'The Night Manager' director Susanne Bier; musician Car Seat Headrest; Spotify's losses

It would never have worked as a two-hour piece because the story and all the minor characters are way too complex to stay interesting if you tie it down to two hours.

When I came along there was the very first version of the first episode. In my first conversation, there was a number of things with the producer, Stephen Garrett, that we discussed. One of them was this whole world of white, male, public school-educated men. He said they were thinking of making Burr's character a woman and I said, "Yes, fantastic!" That character is the moral heart of the novel, so it would be wonderful to have as a woman. I think the collaboration from that point on between David Farr, Stephen Garrett, and Simon and Stephen Cornwell, who are the producers — and, by the way, the sons of John le Carré —was very tight-knit. Even Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston were quite involved as executive producers. So we were like a little group of people very meticulously discussing each beat and making sure that each beat of the the thriller didn't get lost, particularly because we had a short pre-production. It was a very intense collaboration.

Firstly, it was part of updating. We can be very pessimistic about this world, but we can also choose to think that, for women, it has gotten a bit better in the past 20 years. In [Britain's] secret service, there are actually quite a lot of women, so it was a natural thing making her a woman. I had been in a jury at Sundance in 2011 where Olivia was given a prize for "Tyrannosaur" as the best female actress. Ever since, I've been wanting a chance to work with her, so I thought this is the perfect match. I met her for tea and the first thing she said to me — we were in this elegant London hotel with no one around because it was supposed to be a serene meeting —  was, "I'm pregnant." I just thought, That's fantastic for the character, and I'm sure the producers and the insurance company are going to have a meltdown. And they did. But they solved it.

Exactly, but the way it's shot is like film. On a random day we'll do a scene from episode five, scene 16 in the morning, and then something else from episode two, scene two. It was really random, so her development of pregnancy didn't necessarily fit with our production schedule. We did have challenges of how many big coats we [could] put on Olivia. In some scenes she would have to sit down or else we would see too much. 

There was not one single second where I wasn't being totally alert. That was the tricky thing, particularly because I like to work a little bit loosely with the dialogue. I like to improvise a bit. You come to a location and it's a fantastic location and you want to embrace it, so you change the scene slightly accordingly. So doing that while not losing the logistics of the thriller was quite a challenge. I was always looking at everything and making sure I wasn't missing anything or letting a character say too much or too little, or reveal something they wouldn't have known at that point. It was ultimately one of the most satisfying things I've done and I would happily do it again. If you said I start tomorrow, I would jump at it.

I think it's slightly better in Europe, but if you look at the track record at Cannes, this year there were three directors out of 23 that were female. A number of years it's been zero. It might be slightly better in Europe, but I wont say that it's particularly glorious. 

It's better, but it's all a question of getting rid of the old-school conventional way of thinking. I think that's true for Europe and for America. It's happening, but maybe not quite fast enough.

I think it is really important and, particularly for young upcoming female directors or filmmakers, it's a great help for them to have a backing and to get a chance of a start without having to challenge conventional male ways of communication. There's always been a part of me which has been concerned for compartmentalizing female filmmakers, because once we do that we accept the fact that we don't belong in the main field. I'm slightly worried about that. I do want to help young female filmmakers in any way I can, but I also want to make sure that it doesn't generate excuses to distance females from the main field. 

I couldn't agree more. That's exactly the right way of putting it. Kathryn Bigelow has been a fantastic example of doing movies she wants to do, but also totally defying the prejudices of female directors. She won an Oscar for it. In a way, just doing it is the most important thing you can do.

Almost 80 percent of all the revenue of more than $2 billion that Spotify earns goes back to the record label and the artists. The negotiating margin for Spotify is pretty thin on this. Yesterday they released the results for 2015 and they had a loss of $193 million, which is seven percent more than the year before. At the same time, for record labels, revenue for streaming is becoming increasingly more important as the sales of physical products like CDs are still going down. So, Spotify, the world's biggest streaming service, and the record labels both need each other.

They're investing a lot to do things with the masses of data that they aggregate from all their users. Spotify has been around since 2006 so from its users, it has huge amounts of data of what kind of music they have been listening to. They really try to use that information to provide people with even more tailored services and more suggested music. Also to lure artists to their platform because they can provide artists with huge amounts of data [about] their own fanbase. 

Spotify's competitors like Tidal and Apple Music have been trying to lure artists to their platform with exclusive agreements. This is something that Spotify has been a little bit restrained in. They haven't done it to that extent because they are the market leader. Now, since Tidal and Apple are being very aggressive, it may well be that Spotify will begin to look for exclusive agreements with artists as well.

Tidal has said that it pays the most in royalties to artists, so that's why some artists are going for exclusive deals with them. At the same time, Spotify can offer artists great data and value to see what kind of users they have, what kind of people listen to their music, where they are listening, and where to organize the next concert, where to invest in marketing. That's the advantage of Spotify. Apple has the huge iTunes database and knowledge. They all have their advantages.

Spotify is currently available in some 60 countries, which is less than Apple Music. It will definitely be trying to expand to new countries and new markets. At the same time, they're also trying to get more people to subscribe to their paid service, as percent of their revenue comes from paid subscribers. Yesterday they launched a new family plan by which members of one family can listen to ad-free music for $14.99 per month. They're really trying to get people to pay more as they realize that advertisements doesn't bring in that much money.