Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke introduces a screening of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men in Rome, as a guest of the open-air series Il Cinema in Piazza, with an Italian interpreter beside him.

His reason for choosing it is political and unhedged. He is English, the film is set in Britain, and he had rewatched it a few months earlier with Stanley Donwood, who had never seen it. Neither of them moved for its whole length, because what it shows is so close to what he thinks the country faces should the far right take power: foreigners dehumanised, violence and intimidation by the state, and fear as a means of control. That a film made 20 years ago caught it so exactly is what shocks him.

The interviewer points out that the film's music is less a score than a sequence of songs. Yorke is more interested in the long unbroken takes, which he says were rehearsed with cast and crew for weeks because of their complexity.

He has only recently understood what that costs, through his friendship with an assistant director who worked with Paul Thomas Anderson and had died not long before, and whose job he describes as carrying an extraordinary amount of logistical responsibility.