Jarvis Cocker

“But one of the films that I remember seeing on the TV when I was a kid was this one, The Incredible Shrinking Man. They made, like, a normal house seem very dangerous because he got– he gets attacked by the cat and stuff like that. It’s pretty good. I would recommend it to you. I’m going to put it in my bag actually, because I haven’t seen it for quite a long time.”

“Blue Velvet. Well-known film by David Lynch. It gave a picture into a world that sometimes was familiar from watching TV. You’ve seen old white picket fences and a lot of America as, you know, portrayed through the films of the ’50s and the ’60s. But then you add this kind of violence and a sexuality in it which was really unusual, you know, and not long after that that I left Sheffield and went to film college. I studied film, fine art filmmaking, down in London at Saint Martins. And I think I wrote an essay about this as part of the kind of entrance exam. It changed my view of films and it also changed my life.”

“Want to show you this one. This is Meantime by Mike Leigh. Quite an important filmmaker for me because, whilst I was at college, it just so happened that Mike Leigh had been at film college with one of the tutors on the course, and so he was invited to come and show a film. It wasn’t Meantime, I think it was Nuts in May he came to show. And so he was kind of probably the first working filmmaker that I met personally, and... He was... The way he explained how he worked and how he worked with actors was very kind of inspiring, you know, it was... And he was trying to get at something real, and I actually... I think I’m on this DVD because I... I spoke to Mike Leigh about it when it was put on the Criterion Collection. So, yeah, Mike Leigh. Definitely going dans le sac, as we say.”

“Trainspotting, which has actually got a Pulp song on the soundtrack of it. We were making the Different Class record and we’d recorded pretty much all the songs and then we got this message saying, “There’s a guy making a film and could you write a song for it?” So, there’s a scene in this film– It’s a spoiler if you’ve not seen it, but it doesn’t give away too much of the plot. There’s a scene where Ewan McGregor’s character goes into a toilet and some drugs have been flushed down it and he goes down into the toilet and ends up in a kind of underwater environment. You know, I’m realizing as I’m talking about these films how a lot of the films that I like tend to play with this thing of film convention and then something that’s... Is a representation of real life, so... As luck would have it, we had a song called “Mile End” that we’d recorded but didn’t really fit on the album. And so we said, “Could you use that?” That was a bit of kind of serendipity. So... This is going in the bag too.”

“This film. I’ve had... Not this particular DVD, but I’ve owned Salò, or Salò, by Pasolini, and then never found an appropriate time to watch it. I’ve spoken to people about what happens in it. Maybe now’s the time. I’m a big boy. I’m grown up. I could handle it. I’m ready for 120 Days of Sodom.”

“To put us on a little bit more of a lighter note for me to leave. A modern filmmaker who I am pleased to know and to have worked with is Wes Anderson. Fantastic Mr. Fox. I do sing a song in that which Wes wrote the words for and I wrote the music for it. I am kind of represented by an animated... Creature in that film.”

“And The Grand Budapest Hotel. You know, I think Wes is one of the people who is still trying to move cinema somewhere else. The way that he composes his shots, the way he tries to not edit too much within a scene but do it with camera movement. I don’t think he really gets that much credit for being, in a way, quite experimental in that way. So... That will calm me down after 120 Days of Sodom.”