"The first one — I would say Badlands. I caught Badlands in college for the first time. They actually had a film screening of it at my film school. I’d just never seen a film like that before. I’ve never seen a film that was paced that way, that was structured that way, that felt that honest. But also at the same time kind of dreamy and transportive. I remember immediately going home to my dorm room and I called my older brother — who’s kind of my bellwether for cool interesting things — [and asked], “Have you seen this film?” I tried to explain a theme to him, which was nearly impossible of [Martin] Sheen‘s character giving his comb away to the National Guard soldiers at the end of the film. My brother: “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” You realize that’s kind of how that movie is — you can definitely revel in it and share with it when other people have seen it. But it’s such a beautiful anomaly that when you try and tell people about it that haven’t seen it it’s kind of impossible to categorize or just explain. Badlands — it touched upon a stylized truthfulness that I wanted to do in my film."

"George Washington, probably, David Gordon Green’s first movie. That was one that I probably saw right before I started, or was it… I can’t remember — it might have been right before I wrote this film. I had never really seen kids articulated in the way that it felt like kids actually thought. It wasn’t imbuing the kids with a sort of ability to articulate themselves that was beyond them. There’s that amazing monologue when one of the boys is sitting on the floor of a bathroom and he’s looking up, and he’s saying, “I want to be an inventor. I want to make stuff,” and he’s giving this monologue about his wants and his needs, but they’re so through the prism of a young mind. You can tell the speeches he’s heard that he thinks he might be making, but in that dishonesty it’s so honest. He’s reaching for things beyond himself, and you feel that he doesn’t have the faculties to get there, and that’s just so honest of what that time is. You can feel that he really gave a lot of this sort of articulated authorship over to the kid and that really shows. It’s like, “Oh, this is actually how kids speak.”

"Again, her whole catalogue is amazing. I love her music back to front. This is her hit record, as it were, not that it was a proper hit unfortunately. It's been with me for a while and I love it so much. We brought a few pieces of music to listen to while my wife was giving birth to our daughter and this was one of them. That gives an indication of how embedded in my life it is. The tone and mood it sets... She was deep into that sense of spiritual connectedness and universal love. I understand how people who aren't necessarily spiritual might see it as a foolish hippy diversion, but for me, this unlocks the potential of what music can do. At the time it was married to a political agenda, same for all these spiritual free jazz records, and I feel that it's a really unfortunate thing that people don't seem to be able to articulate that so well in the contemporary music world. This is an analysis and that's not why I love it, that's because when I put it on it's my favourite thing to be listening to. But it also stands up to analysis - there's so many reasons to love this music."