As is often the case if you find yourself being a creative person, the things that influence you are unauthored. But I grew up looking at a lot of science fiction. The first time I was acutely aware of a person making a film that had a profound impact on me was certainly Stanley Kubrick. 2001: A Space Odyssey rocked me. I think to this day whenever I make something, I’m trying to replicate the experience that I had from viewing that film. My godmother bought me a copy of Arthur C Clarke’s novel when I was about eleven years old, and at the time there was a magazine, which still exists, called Popular Mechanics. There was a series of articles about the making of this film, two or three years before it came out. When it finally came out, I was obsessed with it. I really wanted to see the movie and my dad said, ‘Okay, when it comes to town, I’ll take you to see it’. It came to a drive-in outside of Clarksdale for just two nights, a Saturday and a Sunday. My dad wasn’t able to get me to it and to this day I still remember it as one of the most disappointing moments of my life. About a year and a half later, 2001 came to Clarksdale, Mississippi, two years after it was released in the theatres everywhere else. I was really excited. My parents dropped me off there to see it at a matinee on a Saturday. It was me and maybe, if I remember correctly, two other couples sitting there at about noon, to watch the movie. I remember the movie starting and hardly anything after that. I used to say the film buried me alive. I lost consciousness in its presence. I remember they had an interval midway through the film, and when the lights came up, it was just me; the other two couples had abandoned it. There’s hardly any dialogue for the first 20 or 30 minutes of the film. It goes from these big epochal leaps in time and then it slows down to almost real time, or slower than real time. It’s doing a lot of amazing stuff that you don’t associate with commercial cinema. The film ends with the famous psychedelic sequence as Bowman’s pod is drawn through space. Then there’s all this surreal stuff where he’s in the bedroom. I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I was completely flabbergasted in the face of it. I remember walking out of the theatre, and this is how I know this was a profound moment for me, because I remember it haptically, I remember it spatially. I remember the dimensions of the space, I remember the angle at which the light was coming in to the theatre, because it’s about two or three o’clock at this point. I remember the lint in the air, floating around in the light. I was looking around like this and I only saw one person, the manager of the theatre. He was sitting over in the booth reading a newspaper. Older White guy. He seemed old at the time, because I was twelve. I walked over to him. At that point in my life I didn’t really have unchaperoned interaction with White people. It was very, very rare. But I walked over to him and said, ‘Excuse me, sir. I just came out of that movie, and … Can you tell me what it was about?’ He stops reading his paper, looks down at me and says, ‘Son, I’ve been looking at it all week and I have no clue.’ That’s the last thing I remember. I don’t remember how I got home. I don’t remember anything after him saying that. As a matter of fact, my younger brother reminded me a year ago that he was at the theatre with me. I don’t remember him at all.