"I’m a huge Gaspar Noé fan and loved submitting to his latest assault. I was caught off guard with “Climax” given how the reviews centered on how much fun it was. It’s incredibly distressing and disturbing in places and unlike with ‘Irreversible’, I wasn’t prepared for it. The opening with all its influences laid bare reminded me of the legendary Nurse with Wound list from the late ’70s in which all the music that influenced their first album was openly acknowledged. By pure coincidence, erstwhile Nurse with Wound member, Geoff Cox, regularly collaborates with Noé’s on/off creative partner, Lucile Hadžihalilović. The dance scenes are extraordinary and as it becomes increasingly deranged and warped, the film lapses into a dimension that evokes the altered physical space of Ernie Gehr’s structuralist film, “Serene Velocity” combined with the narcotic delirium of Richard Kern’s “Submit to Me” skits. It’s cinema as sensory overload and it’s completely Noé’s world."

"The best book I’ve ever received came from my sister. It was a special edition of The Secret World of Og, by Pierre Berton, a book our mother had read to my sister, brother and I one summer when we were children. The book is about four children who discover a secret passageway in their playhouse floor, leading to an underground world, Og. I must have dreamt about the story each night after she read it to us, because my memories of the book are as vivid and three-dimensional as if I had been one of the children in the story. My own children have read the edition my sister gave me, and they loved it, too. At our cottage, the access to the basement is through a door in the floor; it reminded my children and I so much of the book that we named the crawl space “Og.” One day, I hope to read this book to my grandchildren."