"This is the first movie that moved me to tears. I saw this in the theater with my mother when I was eight years old. I was a pretty lonely kid, who made friends slowly when I made them at all. So when I saw this masterwork in a darkened room, surrounded by strangers, spellbound by the flickering world onscreen that painted a devastating portrait of childhood loneliness, it felt like someone had ripped out my insides. I was sobbing in my mom’s arms, aware on some level that what I was watching was completely fake, but on another level was more real than anything I had ever felt or understood. It was the first time I became consciously aware of the power of film to make us feel something. Something I wasn’t even aware of was roiling around inside me. E.T. introduced me to the profound and melancholic truth that love and pain go hand in hand, that love both gives us strength and makes us vulnerable. But, above all, it made me understand that love heals us and gives our lives meaning. E.T. introduced me to an idea that, over thirty years later, would beat at the heart of my directing debut. An eight-year-old me wasn’t prepared for any of that. But watching this movie, clutching my mother’s arm, an overwhelming feeling of empathy washed over me, and it reminded me that I wasn’t alone after all. Someone out there felt just like I did. “Ouch” indeed."

"I had heard about Cassavetes, and when I started to see his movies I realized that I knew his face from childhood favorites Rosemary’s Baby and The Dirty Dozen. I loved The Dirty Dozen because of The Team. I still have an eight-by-ten publicity still from that movie. Which Cassavetes movie did I see first? I can’t remember. I know we watched Minnie and Moskowitz many times before a tour around the year 2000 and quoted it often, and I still offer Minnie’s toast to Zelmo in most instances when I am in the position to offer a toast: “To you and your happiness.” I know at some point I saw I’m Almost Not Crazy . . . before I saw Love Streams itself. Love Streams is, to me, Cassavetes’s version of Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or Russ Meyer’s Supervixens: a summing-up and distillation of ideas, theories, characters, plot devices; making a statement by improving upon many earlier acts and creating something that absolutely could not have been made without specific lives behind it, celebrating those lives and the shared history of creator and audience. I’ve never seen Love Streams projected; first I owned a VHS copy and later a copy of the European DVD whose release was sponsored by Agnès B. Love Streams also reminds me of my favorite movie, The Misfits, in the way that life on-screen and off- is a crucial collaborator in the ultimate full effect of the movie."