"I got into Neutral Milk Hotel by accident. Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire mentioned this song on an interview, and I explored it and found the Aeroplane record. It was like discovering a secret. There are very few records that I’ve had that relationship with - you hear it and you don’t want to share it with anyone. “The story of the record is so unique and a bonus as to why I love it. Jeff Mangum hadn’t been taught about the Holocaust in school, so when he discovered Anne Frank’s journal in his mid-20s', he picked up this book and was like ‘What’s this?’ ""We take it for granted that we know Anne Frank’s story from a young age, but imagine if you stumbled across that book without the context? It would be incredible, and so it had this profound impact on him, to the point where he kind of invented a relationship in his subconscious mind with her, whereby they were old friends. It became like a soulmate relationship where he got to know her through his dreams. “He practiced lucid dreaming in the making of the record by waking up and putting himself back on the edge of sleep. He managed to have these lucid dreams that he could control; where he could walk through passages in his imagination and he got to know Anne Frank through that space. ""All the songs were written in this otherworldly space, and that’s why it’s quite a surreal record lyrically. I visited Anne Frank’s house listening to In the Aeroplane over the Sea and it created an even stronger bond between me and the record. “Also, around 2013, Mangum announced some really intimate shows. It was about thirteen years since he’d toured the record, and I believe he’s got bipolar and is very reclusive. I somehow managed to get tickets to his Union Chapel gig, and for the author of a cult record like that it’s a very small venue. We just sat there and wept, it was like a funeral. There was this incredible sound when he was performing, and I looked around me and realised that the sound was the whole audience singing the lyrics under their breath. “No one wanted to disturb his performance by singing but everyone in the room had this profound connection to the songs. He came back on for three encores and when he finally left the stage the security couldn’t get people to leave. They were refusing to leave the pews, stomping, in fits of tears. It was like a divine presence had just left the building. “This song has been my medicine at different times in life, curing me from different struggles like mental health or loss. Its music that has never failed to move me."

"A recent one would be Raw, the Julia Ducournau film. I love that film. I had sort of finished my movie so… Or no, I hadn’t finished it — maybe I was just about to shoot my movie — but I watched it three times in theaters. I can’t believe that’s a debut. It only feels like seasoned masters are able to really manipulate an audience, beat to beat, to really feel like you are being so perfectly manipulated, and you’re just in the hands of someone who has complete control of you. It’s just unbelievable to have out of the gate. But also, she does an incredible — and it’s something I was trying to do in my movie — she is able to just really ground all of her stylized sequences really perfectly in the felt naturalism of the movie, and she does it in such incredibly sly ways that are so, so smart. Like, you know — spoiler — the finger eating scene. The fact that the beginning of that scene is all about them waxing. Like, the waxing is an incredible way to ground the physical reality of their bodies in something we can all relate to, in terms of, you know, none of us have ever eaten a finger, but we all know the feeling of hair being pulled out. It’s a really relatable and yet traumatic pain that we’re seeing and thinking about. It’s similar in the way that the animals are put in in the beginning. Because the bodies are treated so real and so relatably, then when this surreal stuff starts happening, it feels so goddamn real. She’s just eating half of a finger and people were traumatized by it. You know, it’s actually not that gory of a movie. It’s not that extreme of a movie, but she slyly grounds it in realism. And then there’s just these beautiful images over the whole thing. It’s such an economic use of set pieces. The blue paint and the yellow paint, and getting together and turning green. Even her under the covers, that feels like a set piece. She’s so economic with her use of action and framing, and it was something I really wanted to try to do. I felt like I didn’t have a good reference for “How am I going to integrate the stylized sequences I have in my mind into this natural world?” Then when I saw her movie, I’m like, “Oh man, this is exactly what I want to do.” She just has a really incredible eye for what is significant, and all the set pieces are just very muscular. Knowing the set pieces are made from simple clean action that is understood with iconic, and icons are simple. To know that things that are iconic are often very, very simple."