"Another movie that takes place in the Edwardian era, but in the country where Edward was actually reigning. It was an important movie for me as a kid and it continued to be something that I revisited again because it’s just good. Good storytelling, quite beautiful. You’ve got to love the matte paintings of the London rooftops. You’ve got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny. Obviously, no challenge to Dick van Dyke’s Australian Cockney accent, but his performance in that movie is really incredible. He is such a good physical comedian and when they’re in the chalk painting — which is also just lovely, the live action mix and the animation — he often has the same dance choreography as Julie Andrews. And he interprets it incredibly differently. It’s not that he can’t do them, it’s that he’s interpreting them in a different way, for humor, with his body type and so cleverly. It’s a movie where kids have power. They understand some things that their Edwardian dad doesn’t. And we use a Mary Poppins-esque weathervane shot in The Lighthouse. And then also, as much as it is a very, very satisfying narrative, the movie’s not without mystery. What is Mary Poppins’ backstory? What is her relationship with Bert? She creeps me out. Like when her reflection in the mirror keeps singing after her. The way she’s a little bit austere with the children and then the next minute she’s super cuddly, it is a little creepy. And then it just isn’t her, but when the kids get lost in East London, and there’s the dogs barking, and the old beggar woman who’s like, “Come here, children” or whatever. That was incredibly terrifying as a child."

"I guess I’ll have to start with Songs from the Second Floor, which is a film by Roy Andersson, who is a brilliant Swedish filmmaker who basically… He made a feature in the ’70s called A Swedish Love Story that is a really wonderful, strange, funny, acerbic commentary on Sweden that became this huge hit. I think it was the biggest hit ever in Sweden. And then he delved into making commercials for a long time, and he developed this new style over the course of something like 300, 400, 500 commercials. Then, in the early 2000s, he came out with this film that took him several years to make called Songs from the Second Floor, which is like a parody of obsessive perfectionism. He’s very similar Jacques Tati in that he works primarily with stationary wide shots, and he’s always building sets. All of the sets in his films are built from scratch, and the reason his films take so long to make is because each each vignette is one shot, and the set for that shot tends to take a month to build. There’s just like these gorgeous paintings, and there’s this really singular, dark, dry, sad wit driving everything he does. Since Songs from the Second Floor he’s come out with two other films that play like spiritual sequels, You the Living and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which I think you can see on Netflix. But Songs from the Second Floor remains the most perfect of the films, in my opinion."

"I was a big fan of Mark Everett ever since I heard ‘Novocaine For The Soul’; I heard it once on the radio and bought the album the next day. It was perfect, almost like a Nirvana that were still alive. Little did I know that was their only song that was really like that, but I still fell in love with them, I loved Beautiful Freak. I guess I was following them so closely and thinking about his various woes so much and then this record came out. It was set in a hospital and a lot of things seemed to be set in a hospital for me, musically, at that time - The Bends had a lot of those themes on it too, for example. On the one hand there was this idea of the monotony of being in a hospital, the absolute depths of his misery, but at the same time he can’t seem to stop himself writing these theme tunes for happier scenes, like ‘Susan’s House’. He’s just got these terrible, heart-breaking lyrics but attached to these jovial little songs. There’s also loads of really cool sampling and the musique concrète stuff he does, particularly on Electro-Shock Blues, where there’s lots of ambience and you don’t know what instrument is playing what. It’s got a kitchen sink sort of vibe. “Arrangement-wise too you’ll get really unusual stuff happening; lots of bass and then something weird with no drums. He broke a lot of rules for me when I was starting out and I started thinking, 'Well, you don’t have to have that in your song if you don’t want...' You could just have the beeping from a heart monitor and sing over that."