"This film has one of the best endings I’ve ever seen, starting with the sword fight as remembered by the woodcutter. Up until this point, the fights have looked the way fights usually look in movies. But here, from the moment we see the samurai and bandit’s two sword tips enter the frame, trembling in their shaky hands, we’re in a much more believable world, where people are afraid to kill and be killed. And then there’s this conversation between the priest and the commoner: The priest: It’s horrifying. If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell. The commoner: That’s right. This world is hell. The priest: No, I believe in men. [Pressing himself against the wall in anguish.] I don’t want this place to be hell. That moment when the priest presses himself against the wall and says “I don’t want this place to be hell” sums up pretty much everything I’ve ever tried to express in my own work. The happy ending, where the woodcutter walks off with the abandoned baby as the sun comes out, always makes me cry."

"I think I came across this record because it was produced by Dave Fridmann and I was interested in him at the time because of other stuff he’d done, particularly The Flaming Lips. I heard this record and asked other people about it and they were saying, 'Aren’t they kind of folksy?' And I was like, 'No! What? Have you not listened to them?' Because this album does have that quiet, acoustic thing at the heart of it, but Fridmann has produced it like In Utero or something. Almost all of the instruments are pushing at the top of the range and it gives this really weird feeling of a loud quiet band. This song ‘Cue The Strings’ has this kind of crappy, wind-up string sound, that sounds like it’s been recorded onto tape a hundred times with two voices singing over it. That’s all that’s in it. But you get this feeling as it goes on that it’s absolutely massive and it’s hard to describe why, but I think it’s something to do with that production, the way it’s just biting at the distortion level. It’s got this swelling feeling that’s like the sun rising and that matches the lyric; 'Here comes the cold sunshine.' You get the feeling of being on a planet that has no atmosphere and when the sun rises you’re going to get burned up. It feels like such a huge sound but it’s really only two voices and a keyboard. I think that’s a great example of the power of production."