"They're an incredible band, on Fiction and maybe even slightly discovered by The Cure. They were Americans but lived in London and were involved in the Camden scene with Silverfish, Ligament and all these kind of bands. It's almost metal, but it's also really bleak. A wonderful band, they made two records and then the bass player died so I never got to see them live. Martin our drummer saw them play. When we started Mogwai they were one of the bands we all bonded over. We were all big God Machine fans and actually used to do a couple of covers of their songs. The records have definitely held up and stood the test of time. I think I found them, you're about the same age as me so you'll remember this, but whenever a major label like Fiction tried to punt a new band they're pretty much give the records away, so you'd get singles and 7" for 49p. You could try out a lot of bands. When I moved my records a few years ago I had so many 7" of horrible bands that are just cataclysmically awful that I bought just because they were 50p. But that's how I discovered The God Machines and they're a big Mogwai band, there's no argument about that."

"The notion of making a fiction — meaning you look at it and you think it’s all documentary footage, but it’s all shot. And the reality factor of that is something that makes you able to escape into the film; the fabric of that fiction is so believable and completely knitted together that you buy the proposition of the film — even when you see people getting shot and there’s no blood coming out of their bodies or whatever. There’s something about shooting something [in black and white] — and I’m talking about two movies that are in black and white, we should say, except for the part [in Andrei Rublev] where they show the color of the fresco of the Russian icons. I really like movies that are in black and white, because you feel like you are watching a movie. We associate it with things that were filmed at that time, that would have been filmed in black and white. So there are different concessions and commitments to make to a limited palette for a reason. When I make a movie like Miral, there’s a kind of reversal stock that I’m using outside and sometimes it really feels like Technicolor, like a movie like Exodus, and there are other moments when it’s rougher and it feels like The Bad Lieutenant, or something like that."