"Run Lola Run is a movie that I really love. It’s very much of its time. I watched it recently, and it’s kind of funny; it doesn’t age that well, but I loved it at the time. And I did a movie around the same time called Saving Grace. Run Lola Run won Sundance the year before us, and then we won at Sundance for Saving Grace — we won the Audience Award — and I remember thinking, “Oh my God!” You know, I can’t believe that we would even be in the same league. That’s when Sundance had movies and stuff — before, like, f—ing drink commercials or whatever the f— they do, some kind of Hollywood ski vacation. But I really loved Run Lola Run. It had a really nice feel to it."

"I always come back to this idea of chaotic femininity or chaotic femme. It’s a discourse I have with some of my nerdier friends, like a standard for representations of women that we gravitate to and are driven crazy by. What Assayas does in this film, with the layers of fiction and reality, and representation of representations of representations, is similar to Mulholland Dr.: he interrogates this idea of the actress and the very idea of a character, and leaves you with a queasy feeling about what it all adds up to. What I love about this, particularly as embodied in Juliette Binoche’s performance, is the idea of a woman who is resigned to a downfall and is just fascinated to see how it all plays out. What is this thing that leads women with stable socioeconomic circumstances and certain amounts of privilege (in this case, fame and fortune) to self-destruct? It’s an endlessly fascinating question to me, and I love the way this film explores it. I also immensely enjoy seeing American stars like Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz in this complicated, dark, serpentine French film. Those are some of my favorite performances by each of the three women. I love films about actresses; they always hit me right where it hurts."

"Christy Moore is one of my mum’s favourite artists and I listened to this so much growing up. He had a record, Live at the Point, which we would always listen to on journeys around Ireland and Irish music was the first music I experienced live. My mum was born in Dublin, we would go to Galway and go in taverns all the time and it soundtracked my childhood. “I just recently fell in love and ‘Black is the Colour’ was the song that I really liked and listening to it recently I felt like I was like inside romance. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m so in love right now’ [laughs]. I’ve been quite starved of romance for a really long time and I felt I was in it. I was ‘God, this is so romantic and this is just kind of fucking insane’. I’d forgotten the importance of it and how much I wanted it, so that’s why I put the song in here. “If you get the Live at the Point version, at the beginning he says that he’d heard this beautiful song by this guy and at the end he’s ‘gimme that song!’ He wants it and I love that, that’s so cute - that’s what this is about, it’s sharing stories. Christy Moore heard this guy sing this beautiful song and he’s ‘Come on, give it to me, I want to play that tune, I want people to feel that way’ and how beautiful is that? “I’m Irish, so folk is my origin, sharing songs, telling stories and someone else passing on that story. I’ve been really looking into folklore in the past year, that’s one of the reasons that I really wanted to go to Ireland because I was ‘I need to find a record that’s related to this, this is my culture and this is where I grew up.’ As a kid I played the tin whistle and the Bodhrán. I was winning trophies for Irish dancing, I spent my holidays there and I went around playing in fucking fields with cows. And yeah, I’ve been researching fairies and mythology, I love it so much. “There’s so much ancient, beautiful, really respected and protected traditional stuff in Ireland. The traditional aspect can be so cool, there’s so many amazing musicians that just go down to the pub and play and it’s like breathing to them. I stayed in this little hotel with eight rooms in a town called Kilkee, it was in a bay, it was so cute and there was a family playing music in the pub. There was an eight year old boy just staring off, he was playing the accordion and it was so natural - just a bored eight year old that is a fucking genius and has no idea. And then if someone sang an old traditional song a cappella, everyone in the pub would go silent. It was like a movie or something."