I’m bored today so I made a list of the films that Alex mentioned in interviews. Please feel free to send me messages if I’ve missed out anything.
1. Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (Dir. by Karel Reisz)
“I thought to myself, ‘That’s a right line, I’m gonna put that in summat.’ For a start it’s good because the film’s called Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and that’s kind of what the album is, so there’s a link there. And also, there’s a lot of people saying a lot of things about us and you don’t have control over it.” (NME, 2005)
2. The Graduate (Dir. by Mike Nichols)
Interviewer: What were your favorite coming-of-age films?
Alex: I suppose The Graduate. Certainly in the way they used the music in the film. I like the idea that it is sort of one voice [Simon & Garfunkel] singing all the songs in the film, and the way in The Graduate each song kind of plays out in its entirety, usually. That was a key to Submarine. (PopEntertainment.com, 2011)
3. Harold & Maude (Dir. by Hal Ashby)
Interviewer: What were your favorite coming-of-age films?
Alex: I suppose The Graduate… And Harold & Maude, too. I loved it. (PopEntertainment.com, 2011)
4. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (Dir. by George Roy Hill)
(Talking about Black Treacle) “This was much later down the line. I watched a couple of westerns when we were doing this, like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid which gets a reference in there.” (NME, 2011)
5. Mean Street (Dir. by Martin Scorsese)
Interviewer: And there’s something about “Mean Streets”?
Alex: Yes it is: “You and me could have been a team, each had a half of a King and Queen Seat, like the beginning of Mean Streets, you could be my baby”. Do you know that song at the beginning of Mean Streets ? Yes? Pretty smart, eh ? King and Queen seats like the seats at the back of a motor cycle. That’s the best sentence I’ve written.
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Dir. by Stanley Kubrick)
“I sometimes imagine each word to be made using a three dimensional open-top glass alphabet. Each letter built to harness and transport the mirror ball liquid marble of the melody. When the ‘substance’ fills up the syllables they seem to shimmer and become weightless. With the addition of close harmony I see colours swirl together, parts of the lyrics glow and the way in which they float suggests that something like the ‘star gate’ sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey is happening deep inside them out of view.” (The Telegraph, 2016)
7. 8½ (Dir. by Federico Fellini)
“The basis of 'Star Treatment’ was something that I had at Shangri-La Studios when we were doing the Last Shadow Puppets’ last record, so it’d been around for a while. That’s where it started with, was that, and one day I started writing the words to it. I was watching [Federico] Fellini’s 8 ½, that was on me mind.” (iHeartRadio, 2018)
8. World On a Wire (Dir. by Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
While he’s not especially big on conspiracy theories, he does like “moon stuff” and says, “Once I started, it was hard to put the lid back on the science-fiction lexicon. There was a film [my friends and I] were watching called World On a Wire – it’s a [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder film – and that was definitely what pushed me over the edge into, ‘Let’s go and write about another world in order to comment on this one.’” (Billboard, 2018)
9-11. Un Flic, Le Cercle Rouge, and Le Samouraï (Dir. by Jean-Pierre Melville)
“When I was writing this record, I was turned on to these three Jean-Pierre Melville films—Un Flic, Le Cercle Rouge, and Le Samouraï—that all star Alain Delon and have this jazz lounge club at the center of the story. And the clubs in these films were often very obviously film sets, which is something that interested me as well.” (Pitchfork, 2018)
ellievsbear
gummygunk
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
