"Simple storytelling at its best, character driven, beautiful and cinematic. The ending of that movie, if you’re not feeling good and your heart’s not twisted up and then melted back together then, I mean, I dunno, you don’t have a heartbeat. It’s one of the best feelings walking away from a piece of cinema. It’s all chalked up to really great characters. A really simple story, really. And that’s why I really enjoy it. It’s a beautifully… it’s a masterpiece. It’s a masterpiece of filmmaking in its simplicity. Its characters are lovely and tormented and flawed and beautiful and heroic. And I, again, love the themes of it."

"Then along those same lines, probably in the same conversations where my dad said, “You’re gonna watch Braveheart,” he said, “You’re gonna watch Gladiator.” I think it’s just maybe the crazy world setting. It is so big and far-fetched and out there, but the characters are just so real and intimate, and Russell [Crowe] is just so great in that movie. I think it’s the combination of those two things that was the first thing that stabs me. I remember just the image of the hand in the wheat and how beautiful it is. The whole movie’s really beautiful. Those shots are killer."

"I think it’s because it is about a truly simple character in a truly extraordinary situation, and the way that simplicity can be misconstrued as genius and vice versa. I just think it’s a beautiful, beautiful performance [from Peter Sellers]. I think it’s his finest performance. But apart from that… well, I adore Shirley MacLaine in it. I think it’s beautifully cast, [and] I think it’s richly evocative as a gentle satire on the way that political gurus can function. I just think it’s enchanting, and I think it’s an often neglected film. And I can’t find it on DVD or download and I’m really fed up with that."

"I saw that film and I don’t like to cry in movies — I don’t think anybody does — just because it’s embarrassing, but I was sobbing in that film. It was such a beautiful story. It was this little film that spoke volumes and emotions were just so real and it just moved me. And honestly, I saw it at a time where I’d grown up loving movies and there was a period where suddenly it seemed like everything coming out was the same and I started getting annoyed and then I saw Central Station and Life is Beautiful within months (of each other) and it restored my faith in film-making."

"I saw it when I was a young man in Philadelphia, and I became obsessed with R. Crumb. He reminded me a lot of my father—especially in the way he dealt with the weirdness of sexuality. And he was kind of depraved. Crumb is this beautiful portrait of this man teetering on the edge of madness, but Zwigoff makes him so sympathetic. Maryse Alberti does beautiful camera work that makes you feel like you’re in this guy’s world in a way that’s so intimate and lovely. After I saw it I spent all of my bar mitzvah money on Crumb comics, which was disappointing for my mother."

"This was the present I gave everyone I knew for three years. It’s six different stories told in different time periods and genres: One is historical fiction, another is a ’70s thriller mystery, the sixth is a post­apocalyptic story. It’s one of the most beautiful, entertaining, challenging books—something that takes all your attention. I think the stories are meditations on violence, specifically the necessity of violence. The book ends with a beautiful exchange: ‘…only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops."