"Then I realised everything was a lie and felt terrible … Once you are here, everything is different, by 180 degrees.
"I realised everything transposed immediately from Paris to Brooklyn," says Reza, who adapted the screenplay with Polanski.
But I realised everything we were doing was deeply reductionist, basically saying: 'Scientists should shut down their labs and go and work in Tesco.' It was a kind of counter-enlightenment.
"The first was when I was packing up my house, and I realised everything in the kitchen was about seven years out of date – basically, from the time I started working manically and stopped cooking.
It was during Ata Kak's set, "Obaa Sima" blaring out through the Shacklewell Arms tent, his audience enraptured and yelling back in call and response, a frozen margarita in one hand and a limp, damp rollie in the other, as a crest of sunshine broke through the facade of grey above, that I realised everything would be okay in the end.
I realised that everything I knew about this country, about what was happening, was wrong," she says.
There came a moment – one of life's worst, and best, moments – when I realised that everything I had been working on for the last year and a half was awful.
They said nothing on the drive back but when they started to point out directions I realised that everything would be OK.
Later I realised that everything in the history of violin playing could be divided into BH and AH: Before Heifetz and After Heifetz.
I followed him eight years later to Stuttgart [technical university] and I realised that everything I grew up with and appreciated was utter nonsense - not just modernism, but the conception of life.
