"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."

"I could have chosen any of the first three releases by Pixies – the Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle. We bumped into Pixies when 'Sit Down' was number two in the charts. We were staying in the same hotel as them. I had seen them on TV and thought they were okay. I didn't get them totally but I thought they were pretty interesting. I went up to Black Francis at breakfast and introduced myself. We got talking for about half an hour and hit it off instantly. He invited me to a gig they were playing that night in London. I dragged two members of James, who had never heard of Pixies, to the show. We were up in the balcony chatting and not totally paying attention. I remember after about four songs, Saul [Davies] turning and saying, ""Have you been listening to this?"" He pushed us to the front of the balcony and we watched genius in front of our eyes. It was incredible – the arrangements, the vocals – Black Francis screams like no other singer – and beautiful subtlety within their post-punk songs. Pixies should have been as big as Nirvana, but never had a cute Kurt Cobain frontman. They were always one of the most ungainly-looking bands on the planet, but they made the most heavenly music as far as I was concerned. I love the surreal nature of the lyrics, that didn't quite make sense. I was a singer and I was all about making sense and communicating, and here was a band that seemed to do the opposite and the results were fantastic. That was quite revolutionary to me. Later, when we worked with Brian Eno on five albums, he would say to me ""stop making sense"" and I would think of the Talking Heads album of the same name, but I would also think of Pixies. With Pixies, not a large amount of people got them back then, as they were too ahead of their time. When Kurt Cobain said that in his perfect life he would have been born as the lead singer of Pixies, many people began to discover them. It meant that when they returned from their hiatus, they were bigger than they were previously as everyone had caught up to realise that Pixies were one of the most influential and important bands of all time. I got to know them a bit more and once went to see them play a tiny warm-up gig in London. I went backstage and was talking to Black Francis about screaming. I was asking how he did it, because when I tried, it wrecked my voice and I couldn't sing. He told me that a Puerto Rican man, who was a chef in a crappy restaurant in California, taught him how to scream. He then tried to teach me. At the time, he failed. I can scream a bit more now, but I think I was born more of a crooner."