The Star Wars reference caught everyone off-guard during his Masterclass event. So did his hat-tips to ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind ("Spielberg was God, for a small town in Thailand") and his affinity for 70s disaster movies. A ripple of something like disbelief went around the hall when he mentioned Netflix. It's as though Apichatpong, being the purveyor of such otherworldly reveries as Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century and Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is somehow expected to be not quite of this world himself. As though his eyes should be forever fixed on a loftier faraway that none of us mere mortals can glimpse, except briefly, when huge flowers of wonder blossom suddenly in our heads while watching Cemetery of Splendour in a packed press screening.

I suddenly worry that I, too, am expecting Apichatpong to be some sort of mystic.

So rather than anything more metaphysical, I ask him about Gattaca, the 1997 film with Jude Law and Ethan Hawke and the outlier on the list of his favourite movies I found. He looks briefly alarmed. "What, you don't like it?" I assure him that I do, because I do. He is relieved. "It's really romantic, I feel it's like my memories of Ray Bradbury novels. You know, there's something very simple about the boy who wants to go to space, and I share this nostalgia." "You are also the boy who wanted to go to space?" I ask him. "I think many of us are. Yeah."