"We didn't watch many films in preparation for Teenage because licensing features is incredibly expensive. Also because there weren't that many specifically about youth culture as something different from adult culture. On the other hand there were some significant films that were about the problems of youth that were taken up by the youth audience. One of them is It starring Clara Bow, the original 'It Girl'. Clara Bow is the most amazing screen presence, a huge silent star. She was fantastically sexy but also very alluring. One of those people that just lights up the screen when she's on it. A lot of people thought It was rather scandalous and tried to ban it. In the film she's a working girl but beautiful and cheeky, who marries a rich guy, so it's a classic Hollywood fantasy fulfilment role, one of the first times it was done. There was a whole moral panic about the movie and Clara Bow, so it was very popular amongst kids. There are earlier teenage films like Flaming Youth from 1923, but we don't know if a print still exists, we tried to find one and couldn't. There's a whole phase of college movies from the twenties and they've all disappeared."

"Kristin Hersh is no ordinary musician, and her mind is unlike any other. In her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, she captures what it’s like to be young and starting out, but this is a grazed reality, the top layer of skin stripped clean away. The book is based on a diary she kept when she was 18, which is, as she says, “the age when no one takes care of you”. It was a year when everything happened. She moved her band, Throwing Muses, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, then bipolar. She was offered her first recording contract, with 4AD. She discovered she was pregnant. And she became unlikely friends with faded Hollywood movie star, Betty Hutton. “Betty sings about starlight and champagne,” Hersh writes. “I sing about dead rabbits and blow jobs.” Though Hutton was unpredictable and fragile (“Time is like a hurricane to her – a big, fast mess, sweeping her away”) she was also full of generosity, compassion and advice. “You have to leave things out to tell a story,” she once told Hersh. And Hersh listened. This female Kurt Cobain – he was a fan of her work – has forged her own brave path, often against enormous odds. And she writes better sentences than most writers do."

"In 1985, I was taking meetings in Hollywood, looking for film work. An agent at Universal said to me, “Come back tonight, I want to show you a film we need help with, and we’d like your take on it.” I dutifully showed up at the Hitchcock Theater on the Universal lot and was granted an exclusive screening of this film, Brazil. Within minutes, my mouth was dry. I knew I was viewing a masterpiece, and yet they wanted my input on it. Of course, I had so many ideas, I would have said anything to get a chance to be a part of it, whatever it was (I had not been told anything about it). I called my friend Russell Mulcahy and told him, “I’ve just seen the most extraordinary film, and Universal want some music ideas from me.” “Don’t touch it!” said Russell. “That’s Terry Gillam’s film. He’s in a battle with Universal over it.” With some disappointment, I knew whose side I had to take. But I did get two pneumatic tapes of the film in the mail for my trouble. For months, I played it on my first flat-screen TV, just freezing on shot after shot for days on end. Weirdly perfect."

"Déclassé doubles being kinda a Ripley thing, The American Friend has a trashy yet seductive sister called Ripley’s Game, which, if you haven’t seen it, has John Malkovich and a very GoldenEye vibe. I watch both on regular rotation. But it’s really so wild that The American Friend is the older film, because where Ripley’s Game is like a classic Hollywood cash-in, The American Friend is a radical reinterpretation of the material. It says all the loud parts quiet in a way that deepens the pathos and significance of the Ripley cycle. Rather than being a social-climbing dandy, Dennis Hopper’s Ripley is a mumbling cowboy hipster—it’s maybe his most likable role. And Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan, who can so easily just be a pathetic sucker, is instead an existential hero. But for all its understatement and the arty languid pacing, when the film needs to be—as in the train scene—it’s as taut and calculated as Hitchcock. Oh man, and that stuff about the Beatles and Hamburg is so damn smart. It’s crazy that a director whose work is all over the place could produce a film so totally organic and emotionally satisfying. Honestly it’s not fair."