Gnarls Barkley Makes The New York Times

Unable to escape the press these days, the New York Times recently published a nice indepth interview with Gnarls Barkley members Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green, written by former Spin Magazine writer, Chuck Klosterman. Below is an excerpt from it, with the full article posted here. It is a bit long, but is worth the read, where we learn that believe it or not, film has played a big influence of Danger Mouse's musical endeavors.
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The D.J. Auteur
By CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

North Hollywood sounds like a place that could be glamorous or, at the very least, mildly attractive. It is not. Or at least it’s not on Hinds Avenue, where dirty one-story buildings look semideserted and many of the local “beautiful people” appear to have jobs that involve (a) ripping apart used cars and (b) selling those individual parts to less-beautiful people whose cars are even more used. Nobody on this North Hollywood avenue looks famous, and a few of them look terrifying. But it just so happens that 7325 Hinds Avenue is the geographic location of Power Plant Studios, and inside those nondescript walls a human named Danger Mouse is talking about an album that has just sold 91,000 copies in England within the span of seven days. Danger Mouse doesn’t look famous, either; he also doesn’t look dangerous, or even rodentesque. And even though I am asking him about music, he is talking about movies.

“What changed everything was when I got into Woody Allen,” says Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton. He is sitting on a couch in the Power Plant lounge, eating two different kinds of pizza and drinking Vitamin Water; his legs and arms are folded like a mantis’s. There is a massive flat-screen TV in the room that’s tuned to the TV Guide Channel, but the volume is off. “When I got to college, I saw ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Deconstructing Harry.’ I thought to myself: Why do I relate so much to this white 60-year-old Jewish guy? Why do I understand his neurosis? So I just started watching all of his movies. And what I realized is that they worked because Woody Allen was an auteur: he did his Thing, and that particular Thing was completely his own. That’s what I decided to do with music. I want to create a director’s role within music, which is what I tried to do on this album.”