"In the same [kin] as Ordinary People, I have to throw All the President’s Men in there, which is a completely different film for Redford to do, but probably one of the greatest journalism films of all time. There are so many elements to that film that are unique to it. The relationship between [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein, the way those are portrayed, and then just the whole mystery of the Watergate being spilled out for us. When that happened, I was… I don’t remember, I must have been three or four, five. Those were the years — that was the first time I can remember in my lifetime of something going on politically, and so I actually have memory of that time. And I don’t remember what it was, but I remember the words “Watergate” meaning something. Meaning something big, even though I didn’t understand what they were. Just for that film to be so dialogue heavy, and so all about performance, and the written word, it is one of the most on-the-edge-of-your-seat thrillers that I can think of that is pretty powerful… It’s the most riveting film about people who sit down and type, you know what I mean? You can imagine, it’s pretty intense."

"I used to work at HMV in Brighton and until that point I was still doggedly into electronica. This is a very specific memory but I remember reading something in The Guardian Guide about N.E.R.D., and I realised that these were the guys who’d been producing all the music on the radio that I thought was incredible. At HMV I had to order the album in myself, we weren’t stocking it, and it was kind of another moment for me, that realisation that you do not have to compromise, that production and good songs are not mutually exclusive. At the time I was listening to such complex music where every track had a different snare drum or a different sound, to listen to the N.E.R.D. record where every snare drum and keyboard sound is the same, there’s something insanely clever about that. It was a real moment for me in terms of realising that what interests me isn’t just the niche stuff. My production isn’t as advanced as theirs, but if you’re doing something that sounds interesting it’s pointless doing that if you can’t back it up with a song. That’s what I try and do, but I’m not as committed to the pop side of it as I could be."

"An early work by Resnais. It’s only a half hour long, but I’ve not seen a film of any length that matches it in emotional resonance.
 It transcends the documentary form. I saw it around the time I first saw The Night of the Hunter, in the late fifties, and I was about to film my first documentary. Night and Fog begins with a beautiful color landscape beneath a blue sky. The camera cranes down to reveal a long stretch of barbed wire, followed by shots of vast fields overgrown with tall grass, trees, and wildflowers. The camera tracks slowly across the placid landscape, dotted with abandoned red brick buildings that could have been warehouses or barns; then a sudden shock cut to black-and-white footage of victims of the Holocaust. The long, tracking color shots of the killing fields of Auschwitz and Majdanek, only ten years after the end of the Second World War, are intercut with horrific black-and-white shots of piles of dead bodies, rooms filled with women’s hair, and personal effects. A dry, dispassionate narration is heard throughout, written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the camps. Night and Fog is one of Resnais’ first “memory” films and points the way to his later masterpieces, Hiroshima mon amour and . . ."