Florence Welch

“Picnic at Hanging Rock. Every shot looks like an impressionist painting. Me and Autumn de Wilde, who shot the album cover for "Dance Fever" and directed the videos, we looked at this for a reference for the video for "King," and this kind of idea of these girls learning to be ladies, but within the wild and then there is this kind of wild force, and no matter how proper and ladylike that you try and learn how to be, this idea that nature or this kind of force that is bigger than you will kind...”

“The Red Shoes! I’ve been thinking about The Red Shoes for a long time. I was thinking about it on "Dance Fever" in terms of, like, it was a record almost about dancing yourself to death. But also as a performer, just a sense that you are in the search for perfection and for perfection in Performance, that you would do anything. The brutality of Performance, what you put your body through, the madness of it, the kind of tragedy of it, I feel like this film, it sort of encapsulates that.”

“Another film that has been with me for a really, really long time is Pina by Wim Wenders, and it changed the way I saw dance. It changed the way I saw Performance. It kind of made me the performer I am today. So this was a really, really huge film for me. I think I discovered it when I was about twenty-four or twenty-five, and it kind of changed everything.”

“Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. This film as well has been a reference for me since my first album, "Lungs." Some of the images and the sort of... Medieval, vampire, witchcraft, this film has everything, and a lot of it is about young women coming of age and the hallucinatory experience of that, and I do think the sort of surrealist elements about girlhood... I think people are really drawing on that currently... It’s all coming back to this moment in cinema.”

“I Married a Witch! I haven’t actually seen it, but I feel like I should. These are the ones I feel like I should see: Häxan, I Married a Witch.”

“Häxan, I Married a Witch. These are the ones I feel like I should see.”

“What they don’t tell you is that Spinal Tap, I know it’s supposed to be a spoof, but so much about being in a band is just completely true. Spinal Tap is supposed to be satire, but most of it you’re just like, "Yeah. Yeah, that’s real." This is the last of my film choices.”

“Withnail and I is one of my favorite films in the entire world. When I was young, I was like, "This is going to be my blueprint for living." I’m sober now, so it didn’t go great. But when I first saw this film, I was like, "This is it." On "Dance Fever," I made a video called "Free"—for a song called "Free"—and Bill Nighy was in it playing my anxiety. There’s lots of theories about Withnail and I that Withnail doesn’t actually exist, he’s a kind of figment of I’s imagination.”