"During the 1960s I spent my time going to Hollywood movies, following the spirit of the Cahiers du cinéma. Written on the Wind is an explosion of cinematic style and of melodramatic excess. It stands for my love of Sirk but also for the extraordinary genius of all those 1950s directors whose careers came to an end before their time. And Sirk also leads forward to the great R. W. Fassbinder, especially to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul."

"This is many people’s least favorite Rohmer film. Yes, the main character is a bit charmless, but the film is astonishingly pure – the story of one man’s journey on foot through Paris, over the course of a few days. It’s also quite dark. We follow the main character's descent into vagrancy, and gradually – like him – start to see Paris from a perspective very unusual for 1950s movies: distant, cold, alienated. A brilliant anomaly among Rohmer’s films. "

"In 1950s Baltimore, my parents were pretty open. They read The New York Times and listened to Woody Guthrie records, so you can imagine what kind of a household that was. They were immigrants from Scotland, and their taste included a lot of American folk music like, Woody and Pete Seeger, both of whom made children’s albums, so that’s what I would hear. Later, I heard their other songs, which obviously had a political slant and a story to tell and a point of view. That was something to realize at a young age: that a song could do that."

"I saw both of these for the first time in film school, then I moved to Paris in my twenties and lived there for many years, always kind of romanticizing the Paris of the late 1950s that I saw in these two films but never quite finding it. You can still find a few little streets and alleyways in Ménilmontant where The Red Balloon was filmed, and a few years ago I found myself on the same beach in Normandy where Jean-Pierre Léaud runs in those beautiful long tracking shots that end The 400 Blows. Landscapes are just as important as story."

"I saw both of these for the first time in film school, then I moved to Paris in my twenties and lived there for many years, always kind of romanticizing the Paris of the late 1950s that I saw in these two films but never quite finding it. You can still find a few little streets and alleyways in Ménilmontant where The Red Balloon was filmed, and a few years ago I found myself on the same beach in Normandy where Jean-Pierre Léaud runs in those beautiful long tracking shots that end The 400 Blows. Landscapes are just as important as story."

"This whirlwind cautionary tale, which explores the dark dynamic between powerful newspaper columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and the obsequious lapdog of a publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), is a cinematic marvel—especially for the jaw-dropping dialogue of the screenplay, which was cowritten by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman and adapted from Lehman’s autobiographical novelette about his early experiences working for a Broadway publicist. With its high-contrast, black-and-white cinematography and jazzy Elmer Bernstein score, the film conveys a certain kind of mythical 1950s New York City more vividly than any other film I can think of. And the on-location street scenes are to die for."