"Life is Beautiful was a very big deal for me. Coming from a Jewish intellectual family, and also a family who was in love with the arts — and my sister’s an artist, and I’m an actor. Just mixing your brilliance with your imagination — just blew my mind, and I was fully swept up in the fantasy of Roberto Benigni and what he was able to accomplish in that story. I thought it was beautiful."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."

"Chanel fostered friendships throughout the arts, one of the most intimate with Jean Cocteau. Painter, poet, novelist and film director Cocteau provided the dialogue for Robert Bresson’s second feature, a bitter romantic melodrama adapting a Diderot anecdote to the present day. Chanel was also one of the first to recognize Bresson’s talents. In 1932, a decade before he began making films, she commissioned the then-painter-and-photographer to shoot her "Bijoux de diamants" jewelry collection."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."