My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see Silkwood, which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant. She’s played by Meryl Streep, and they poison her by putting plutonium in her sandwich. I was so terrified by it that I stayed away from the cinema for a long time. Then my parents got divorced and I had older stepbrothers who started taking me to movies that were way beyond my capacity to understand, such as Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. So as a child I found the cinema to be a house of horrors, or I was totally mystified.
What’s your favourite film ever?
Even Dwarfs Started Small by Werner Herzog. I dreamed of it for no fewer than six weeks after seeing it.
Worst/most over-rated film?
Virtually half of the movies that come out. They’re made to make money, and to divert us from confronting what it means to exist and be human. I’m against escapist entertainment.
Favourite film snack?
I don’t like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible. And people who are trying to get that last sip of soda through a straw, that symphony of liquid over hundreds of little ice cubes. I don’t drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.
