"The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were leveled, humanity’s faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didn’t look away from harshness and violence—quite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance. I’m thinking of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51, the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world."

"The next I would say is La Strada because, well, do I really have to say? I feel like it’s sort of self-explanatory. Like [laughs] Giulietta Masina, I mean every performance, but particularly the last scene in the movie, with Anthony Quinn and just being on the beach, and everything about that movie is beautiful. And there’s something always about his films that, knowing that audio was recorded post shooting the film — I’m pretty sure that’s true with that movie — just to know, in a way, if it is true, it’s just to know that there are two sort of performances happening simultaneously. You can see and hear that. And I love that idea and what skill and sort of the presence to this day that movie has. And it’s also personally really resonant because my father said after he saw that movie, it was what made him want to make movies, and when I finally saw it when I was a teenager, I understood why. So it inevitably has a resonance beyond the brilliance of the movie itself."