"In high school, I worked at The Video Room in Oakland, California. It had the largest selection of laser discs in the Bay Area. One guy owned all of them. I was smugly aware that most people were watching movies entirely wrong, and would tell them so. I’d explain aspect ratios and assure my friends they’ve never even really seen Jaws until they’d seen it at my house on the Pioneer, hooked up to my dad’s concert amplifier and massive stadium speakers, my own rig. I watched more movies during that time than I did in film school. The Manchurian Candidate was one of them, and it was just [on a] different level. I went in thinking it would be a masterfully directed political conspiracy thriller, which it was, but was also completely bananas. I couldn’t believe some of the choices made. That film gave me permission to get a little bit weird in my storytelling. Once you’ve seen an old lady execute a Korean POW while Frank Sinatra looks on in complacency, you know you can go to crazytown and the audience will stay with you. It’s not easy, but it’s possible."

"I heard that when it first came out in 2010. I've got it on CD. He was a member of the Flipmode Squad so he'd done his time already I think. He probably felt like an old bastard as well - he's probably older than me! You've got the obvious misogyny in there and there was lots of that, but there was this real interest in the history of the pimp, which is a controversial subject, but it's almost like he's done his research on it and looked at it in a political sense. It's not just blatant misogyny as well, but then it is, it swipes over to that, and then it swipes over to gang on the corner, shooting, drugs. I get the impression that a lot of the time this is stuff he has observed. A lot of the time, these rappers like Conway the Machine and West Side Gunn, used to be dealers but had to step out of it to go professional. So they have this whole memory bank of experiences to draw from and then in that environment it's probably very close to you."