"An utter masterpiece from the great Akira Kurosawa. Curiously, a Dashiell Hammet novel provided the inspiration for this film. I love that an American pulp novel from the 1920s was the spark for a staggering work of genius from Japan over three decades later. It demonstrates how art can transcend barriers across time, space, and culture and speak to us in a meaningful way. Yojimbo was remade as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western classic A Fistful of Dollars, which I saw and loved long before I knew the original even existed. But when I discovered Yojimbo, it was like a gift from the universe. Everything else paled in comparison. Yojimbo is part western, part gangster noir, part samurai story, all awesome. It’s so good. Plus, if Kubo’s dad looks a wee bit like Kurosawa’s resplendent muse Toshiro Mifune, that’s not necessarily a coincidence."

"Bresson is my favorite director. He personifies my values in movies. My fetish film of his is The Devil, Probably, but it’s not available from Criterion. The ones that are offered are all magnificent, but I have to go with the donkey. Above all, Bresson is unconventional; he had the vision and fortitude to penetrate and disintegrate received ideas and habits to make films that start from square one. He’s ultra-intelligent and ultrasensitive, with the eye of a painter; his films are near-noir in their bleak, unblinking presentation of human existence—a large proportion of them include suicide of the protagonist—while they’re also exhilarating and uplifting in their God’s-eye views. Balthazar, of course, stars a saintly donkey, the beauty of whom rivals that of his costar, a mournfully angelic young Anne Wiazemsky."

"There are a lot of parallels between this record and the roots of Underworld’s inspiration. Film music. Taking sounds and songs and melodies from other tunes and fusing them together with other music in a completely different key. And it just has this dusty, beautifully dirty quality – like film noir through a dirty window. I absolutely love it. We took it to Chile with us, Rick and I, and played it in our hotel room and decided it was the best thing we’d heard in years. It inspired us to start writing there and then in our hotel room – music that went on to be part of the download-only records we did. It encouraged us to be a little less produced. It’s an amazing soundtrack for what’s going on around you. There’s a link between these first three records – especially with James Blake – the way that the voice is treated. It was very exciting to hear the voices on the Burial record treated in such an unprecious way. Taking vocals as oscillators, as we’d always seen them, like another synthesiser that’s capable of generating incredible noises. That in itself was inspiring."