"The notion of making a fiction — meaning you look at it and you think it’s all documentary footage, but it’s all shot. And the reality factor of that is something that makes you able to escape into the film; the fabric of that fiction is so believable and completely knitted together that you buy the proposition of the film — even when you see people getting shot and there’s no blood coming out of their bodies or whatever. There’s something about shooting something [in black and white] — and I’m talking about two movies that are in black and white, we should say, except for the part [in Andrei Rublev] where they show the color of the fresco of the Russian icons. I really like movies that are in black and white, because you feel like you are watching a movie. We associate it with things that were filmed at that time, that would have been filmed in black and white. So there are different concessions and commitments to make to a limited palette for a reason. When I make a movie like Miral, there’s a kind of reversal stock that I’m using outside and sometimes it really feels like Technicolor, like a movie like Exodus, and there are other moments when it’s rougher and it feels like The Bad Lieutenant, or something like that."

"Nina is another friend that we were introduced to via John Peel and his family. There were a number of people after his passing that I really wanted to get in touch with and Nina was one of them. That was John’s legacy. That and one-stop shopping, something that Radio 1 would benefit from the asset of again. John was a place where you could go to hear very disparate music – some of which you would love, some which you would loathe, and some of which you would loathe but come to love. Nina was one of the people that he played a lot. This was the album when I met her and her fella. She’s an extraordinary singer – for me, I think the greatest contemporary female lyricist. She and her boyfriend live in a tiny flat in Manhattan, almost like Russian peasants. There are lots of stuffed animals and huge rugs on her tiny bed and laptops hidden behind huge automatons. I love her guitar playing and her singing, but her lyrics challenged me to try to be as good. She writes from a woman’s point of view, beautifully. Her lyrics are very personal. I struggled with that before writing Edgeland. This, and the John Martyn album, and the James Blake album – they were all writing very personal songs."