"When I was first living in Los Angeles. I was in love with a French girl, now my wife, and I became immersed in the way her culture viewed life. There was a different set of priorities at work, a value of simplicity and pure ingredients, both in the food and the filmmaking. This film blew my mind. The cast is all children. It contains one of the great suspense sequences of all time: a toddler climbing out an apartment window trying to reach a kitten while his mother talks on the phone, ignorant to the tragedy at hand. Another vignette follows an older boy teaching a younger boy how to pick up girls. Very French, but so honest and pure. I remember watching the extras on the DVD of A Man and a Woman, another great film. The crew consisted of a handheld Bolex and a sound recordist, mostly natural light. Everything was in the eyes, the body language — just two people learning each other. It informed the way I made Safety Not Guaranteed. Stripped down, but not messy or ugly. Clear and audible sound, like what your ears would capture if you were there. Intimate. Real. The best."

"Time gets flattened out, because now we’re into the digital age. Usually, I’m quite a retro person, but my manager was one of the first people to buy an iPod, so I got one. But then I thought, When am I ever going to use that? It took me ages to take it out of the box—maybe four or five years—and then I just couldn’t see the point of carrying it around. The first song that I ever downloaded was Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man.” Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker are the two real touchstones in terms of people I’ve listened to consistently throughout my whole life. If you listen to that first Pulp record, it is just a direct rip off of his first album—though I’m not saying it was as good as that. I was very lucky to [meet Cohen] when his album Old Ideas came out. I hosted the playback of that in London, and then I interviewed him about it. I was nervous about doing that, but I’m really glad that I did. I didn’t get to know him so much, but at least I got to meet him, and I was able to tell him how much his work had meant to me."