"I'm loyal to Weather Report's vision. I can understand how some people come in through the wrong door with them. This album is from a point where they're coming out of this improvisational period. Their first few albums were really exploratory and you had to be quite committed to them; they weren't instant records. But they had plenty of acclaim and backing from their record label. It's amazing that there was a point in time when record labels backed that kind of music. But this was the point when they were playing a lot of colleges and they added a more funky span to what they were doing. So the bass guitar started to get more prominent. It was Alphonso Johnson playing bass here and not Jaco Pastorious, and people forget that Alphonso Johnson did a lot of the groundbreaking stuff for the fretless bass. There's a painterly quality about this album and the orchestration gets more densely textured. You've got tracks like 'Jungle Book', that closes the album, and it's a beautiful track that could be put together by coloured pencils. It's a very pastel-y track where they've taken an improvisation and drawn round and over the top of it. Tracks like that are really funky. We didn't have ""world music"" back then, but this was the beginnings of that idea; of something beyond the horizon of our culture and something that was kind of hidden. It wasn't about doing an authentic version of ethno-musicology, but taking different elements; it was all about colours."

"Virtuosic camera movements and demonstrations of technical originality, while impressive, can often do just as much to pull the viewer out of the experience as into it. One becomes absorbed by the mechanics on display, rather than gripped by the characters and their fates. In the case of “1917,” however, it is exactly the virtuosity of the filmmaking that makes the movie so exceptionally gripping. All of the cinematic elements, from the unique visuals to the rousing score, come together to give the audience a monumental, visceral sense of participation in the protagonists’ mission. As a viewer, I am intensely bound to the characters throughout the film. Their story is a relentless, brutal and violent experience — we’re in the foxholes, in the mud, with the corpses in the waterholes, running across rotting horse carcasses ­— and it all feels so real that you can smell the dead horses and burning houses. But amidst all the violence, there are small moments of kindness that moved me more than anything; moments that encapsulate humanity at its finest. The two soldiers in “1917” are far from classical heroes. They are afraid, confused and insecure. But their innocence, their love and their willingness to do the right thing, make them the most touching heroes I’ve seen in a long time. Watching “1917” is a weirdly humbling experience not because of its incredibly cinematic qualities, but because its portrayal of human dignity is so profound and moving. It keeps playing in the back of one’s mind, long after the projector turns off."

"""What else do I like? A Godard film called Prenom Carmen, which sounds like I’m just saying that to be cool, but it’s actually one of my favorite films. I think it’s the best Godard film. It’s like his version of Carmen the opera, one of his films from the eighties. In terms of just pure filmmaking and manipulating an audience, it kind of starts out as a farce, as a complete, stupid farce, with this bank robbery; but it’s really, really…Godardian, with kind of a stupid humor that’s so random. Only he could make it, mixed up with these kinds of philosophical elements. It starts out with one of these bank robbers, these students, and she starts to sleep with one of the guards; she’s having sex with him in the bank, and he pretends to arrest her and they run away together. And he wants to be part of her gang. It’s all so completely ridiculous. And then suddenly, halfway through, it turns into the most heartbreaking, serious thing that you’ve ever seen — out of nowhere! — and you’re suddenly so attached to these characters, which you weren’t before, because it seemed like a stupid student film. They have this secondary story where they have a string quartet playing the soundtrack which runs in the other story, but they film them during rehearsal, just doing really close up things with them playing cello and stuff, and it’s about the relationship with the conductor and this girl, the cellist — and it’s completely random to the film, but it’s incredible."""