"Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other 20th Century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Not that he didn’t hope to write and publish more. The life of this Galician Jew was cut short when he was shot dead in the streets of Drohobych in a tit-for-tat between German officers of the occupying Nazi force. What survives is the people and other beings of the ghetto Schulz made eternal and universal in a text where everything has the right to respect, even a tailor’s dummy."

"The next movie would probably be Young Frankenstein. I remember going to see that as a kid. Because I loved all the Universal horror films, but I had only seem them on TV, like on Creature Double Feature on Friday afternoons. By that point I loved Gene Wilder, because I made the connection like, “Oh, that guy was in Willy Wonka. Now he’s in Young Frankenstein.” So that movie blew me away. And even to this day, I watch it all the time. It’s such an incredible movie because it’s really, really funny, with such incredible performances, but it’s so beautifully made. Nobody would spend the time now to make a comedy that well. Visually and technically, it’s so incredible. It doesn’t date; it holds up. Peter Boyle’s perfect, and Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder, and everybody. It’s just an incredible movie. It really captured the feel of those Universal films, like Bride of Frankenstein, yet it is really funny. It’s something that almost never works. You know, kind of look at the Munsters on TV, and the Addams family, where you could get into it and they have the art direction there and everyone’s funny, but it almost never works. It’s almost always a disaster, and that film is just so perfect. I think the fact that people were brave enough back then to release black-and-white movies."

"I have to declare an interest here—I was the production designer of the film. Terence Davies takes us on a fictionalized journey through his childhood. There is no story; the film is composed of memories, some long and complicated, some very short, all vivid. A shot onto a carpet in which nothing happens but movements of shadow and sunlight is memorable because so universal; a sailing ship seen in a child’s schoolroom daydream, the tortures of confused guilt, the joys of a close family life, and the loneliness of the outsider are, in one way or another, common to us all. Davies has somehow caught that essence for us."