"I’m going to end this list with a request that you also seek out Kurosawa’s Dreams after you see this movie. Dreams is my absolute favorite film of all time, and when you bookend it with Ikiru, the experience is quite amazing. Ikiru is the story of a long-tenured public servant who discovers he only has a year to live. He makes a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his existence by working tirelessly to build a children’s playground. It is the work of an artist feeling he has not done enough substantive work in his life—a romanticized notion that our daily routine is often meaningless save for a few charitable acts. It is our fears as a young mind. Over the years, Kurosawa would endure a tumultuous career that nearly ended in an act of attempted suicide. Now consider Dreams, a film coproduced by Steven Spielberg and featuring Martin Scorsese in a cameo as Vincent Van Gogh. These filmmakers, along with George Lucas, would rally behind Kurosawa in the ’80s and help him make a comeback with Kagemusha and Ran (both on Criterion), winning him a Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination while also bringing back to light his incomparable portfolio of works (Lucas would very often recount how The Hidden Fortress was the narrative inspiration for Star Wars). Dreams, to me, feels a bit like a representation of the playground that Kurosawa built through his works, and the children he inspired coming out to thank him for it. I can watch this movie again and again forever. Criterion has an amazing collection of twenty-five films by Kurosawa. I cannot recommend watching his entire body of work highly enough, as it is perhaps the best documentation of a commercial artist in the modern age."

"Berlin, for me, is one of the most complete albums. It incorporates and encapsulates everything I love about albums and music, which for me is it being like a film that plays out in your mind. There's a sort of cinematic aspect to the whole thing. It's storytelling in its darkest and most beautiful form, it takes you through a relationship from the beginning to the end and you get invested in characters and people that are inhabiting the scenery that Lou Reed's talking about. You feel pain, in the end, when it's: "They're taking her children away / Because they said she was not a good mother". Those lyrics, and "this is the place our children were conceived / Candles lit the room brightly at night" and "this is the place where she cut her wrists / That odd and fateful night". It's just like, fuck me, who actually talks about that stuff any more? Who's brave enough to believe in the album as a whole? Because you take out any of those songs, and they're fantastic songs, but the whole point is it's a novel, and you have to invest in listening to the lyrics and absorbing the atmosphere and going with it the whole way through to really get that fucking hit at the end, where you're just devastated. The full entity, that's the album I wish I'd made. My boyfriend for seven years, when I was 18 to 25, was obsessed with Lou Reed and we saw him loads of times. He probably played it to me quite early on, maybe when I was 19 or 20, but I think I actually got obsessed with it on my own around 23, and just listened to it over and over again. And then luckily, it got brought back live and he toured it with the full children's choir and bloody string section in his band. It was such a treat to see that. In 'The Kids', they put all the samples of the children going "mummy!" and crying and banging on the door. Apparently they actually locked someone's kids in a room and recorded them, sobbing away. [laughs] Absolute bastard, you know, but what have you got to do for the arts? That really struck me at the time, thinking how much I love film and whenever I write music, I see it, in characters and colours and locations and places, and it's like they had, like lots of other people I suppose. There are so many songs by him that I love, but I wouldn't say there are any albums by him that I love the whole way through as much as this one. Obviously there's 'Satellite Of Love' and 'Perfect Day' and 'Walk On The Wild Side', which I think are fantastic pop songs because they've got grit - when I think about great songs that have darkness and grit and integrity, I think of Lou Reed and Kurt Cobain, and those are my two men that I reference. When I was writing 'Laura', I was like "okay, Lou", can I summon the spirit of Lou? Just to be able to talk brutally and honestly about a thing, but within a context of a song that people will remember. It's just in my DNA now, always with me, it's just part of me."