"It’s ‘The White Hotel’ by DM Thomas because I’ve only read to about page forty-seven. I couldn’t get past the poem section, which is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. As one solid book of poetry and evocative writing, it’s the best. I thought I was in that poem; kind of similar to the way Leonard Cohen makes me feel like I’m in his songs. I’ve recommended it to anyone who I thought could read."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."

"My wife, Sofia, recently published her first book. I'm incredibly proud of her for all her hard work and dedication in writing this and don't know how she did this whilst being a great mom to our both daughters. The book is about her experiences being a young western woman living and doing business in a dictatorship, and it's a story of love and hustle in a land where nothing is what it appears to be."

"Andrzej Wajda’s films had an enormous influence on me as I began writing and directing. I had lunch with him at the National Film Theatre in London, after he had just made Everything for Sale, a film I loved. It was Wajda’s tribute to Zbigniew Cybulski, his friend and the star of Ashes and Diamonds, who died young. In Ashes, Cybulski plays a resistance fighter stranded by a sellout peace. His broodiness and manner seemed to mourn James Dean."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."