Yeah, of course! I think they made that way back in like 1968 with an optical printer where they had to keep shooting each section. It was made for IBM. The idea of virtual travel versus physical travel, the idea of exploration.

I did think about Woody Allen’s movies with Frances Ha because Woody Allen’s movies were also in black and white and very contemporary. Manhattan and Stardust Memories are not period pictures. Particularly in Manhattan you have the grandeur of the black and white and the Gershwin music sort of playing up against a more intimate storyline in which, when you break it down, is really just people sleeping with each other and trying to figure out their lives. But something about the filmmaking and the approach to it makes it feel almost epic. And, ultimately, the concerns of those people are epic. That movie is a masterpiece.

The music of the “I Have a Dream” speech is a replication of the music which comes out of the mouths of the African American preacher. Preacher, singer, blues singer, jazz singer, rap person, it is so catching, so hypnotic, so wonderful that, as a poet, I continue to try to catch it, to catch the music.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern. Stanley Kubrick was an influence because I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey. and the more I learned about him and his methodology the more I realized what a rigorous intellectual exercise filmmaking was for him, and I was inspired by that.

Not dying before my wife and kids.

John Boyega’s vital organs. If I couldn’t have them all, then just his heart.

Quality compost.

All the damn time, it comes with the territory. My family valiantly put up with most of them. Though the older I get, the bolder I am about saying no.

I need to do more whale-watching. I must learn to play the guitar. I would like to play Uncle Vanya, King Lear and a panto Dame. The icing on that cake would be if they were all in the same season.

Supreme self-confidence and my wife.