One of the pleasures of this exercise is watching my students as they start to realize that, yes, wow, the director, Vittorio De Sica, really did take that much care. Every aspect of every frame has been carefully considered and lovingly used, and this is part of the reason the sequence moved them the first time they watched it. That is: De Sica was taking responsibility for every single thing in his film.

Of course he was. Bicycle Thieves is a great work of art and De Sica is an artist, and that’s what an artist does: takes responsibility.

And yet, candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp. But think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise-driven. Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. And this is as it should be. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.

During weekdays, at the London College of Furniture, I felt free to explore my new self, but at weekends when I saw Tony I softened my appearance. A change of look can happen quickly, but changing on the inside is a more gradual process. On the outside, I was a trendy college student, but in my head I was still the good Christian girl wanting to keep everyone happy. As I look back, I know that I had zero interest in Tony. The fact was I didn’t know how to say no to him; it was that simple. We didn’t do anything or go anywhere, and I don’t recall him ever taking me to a restaurant or a movie like normal couples. He’d pick me up from my home in Brixton, drive me all the way to north London, and we’d watch telly in his room. That was our relationship. I was so meek I didn’t have any voice at all.

One night, desperate for the loo, I stepped on a giant slug and it squelched between my toes in long green tubes. I think that’s the night I became a soprano. After that, I made myself a salt path every night to dispose of them. As young, first time tenants, we had no idea that we could complain – we had to pay the whole term’s rent up front, so we had no leverage at all. God, it was awful, but we loved having our independence.

Seven years apart gave us a decent amount of time to look back and reflect on our band dynamic and what we had achieved. My perspective had changed – I was much less stressed and better at living in the moment. I’d been through a lot of challenges as a solo artist, I was better at problem solving and I had lost my fear of the unknown. Everything had gone so well, and we enjoyed putting together the live album so much that we decided to continue and go on tour. This would be unknown territory; we didn’t know if the magic would be the same.