - Vangelis and Moroder to me were icons of electronic music in the '70s and '80s. Although I think Vangelis had the edge with atmosphere."

"Another incredible thing about Criterion is that in addition to the classics, the treasures, the widely acclaimed, they also have a true love for cult and lowbrow cinema. Director Herk Harvey explains on the Carnival of Souls commentary that they had hoped the film would have an art-house release, and they actually approached a distributor successful in that market and were told that, since it wasn’t in a foreign language, it didn’t really fit. I’m sure being American-made wasn’t the only reason this was a hard fit for distributors, but it was interesting in terms of what art houses were looking for at that time and how the filmmakers saw the film’s niche. This film taught me how to watch Mulholland Drive . . . which is to say, if you stay with the mood, without fighting it, your intuition will serve you far better than the plot and structure and logic your brain is craving. Because essentially all stories are simple; what isn’t simple is the underneath of it all. And that’s more rewarding in the end. I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic. Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . ."