"Then the next Paul Newman film has to be The Hustler — that’s as much about directing as anything else. I know that director [Robert Rossen] didn’t do a ton of stuff but that’s the first time I really started thinking about the frame. That’s not true; I thought about the frame before I even knew I was thinking about the frame when I saw Lawrence of Arabia. I saw The Hustler again on a film print in college. I’d seen it many times before, I actually owned it on video in high school. What high school student owns a video cassette of The Hustler? But I did. I just thought it was so beautiful — that black and white photography. The framing in that film — I think it’s cinema scope. I know it’s 235, so super wide frames. The way they would stack foreground-background action in that — that was a real lesson because I had done this thing in my first video project in film school. I was looking at the camera and I was looking at the shot and it was a video camera that they had on a little pee-wee dolly that had a hydraulic boom arm on it. I was just sitting there looking at this video and wondering, “This is in my infancy as a person thinking about visual storytelling.” I was messing with this hydraulic boom lift and looking at the monitor and all of a sudden I lowered the camera to the point to where this table that was right in front of the camera fell into the foreground. Then I had this thing in the foreground and this carriage in the background. And all of a sudden, it just got vastly more interesting to me. I know that might seem so remedial to people that take photographs and other things. This was a big breakthrough for me. When I went back and looked at The Hustler you see all of this complex foreground-background framing going on. Spielberg‘s the best at it too. Spielberg does it all the time. If you look at scenes in Indiana Jones where they’re sitting across the table the more he puts the camera — it’s awesome. But there’s an elegance to the camera placement and the camera movement in The Hustler that’s pretty undeniable. Not to mention, there’s a reason I’m talking about Paul Newman movies: there’s a behavior emerging in these films from the sixties that I really identified with. I almost felt like they valued it more than people in other decades, because they were so directly breaking free from the structures of studio films of the fifties and that acting style, more importantly. That it seemed like, “Now we’re going to take some seriously flawed characters for a run, for a test drive.” It’s when you start getting, I think, some of the best writing in film history — and character writing specifically. Stories that turn on character more than plot. What an odd plot for The Hustler. What an odd trajectory, but totally compelling. When I guess they’re going to the derby or whatever and that’s when his girlfriend — what an odd structure. That’s really something I strive for in my stuff. Structures that aren’t just a continual execution of plot, but are really driven by characters and their flaws."

"I discovered him at university when I was 20. The first thing I ever heard was 'Come Out' which has a sampled voice that just keeps saying "blood, come out" and it just keeps beating, so this was Steve Reich's very early tape phase experiments where he stuck it on two tapes and would press play at the same time and they start off together and then gradually start to move apart. First of all you get an echo on the vocal, and then as the two vocals move away it starts to kind of [imitates the sound], and it's so trippy it's amazing. I feel like it's the earliest rap or something, it’s got this really amazing sample, this guy who's street, the way he's talking - his accent's amazing and authentic, and then you just have like the rhythm that's created through words. Percussiveness and then there's ... syncopation starts happening and it's constantly evolving, moving, different rhythms, and that's basically his thing. 'Come Out' inspired me when I was at uni. I made a tape and slide piece, which is this projected piece that you animate using different slides. [Reich]'s using really graphic, violent imagery and I got a little boy to talk about fights at school, he was like six! I was asking how he felt about the fighting, has anyone ever tried to punch him, how does it feel? And I put his voice along with all these images of men fighting, and I phased it and did weird things to it, laid them all on top of each other, just experimenting in my own way with that. But that really inspired me and I started to delve more into Steve Reich. There are some preachers which he did tape phase experiments with, like "it's gonna raiiiiin, it's gonna rain!", such a musicality to what he's doing even though what he was doing was very conceptual. Again, it was a very rigid, composer-y thing to do, which is to set up a tape experiment, but within that he chose words and expressions that are really emotional and move through all different phases, making you think about all sorts of things and culturally, politically, there's a lot behind it. And then on this [Works] there's 'Music for 18 Musicians' which I absolutely love. Eighteen musicians would sit round, play their rhythm and then the next person would start a fraction of a second after them so they'd be in sync sometimes all playing the same thing but with a slightly different time part, so it totally fucked your brain. But the sounds that come out: you get all these weird intervals, syncopations, harmonies, rhythmic counterparts that are happening but the key that he chooses is heartbreaking and amazing as well. There are certain notes and harmonies, certain two notes will just start to really vibrate together and it just starts to create an amazing cinematic, filmic burst of ideas in my mind. It's almost like meditation or mantras, Ravi Shankar or something for me, Reich has done a similar thing. Like it just keeps on going round and round and then you get drones and then other drones come in and then they create textures that are moving all the time, so it's almost like a meditative state that you get into."

"I remember becoming aware of them when I was living in London in '94 when His 'N' Hers came out and thinking: "That's a good band". Actually, I think it was in Select, the one that had Brett Anderson on the front cover draped in the Union Jack and it was like the "new British pop", it was quite a classic issue, and they had a little paragraph at the bottom: "...oh, and Pulp are quite good too" and it was Jarvis sitting on a deck chair. And I thought "hmm", his whole image made sense to me, so I was more open to buying His 'N' Hers and thinking "that's a very good record". Then we were recording Casanova in a place called Moles in Bath, and Moles had a club underneath it and we'd go and drink in the club after a session, and 'Common People', the first time I heard it, was when it came on the enormous PA, it was very loud that room, I thought: "What the fuck is this?" It's one of the greatest pop songs of all time, it's so well-written and it's got such an arc, such a trajectory, a real energy. So that's where I thought "I'm desperate to hear the rest of that album", but also thought "I'm quite shocked and appalled that somebody else is making the music that I want to make myself"! So, yeah, I bought that album and thought, "yes, it really is a different class!" I was pretty scared of him when I interviewed him [for Les Inrockuptibles in 1994] - he was older than me and much, much taller! The first time we did the photo shoot, he turned up in his usual wonderful attire, for some reason, I was having a bit of brain fart that day and I put on this crappy old Barbour jacket coat, which had probably been worn by many many tramps before me. As a result, we did a few photos and then they told us to go away and come back another time and do the photo shoot properly, with Neil dressed as he ought to be. It was quite humiliating! I heard through a mutual friend later that Jarvis had said, "You've got to live it". That always stuck in my head and I thought "well, what does he mean by that?" I suppose if you're going to dress well for photographs, you've got to dress well the rest of the time as well, just be that person. Which I agreed with to an extent, but when you become a parent and have an ordinary life, you cease to dress well, which is a rather down-trodden middle-aged man! I've met him once or twice since very fleetingly in a couple of places. The funny thing is, we were both writing for the same Charlotte Gainsbourg album [5:55] back in the middle part of the last decade. I wrote an awful lot of lyrics and when I had kind of given up because I didn't know what they wanted anymore, they got Jarvis in to finish the job, and sure enough he did some wonderful things on that record. What I like about him is that he doesn't filter himself as much as I or other people would, he lets the stark stuff out, and he's not afraid of it, which I would be, being repressed!"