"The Exterminating Angel is a surrealistic movie. It’s about a bunch of people from high society in Mexico who, after one night at the opera, decide to have drinks in the house of one of them, and they cannot get out. And they spend about three months there, and you don’t know why they cannot get out, but they cannot. [Laughs] It’s a very, very beautiful and interesting story — also risky, and very misunderstood at the time that the movie opened. But you know, that’s what happened sometimes; after the second World War, naturalism and realism won the battle, so it was imposed that cinema had to be realistic always. But there was a time that it was not like that; Russians were doing expressionist movies, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for example in Germany, and all these German directors, they were doing another type of approach to movies in formal terms. And in Spain, too, we had Luis Bunuel who was doing this type of surreal movies that were very interesting. Now they can be revised in sort of a different way, with time passed. But Luis Bunuel is definitely one of my favorite directors of all time."

"I have to pay my respects to two very influential cinema figures for me. Laurel and Hardy are probably the biggest influence for me, just in terms of sense ofm humour, when I was a kid, and in terms of what I continue to laugh at. If I had to pick one I’d say it would be Way Out West. I watched it recently and it still holds up. The reason why I think I latched on to them so much is because as a team they had such a great balance. Oliver Hardy was such a great anal retentive straight man, but still funny in his own right. They had such different comedic perspectives but when they worked together they created such a perfect synthesis; just a perfect balance of extremes, of odd coupling. I feel like all of my favorite comedy since then in some way draws from that — Planes, Trains and Automobiles comes to mind, and What About Bob?, and Midnight Run; these all employ the same template and they’re my favorites, but I feel like I can trace it all the way to Way Out West."

"My father was a film buff. He instilled in me an appreciation of the art of movies. He felt that there was no cinema artist greater than Kurosawa. At a very young age he took me to see Throne of Blood and Seven Samurai. Since then I’ve seen Seven Samurai over fifty times, in theaters, on VHS, laserdisc, and DVD. The latest Criterion edition is my favorite version of my favorite action movie. I love all the extras, especially the history of the samurai, which really enhances the movie’s historical context. In the second season of Heroes, we did a story line set in seventeenth-century Japan. The Seven Samurai box set was an invaluable resource for the costume and art department. About half of our crew watched it and were really inspired by what they saw. It’s one of those movies that I can’t turn off. One minute of viewing and I’m hooked. I’ve heard many people say that about the first two Godfather films, but for me Seven Samurai is the one that lures me into watching multiple hours of a movie I know by heart."

"For the four years between 1971 and 1975 one could say that Robert Altman didn’t touch the ground. I am strangely less sensitive to his previous work, including M*A*S*H, and what followed (too baroque for my taste), but Thieves Like Us, California Split, The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are the great successes of a cinema free of all constraints and carried by the best of the spirit of their time. It is hard to believe today that these films were actually financed by a studio and were even popular successes. Nashville is the culmination of this rather miraculous cycle. And even its transcendence – being a sort of “total-film” – its timelessness grasps the American spirit in a way that few films have. One feels at times it veers toward caricature that is a little cynical – Geraldine Chaplin, a very young Jeff Goldblum – which gives a glimpse of what will follow it; but for the most part, the film is in a state of grace, at once funny, cruel, profound and always seeking human and social truths – with a scalpel."