"I first heard it when I was a little kid. I thought, ""What is this?"", trying to get my head around it. You've got to do a dance as a little kid to figure it out, and with all the most interesting stuff it takes you a while to get it. It's so fucking modern. You could pick a number of songs, but the architecture of those songs, it's like these super-tight rhythm sections and it doesn't really go anywhere. The groove is the thing. Sometimes he goes, ""Take it to the bridge!"" and they change it, but then they go back to the groove. It's not like a traditional song structure. The streamlined simplicity of it, and not being distracted by harmonic development, strikes me as being so revolutionary and modern. It makes me think of painting. Sometimes he's just groaning and yelping, and he's kind of like Jackson Pollock over this very tight structure, this kind of animalistic thing smeared across the song. You can see the connection to the blues, you can see the connection to early jazz, but he takes it somewhere else completely different."

"I sat next to someone called Arnaud Desplechin at a dinner once in Paris. At home a week later, I saw a movie called A Christmas Tale. It was jaw-dropping, immediately one of the best films I’d ever seen. I got up from the couch thinking, Who in God’s name directed this thing? At the TV, I flipped over the DVD case and shrieked. I’d been sitting right next to him and hadn’t said a thing. I was distraught—like someone who decides not to buy an eight-dollar painting at a thrift shop only to find out later that it was a Picasso. Surely A Christmas Tale is built on one of our sturdiest clichés, that of a dysfunctional family reuniting for the holidays. But that’s where everything you’ve ever seen before ends. There’s not a filmic technique that isn’t employed to its fullest, no trick Desplechin is afraid to pull. Every beat is specific, there’s not a written false note, and it has some of the ballsiest acting on any side of the Atlantic. I only wish I had known all this when I was sitting next to the man. C’est la vie."