"I've read since that Hex Enduction Hour was going to be the last Fall album and that Mark was going to split the band up if it didn't work. The rest of us weren't aware of this. I guess it could have been like David Bowie splitting up the Spiders From Mars onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, but obviously this proved not to be the case. I put this in here because it was the last Fall album that I did, and everything that we'd learned just came together. I was on Live At The Witch Trials, but that was a pop album. It sounds like a totally different group… well, it did have different musicians on it, I guess. Mark obviously wasn't clear on what he wanted The Fall to sound like at that point in time; Dragnet was just the sound of a load of kids who couldn't play being thrown in a studio and being excited and being in their favourite band but… [laughs] well, Dragnet is a mystery to me, that album… I remember recording it and the production… it never sounded the same twice. I realised that wasn't how we sounded live. It didn't sound like The Fall. It sounded amazing in its own way but it didn't sound like The Fall. It didn't capture what we were doing. But with Hex Enduction Hour, everything came together at that one point. We did some of it live in a cinema in Hitchin and some of it in a studio in Iceland that had lava walls. Apparently it's still talked about to this day, The Fall's stay in Iceland. No one went to Iceland then, The Stranglers had played there, Jaz Coleman ran off there to find the ley lines, but that was it. I think we first went there because we were invited by Einar from the Sugarcubes. He instigated it. It was so bleak there. There was no tourism. And the mentality of the Icelandic people was like that of The Fall, to be honest. It was a real case of us versus them. They were out on a limb. Iceland didn't integrate. It was a really strange community of people. They were really nice but otherworldly. That was my swansong really. I mean I'm on that Room To Live album as well, but I listen to Hex and I hear a glorious racket. I think that's when Mark really got to grips with what he wanted The Fall to sound like, and ironically you find out later that it was going to be the last Fall album. Mark's stream of consciousness really comes together, the way he makes words up like in the title, he really got a handle on where he wanted to take his own art. And with the band it was all because we'd been playing together for a long time. Steve Hanley couldn't play bass when we were together in [pre-Fall group] The Sirens, I taught him the root notes and I couldn't play guitar either… I still can't, if I'm honest. Steve found his feet and found his sound, so he became the engine room of The Fall. The sound of it is right, despite being recorded in these two totally different environments. I remember when I heard 'Hip Priest' on Silence Of The Lambs, because I was the only person left in the cinema when it came on… I tell a lie, it was just me and the wife. Jonathan Demme was a massive Fall fan. Yeah, it was peculiar that… but then again it's the music that a serial killer's playing in his house, so is it really that weird? Mark's given me grief over the years, but how can you take any of it to heart? Anything he says is water off a duck's back. He's a character… almost a cartoon character. I've got a massive soft spot for Mark and I'm a massive fan. Round the corner from here there used to be a venue called The Arches Bar and a mate of mine was having his birthday party in there in the mid-80s. I was upstairs, and my mate said Mark Smith's downstairs and he wants a pint with you. So I thought, right, well, we've both grown up since then, let's have a drink and put it all behind us. So I had a couple of pints with him, and we had a really good time together. I'd been listening to The Fall, he said – and he'll deny this – I've got your album and I'm keeping an eye on what you're doing and I think it's great. I mean we were both drunk, but by the end of it we were kind of mates again. Then about three months later they reissued a load of Fall albums on Cog Sinister, so I rang him up and said, 'Am I going to get paid for any of this?' And he said, 'No you're not!' [makes noise of phone being slammed down] So it was straight back to square one."

"I spent my moviegoing life avoiding Ingmar Bergman movies. A few glimpses of The Seventh Seal or Persona made me think they were not accessible. I also knew Woody Allen worshipped him, so surely they were over my head. It was while working on my Ikea-sponsored web series Easy to Assemble that I thought: Well, if I’m going to be satirizing Swedish culture, I should watch some Bergman. He became the director from whom I have learned the most. He gave me the courage not to shy away from pain, which is the core of all comedy. The results are apparent in “Finding North,” an episode in Easy to Assemble’s third season, and all my writing since. I chose Wild Strawberries because in it I found the key that changed my work forever. I always lived in a daydream, where sometimes things felt real and sometimes they felt imagined. So much of an actor’s life is imagination. Wild Strawberries is a road-trip movie about an old man who looks back at his life, his loves, his regrets, and has to face certain truths about himself. The story is not revealed by flashbacks, though. It’s revealed by going from reality to daydream. He reflects on his past with a nostalgia for childhood. This makes reality feel more present and his relationship with his grown son and daughter-in-law more uncomfortable. Have you ever been in the presence of someone having an argument and thought, I can’t believe they revealed that to me? That is every scene in a Bergman film! After his wife died, Bergman said, “I was in a room built of my own sorrow.” No other sentence expresses the pain of losing a loved one in such a poetic way. His words are so revealing, and coupled with the right emotions, the right images, they bring me as close to the human experience as anything I have experienced in a film. There is another reason Wild Strawberries has a special place in my heart. In 2013, because of my involvement in Easy to Assemble, I was cast in a Swedish-American show called Welcome to Sweden. I like to imagine that Bergman had a hand in that. I shot a scene with Lena Olin in which we picked wild strawberries. It was not imagined, though. That really happened!"

"I mean the thing with Ugetsu, and the whole Apu Trilogy [discussed next], that I was really looking at when I was making First Cow, was that they are super low-to-the-ground films. You get to the ambition of the potter in Ugetsu, and the sort of dream sequences of it. I love the way it’s filmed, in the way the small villages are filmed, and the way you’re in this hutch all the time and everyone is super low-to-the-ground. I mean everyone’s sitting on the floor all the time and you’re wandering through these small towns and you’re inside these hutches, and I liked that Cookie [in First Cow] is sort of a down-to-the-ground guy – he’s a forager. There are caste systems in both Ugetsu and the Apu Trilogy, and both of the protagonists are sort of at the bottom of the food chain and surviving hand-to-mouth. In the case of Ugetsu, I found that character relatable as far as King Lu [in First Cow] goes – he really wants to get a toe hold in the next level, and he’s very seduced by getting there; he just has kind of a narrow vision of like, “I’ve got to get to this place.” He also knows that he has to find a backdoor into it. And they’re all craftspeople in Ugetsu, and in First Cow Cookie is a cook and they’re constantly making things, and King Lu is sewing his slippers – it’s a life of just endless making of things because it’s how you’re surviving."