"I came to Beefheart late. As a youngster, a lot of the older lads were into Beefheart but I didn’t like the way they dressed or their attitude I didn’t think they were cool. They were borderline radical hippies and I wasn’t having any of that. It didn’t look like fun to me. So I steered cleared of Beefheart. And then years later, somebody sat me down and played me Trout Mask Replica and I went, "oh my GOD!" and went out and bought everything. It was his use of language – he was writing like an abstract impressionist painter, fusing together chunks of English language that made more sense to me than something written straight. He was writing emotions through raw chunks of images that were coming to him. He was the first lyricist that made complete sense to me. Then I read that this music that I’d thought was badly played was in fact played amazingly well. He would write these very emotional piano pieces and then hand them to the guitarist who was the MD (musical director) and say, score that for the whole band to play. Often they weren’t even played to a rhythm – they were kinda random – and the band had to play along with them. They’re astonishing renditions of something that is so abstract that it needs great musicians to play them. He was fusing the blues and finding new ways of playing it. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is one of his later albums where he returned to the style which people loved – trying to be less commercial than his Virgin Records years. There’s a track called ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’, (quotes lyrics) “like two flamingos in a fruit fight… Everything’s wrong, at the same time it’s right… Like steppin’ out of a triangle into striped light” – and this reminded me of my drinking years. That’s exactly what it was like, where you’re in shadow and you’re in white light. This man knows exactly what’s going on in my head. He wrote such beautiful poetry. In later life, I made contact with him through Anton Corbijn and he’d send me music of his that wasn’t quite so well known. But I never got to meet him sadly. As a painter he was a massive influence on me because his titles were so fantastic. I take that same approach when I’m titling paintings for exhibition."

"Another incredible thing about Criterion is that in addition to the classics, the treasures, the widely acclaimed, they also have a true love for cult and lowbrow cinema. Director Herk Harvey explains on the Carnival of Souls commentary that they had hoped the film would have an art-house release, and they actually approached a distributor successful in that market and were told that, since it wasn’t in a foreign language, it didn’t really fit. I’m sure being American-made wasn’t the only reason this was a hard fit for distributors, but it was interesting in terms of what art houses were looking for at that time and how the filmmakers saw the film’s niche. This film taught me how to watch Mulholland Drive . . . which is to say, if you stay with the mood, without fighting it, your intuition will serve you far better than the plot and structure and logic your brain is craving. Because essentially all stories are simple; what isn’t simple is the underneath of it all. And that’s more rewarding in the end. I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic. Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . ."