"My fifth film — it’s the movie that literally got me wanting to make movies to begin with — is the David Cronenberg film Scanners. When I was a kid, I was a little weird kid, and I loved horror films, I loved gore films. When Michael Ironside made that guy’s head explode in that movie, I was like, “Whatever this is, I want to do this!” I was ten, eleven years old, and my parents would take me to see these. Like, I saw The Exorcist in movie theaters; I saw The Evil Dead in a movie theater. I went to see all this crazy, freaky s*** that you would never take a little kid to see today. But I saw Jaws in a movie theater. Like, I wanted to see all these scary movies, and my parents were like, “Absolutely. Let’s go.” And so here I was, as a teenager, learning how to make my own blood, and my own scars and wounds. I wanted to be Rick Baker or Tom Savini. When I was a kid, that’s who I looked up to. When I saw An American Werewolf in London, it was phenomenal, to see all those makeup special effects they were doing. And then when I went to high school and learned you could actually go to college to study film and learn how to make movies, I was like, “I’m in. That’s exactly what I want to do.”"

"We've been around them quite a few times in the last three or four years. They have a way of doing this hypnotic, simple, grinding-away thing. The guitarist, Ira Kaplan - he's crazy with all these delay effects, the way he's layering them up. We would end up listening to them almost by accident. There have been a couple of times where we would do these long drives and we'd put on a record like Boris or Yo La Tengo, and they'll have songs that go on for ten minutes, and you're getting into these big soundscapes that just dig into oblivion. We've really embraced that in the past couple of years: to find this perfect goal, a sound you can play over and over, and not necessarily get to a crescendo and back, but to get to the edge and stay there. And they do that great. There's a lot of good qualities about their group. They're fucking weirdos, they're just not a typical rock group. A lot of times, I feel like The Flaming Lips are a typical rock group. I mean, we're influenced by The Beatles. It's a bunch of dudes with long hair that do drugs. We're pretty typical. I try to remind ourselves that we like weirdos, although I don't always believe that we're weirdos ourselves. But we love the weirdos, and we love when they get the keys to the house and they can have their party that night."

"This is pretty amazing. I think this is Geoff Emerick’s first go as engineer. He’d been working there [at Abbey Road studios] but he hadn’t become an engineer yet. When I was working with Paul McCartney on his album, Flaming Pie, Geoff was the engineer as well. He told me what a marvellous thing it was for him because he used this close mic ambience on this album and did some really amazing effects, like on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Backwards stuff and all that and this was pretty advanced stuff in them days. It was more experimental than anything they’d done before. Some of the tunes on there are just great and it was them nearly getting into Sgt Pepper, you know? Probably doing more experimenting and copying tapes and bouncing them across. They hadn’t got the tracks to do it, really, so they had to use two machines and sometime three machines and then mix everything down from four tracks onto one and then start on another and mix that down to another machine. So it was very difficult to make those records, I would imagine. How did it sound back in ’66? Way better than everything else, I would say. It stood out like a sore thumb really. It was so tight and beautiful and punchy. It was the punchiest thing around. It was, like, powerful and, it seemed to me, majestic."