"I’d bought this record years ago and had forgotten about it. But the movie came on TV in America, and I went oh my god and immediately had to hunt it down. I’d left it in London; I went to London just for the Barry Lyndon Soundtrack. There’s a Mozart piece on there that is just stunning. It was different to the usual classical renderings, it just seemed to have more heart and soul and harpsichord. It’s still there now on the top of my pile, it’s one of those albums that doesn’t collect dust. I have a weird association with it because my mother’s maiden name was Barry, and Lyndon is obviously Lydon misspelt. It also reminded me of my mother’s death and all of that. I wanted to play this at my father’s funeral a few years back, but my dad had a specific Irish record that he loved, so we played that."

"Ok, I know this one’s cheating. I don’t care. So it’s not a movie, so what? It did start as a movie, so it totally counts. No TV show has meant more to me than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stop laughing, I’m serious. It’s one of the greatest things ever created in the history of mankind. I said stop. How dare you?! I will fight you! I will fight you and I will win. It’s the best. Every right-thinking person knows that. When Buffy was on the air, I recorded every single episode on my TiVo. I’m pretty sure my DVR thought I was a fourteen year-old girl. Whatever. The show was incredible. It refused to be pigeonholed. It defied, merged, bent, and blended genres, masterfully commingling fantasy and reality. It dealt with issues of real substance. It treated its audience intelligently, with the utmost respect. Over a decade after it went off the air, it still had residence in my head and heart, and served as a model for what Kubo became: real life wrapped in metaphor. Like Buffy, we explore triumph and tragedy, loss and healing, and compassion, and forgiveness through the stylized prism of fantasy. We acknowledge that part of life… is death. That lives can be thrown away and lost and upended in an unfair and random act of casual violence, without the grandeur and rousing speechifying often found in heroic movie deaths. People we love are often ripped away from us, in an instant. And we need to find a way to reconcile that a part of life is struggle, and it has a cost. Kubo and the Two Strings, like life, like Buffy, is wonderfully bittersweet. So thank you, Joss Whedon, for giving me so much high-spirited joy and gut-wrenching heartache. You saved the world. A lot."