"""1932 film. I just watched it. It was on TCM a few weeks ago. It’s the first Island of Doctor Moreau film. It’s Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, and he’s experimenting with the animals. He’s trying to turn them into humans, but he mostly fails, and so he has these horrible creatures trapped, and they’re enslaved. And it’s an amazing, dark, terrifying film. And — this is true — when it came out in 1932, audiences found it so horrifying, people threw up in their seats. They threw up in the movie, they were so horrified by this film. I love that. I love that. I really recommend it. It’s very short and to the point, and this guy is shipwrecked, and he’s trapped on the island with Dr. Moreau, and finding out what he’s doing. And he’s actually created a woman out of a panther or something who’s almost a full woman but not quite. It’s pretty damn clever."""

"My son listens to Frank Ocean, so I started listening to this through him. I started with listening to Channel Orange and I thought that was fucking amazing. At first I was displaced by the thin-sounding R&B American-ness of it, but when you get into it you realise it’s brilliant. What I like about it is the nature of what Frank Ocean’s singing about, his little introspective vanity subjects. He doesn’t go outwards, like ‘the big wave’s gonna crush us, save the animals’, he just talks about vain things. It’s good. It’s brilliant actually. He’s just a really weird guy singing about weird subjects. There’s that tune ‘Super Rich Kids’, which is just fucking brilliant. ‘Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce’, there’s little moments of discomfort like that, turned into a chorus. I much prefer that to someone’s big treatise about, I don’t know, Assad. Or the coronavirus."

"I saw it at BAM in Brooklyn when they were doing a Schlöndorff retrospective, and I didn’t previously know much of his work but then got super obsessed with him. What’s cool about him is that his films are all totally different. The Tin Drum is a crazy epic story told through the perspective of this young boy, and the voice-over is incredible and takes you through his experience. A lot of people think the voice-over in We the Animals is a reference to Malick, but we’re actually referencing The Tin Drum. What I love about this movie and Ratcatcher is that they show an understanding of childhood sexuality, which you only really see in European films. The other thing that’s really important about The Tin Drum is the color palette. It has this incredibly vibrant, almost Technicolor palette. I showed the film to my DP and everybody that we worked with."