The Strangers was such an impressive debut–so minimal, the camera was always in the right place, and the patient opening created two fairly empathetic lives. Then the next 70 minutes was just about great sound design and a slow march to something inevitable but still a bit shocking. I hope the director’s next films are just as bare-bones.

I really love Mike Leigh’s new film. I’m a sucker for everything he does, but Happy-Go-Lucky is, on the surface, just a character study about a youngish-acting woman on the wrong side of 30 who happens to be so blindingly positive in her outlook that she unnerves some of the people in her life. I think this film is actually really transgressive, and is an much a commentary on the corrosively cynical attitudes that run through contemporary culture as was Naked–a film about a ranting nihilist that Leigh made 15 years ago. Those two films–Naked and Happy-Go-Lucky–actually make great companion pieces, I think. They’re two sides of the same coin. Both of the films depict people who’re reacting to the dehumanizing effects of their culture–though in radically different directions.

I hope that when Happy-Go-Lucky opens in the U.S., “Poppy”–the character played by Sally Hawkins–is championed as an important, almost iconic character in film history (a more intelligent, modern-day Chance Gardener?)…it’d be a better world if there were more people trying to live like Poppy (even if they’d annoy the hell out of you every now and then with their obsessively sunny outlook). It’s nice to see a famous curmudgeon like Mike Leigh make this film at this point in his career.

Does your interest in them have anything to do with your own work as a filmmaker?

I appreciate The Strangers just as a great, (relatively) cheap genre film. Though it’s hard not to admire how lean the script is.

Mike Leigh is an inspiration in every way–not only in his modes of creative collaboration with his actors, but also in the personal, funny, sad, humanist stories he manages to birth into the world every couple years for several decades now.

The Moviegoer. I read it for the first time at an impressionable point in my life (freshman year of college), and I’ve managed to read it once a year ever since then. It’s like checking back in with an old friend. I begin to miss Binx Bolling.

Hopefully, novels and short stories have given me a point of access into the consciousness and secret desires of characters. There’s no pretty images–just thoughts. Beautiful, contradictory, sometimes base, sometimes inspiring…thoughts.

Boris, No Age, Lil Wayne, Atlas Sound, X, Rick Ross, Brian Eno, Fuck Buttons, Madlib, Dark Meat, The Roots, The Shangri-Las, Black Mountain, Shuggie Otis, Yeasayer, Black Lips, Pere Ubu, Nas, Titus Andronicus, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Liars, Moondog, Bodies of Water, Hope for Agoldensummer, The Feelies, Harvey Milk, MGMT, Can, Fleet Foxes

Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound). Bradford is musically omnivorous, and his taste bridges various sonically textural periods/areas of music, from lo-fi fuzz to art rock to shoegazer to 60’s girl groups with Wall Of Sound production. His music is never boring, always challenging, yet he’s got a innate sense of catchy melody (just like his Atlanta peers, The Black Lips). I think Bradford has a foot in both the experimental and mainstream music worlds–like Brian Eno 35 years ago–and could actually change the way we think about popular music. Fawning, right? Well…what can I say? I’m a fan.