"What can you say? He's Nick Cave. He belongs in this mysterious closet. I love that he's so impossible to categorise. I remember hearing his music for the first time when I was 15 or 16, and having no idea what to make of him. I almost still don't. He belongs in a genre unto himself. The one thing I love so much about Nick Cave is that he's a master craftsman. He considers himself a writer, and you can really hear it in his songs in a way that's highly unusual. The way he crafts a song is like no other. He makes no bones about the fact that he's putting a certain kind of poetry to a certain kind of music in a way that just isn't really done nowadays. And he's an incredible performer. There are artists and there are songs, but then there are albums as albums, that really stand up as an entire record. Let Love In, for me, works as an entire record from the moment it opens to the moment it closes. But it also was the time. If I loved a band and they had an album that came out in the late 80s, early 90s, it was probably just more influential, because it was hitting me at a time that was so important. I actually got to meet him last year in Australia. I'd covered 'Ship Song' on a record of Australian songs, so I got to get Nick Cave transmission. Now I just need to get Robert Smith transmission and I'll have the holy trinity."

"A little Whiplash anecdote is, of course, like everybody else, I had no idea who Damien Chazelle was. Jason Reitman was the one who sent me the script, in an email, for Whiplash. He sent me both the short and the feature script and just said, “Read this,” and obviously it’s from Jason so I’m gonna read it. It was again, obviously, probably one of the most brilliant scripts I had ever read and one of the best fits in terms of the character that I really immediately understood and felt like I could wrap my brain around and pull off. They said, “The writer-director would love to meet you,” and we set up a lunch, and Damien and I sat down and immediately basically agreed on everything, except he didn’t know that I had a musical background, so he was talking about how we’d have body doubles and we’d have somebody coaching me on how to wave my arms around like a conductor. And I said, “Hey, we don’t need that because actually, that’s one of the arrows I have in my quiver.” That was one of those moments where it felt like kismet, that Damien was like, “Oh, my God.” He said, “When Jason and Helen suggested you for this part, I immediately thought that’s a great idea, but I had no idea that you actually had those kinds of abilities.” And also, he didn’t write the script for me, but he wrote it with Miles Teller in mind from the beginning, and didn’t know that Miles had been playing drums since he was 15 years old."