Emily Watson

So this we saw very young.

When I was four, maybe we drove to the south of France in a Renault 4.

But before we went, they took us to see Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, the Jacques Tati movie.

And I think they must have taken us more than once.

And then we had the record.

We had the LP of it.

And we had a very, very thin record collection, which was mostly Mozart, but it had this monocle in it.

And...

It's a film and music that's about everything you see is absurd and delightful and hilarious.

I'd sort of got so into this that by the time we arrived in Calais and drove off the boat, I thought everything I saw was hilarious.

I thought every French person I saw was...

A clown designed to make me laugh.

I'd sort of so absorbed it.

Anyway, so it's a piece of music my sister and I listened to over and over and we loved.

We didn't have access to very much music, but this was very special.

It's a religious organisation.

It has a belief system that is very devotional and full and people give their lives to it.

And, you know, I think at the centre of it is a philosophy that is

a beautiful thing it's sort of spiritual communism that everybody is the same but in practice well for us as children it wasn't like that it was very restrictive and just very very strict but also very repressive to women and young girls and destructive in in some ways so very mixed um

Well, my sort of instinct to be, you know, a sort of dreamer and allowing your imagination to take you further.