"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.”

"I’d known nothing of Serge Gainsbourg until I was co-producing an album by a French group called Louise Attaque. Their first album ended up being the biggest rock album in France, which was an amazing thing. Being with these French people and making this album, myself and my co-producer asked, ‘Well, what music would you recommend for us to listen to, things that we might not know that you could tell us about. What do you like? Because we like your music and what you do, so what is it that you like?’ This was the first thing that somebody there said, ‘This is what you have to hear, this is great,’ and it just struck me that way. We went to a big record store and said to everybody in the band, ‘Why don’t you pick out music for us? What’s the two or three CDs that are the best, or that you think we need to hear?’ We wouldn’t know a lot of this or maybe any of it, and one of them recommended this and everybody agreed, ‘This is something you need to hear.’ It didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before and I immediately liked it very much, the whole album. And then I found out about Serge Gainsbourg and all the things he did for decades, all different kinds of music. I think he’s really one of the great ones"

"Revelatory meditations on a classic FM synth sounds. The end of an era and the beginning of one. I came to his music maybe later in my life, and he's one of those guys where you just slap your head and go "Oh man, how have I not known about this guy?" Only in the last couple of years have I approached him. He does micro-electronic stuff, kind of like preceded a lot of labels that have since flourished with that, like Raster-Noton and Editions Mego. What he's done - and I think this must be a running theme of things that I like – as far as liberating an idea from its historical context. Like Feldman and Varese, it's him taking these dance sounds, these FM synth sounds that you hear in techno even, and isolating them, turning them into this simple object which is hanging on your wall. And in doing so, it's reduced to something so pure that it's profound and it's absurd. And it's powerful and funny. It's so simple, the idea behind it. Production-wise, he has his own methodology that I'm not too sure about. It's not basic, but it's so obvious in its clarity, that it makes you ask, "How has someone not done this already?" So profound in a way. It's so simple, this idea. It's literally one pulsing sound. You understand it, but you are thinking "How do I listen to this? What is it for?""

"Look, X-Ray Spex is amazing, I could talk about them all day, but I put The Slits, because sonically nothing sounds like them and nothing will ever sound like them again. Their harmonies, the drums, Budgie, Palmolive, oh god, where do you start with The Slits? I mean their name is The Slits. To be 14-years-old in that scene, just to create what they made? If you look at The Sex Pistols at that time, they were a prefabricated band, but not The Slits. The lyrics are so good. They're another one of those bands where it's on every level. Every single layer is so creative and interesting and incredible. It's really multi-faceted. From their personalities, to their feminism, to the politics, which were wishy-washy in this crazy way, but sonically, nothing sounds like that. It was primitive. It was really provocative, it really provoked society and it was so cool. You can't compare anything to The Slits."

"Another movie that is hugely influential to me and I never get tired of watching it. The cinemascope photography is unbelievable, evolutionary and fantastic. The performances, the production design and the pacing – it’s kind of slow but it draws you into it and it makes you wish there could still be movies like that nowadays. I mean most movies these days are made for teenagers. It’s almost as if people’s brains work differently these days. Maybe its commercials and music videos and videogames and you just want more stimuli at a faster pace. Filmmakers seem to be afraid to trust the audience more. I don’t mean that movies should be slow and boring, but if you have a good enough script you should be able to use the power of the image to tell a story. It’s like if you look at Pixar movies like Wall-E, actually I do think they have a slower pace, there’s such richness in every frame."