"Even with a nod to some of Hollywood’s best navel-gazing films, I will make a case that this is the best film ever made about filmmaking—made by one of the most self-referential of all filmmakers. Visually lush to the point of a Powell and Pressburger surfeit, Godard’s film lays bare a marriage in crisis. The long apartment sequence between Bardot and Piccoli is a dystopian analogue to the hotel room playful casualness of Seberg and Belmondo in Breathless. A back-to-back viewing of the two sequences constitutes a minihistory of the French New Wave. Raoul Coutard’s cinematography and Georges Delerue’s score give the Greek myth parallels of the film’s story line (and of the film-within-a-film trope) a sensuous subtext—music and image caressing the body of the star of And God Created Woman. It’s great to see Fritz Lang and Jack Palance, two polar opposite cinematic icons, in a room watching dailies. Below the screen is a running legend that reads, “Cinema is an invention without a future. Louis Lumière.” The film’s opening long shot over verbal titles—as the BNC anamorphic camera approaches the viewer along tracking rails, then pans and tilts so that Coutard’s lens points right at you—is one of those great “gotcha” cinematic moments."

"I never really listened to Blur much or many of the other Damon Albarn projects, but I was on tour and kept running into Dangermouse. He was on tour and we were playing a lot of the same festivals. He may even have given me a copy of this record. I remember being in Adelaide in this lonely hotel, drinking a bottle of red wine alone at sunset and listening to this record and being completely mesmerised by it. I love the whole thing. I love Dangermouse’s glitchy, hip-hop Beatles production ideas. It’s just a really great recipe: the whole thing. I spoke to him about making that record but I almost don’t want to know what it involved because it’s so magical to me. I’m totally into Paul Simonon’s bass playing. Even though it’s not a reggae record, courtesy of him it has some of that kind of soul. And Tony Allen’s drumming is wonderful. It almost sounds like military drums. It’s very angular. It doesn’t swing. It sounds like ‘Let’s attack, let’s attack.' At the heart of this record, you have really simple rock & roll performances, but the production brings a lot more detail to it. I’ve worked pretty briefly with Dangermouse on something in the past. I enjoy his personality a lot and I’d sure as hell like to work on a record with him one day."