"Next choice I’d say would be The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Pasolini. I saw that movie for the first time when I was 23 years old. I’d gone to church every Sunday and catechism every week for my whole childhood, but I never paid attention; I was always daydreaming in church — and all of a sudden I went to go see this movie, and I knew everything in the movie. I guess all of my Catholic upbringing I had absorbed through some sort of osmosis. Here was this movie which was this Biblical story which was told so beautifully: the cinema was so simple and so beautiful. He had, you know, Odetta playing “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” as the three wise men found Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. It was, you know… I started sweating while I was watching the movie. The whole left side of my body went numb while I was watching, and I was sure that I was having a heart attack. It was all that I could do — you know, I didn’t want to because it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen — but it was all I could do to crawl out of the movie theater and knock on the projectionist’s door and ask him if I could call my girlfriend. I called my girlfriend and told her I thought I was dying, ’cause I was seeing the greatest movie I’d ever seen, and she showed up. I remember it had been snowing in Colorado and she had all this dirty snow on the roof of her car and I was eating all this dirty snow because my mouth was just parched. And I remember being in the emergency room and thinking that when the doctor walks through, if he looked like Jesus from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, I knew that meant I was dead. Fortunately the guy didn’t look anything like Jesus."

"Maybe ten years later [after seeing Salò], I had written some shorts and I was talking with a friend who said, “Oh, have you seen this Austrian movie that has been banned in France for extreme violence?” That came out in VHS. And the German title was Angst. And the VHS was called Schizophrenia — the French VHS with French subtitles. And I tell you it was weird, it was like the beginning of some kind of new thing — that some movies could be banned for theatrical release but they could still come out on VHS. So I got the VHS. Nowadays there are maybe things that are banned out there, but you can find it with one click on the net. But this time, something that was banned could be found on VHS. I bought that VHS; that was quite hard to find. And I believe that I watched that movie 50 times because each time a friend said, “Let’s go see a movie,” I said, “Come to my house. I’ll show you Schizophrenia.” So one by one I was showing that movie to all my friends. And it’s got the most amazing camera work in the history of cinema. Not so many movies that really impress when it comes to the camera work. Maybe Brian DePalma’s movies… or 2001. Or, for example, lately, the images of Gravity. But the camera work of this movie is so real. It added to a very violent story of the guy coming out of jail and killing a whole family in order to go back to jail where he felt better, and it’s based on a true story. And it’s got a [unique] voiceover. But the mix of that cruelty, the voiceover and the camera put in positions that you’ve never seen before made me be obsessed with the movie. Now, since three or four months ago, it’s for sale [on DVD here in America]. So if anybody is interested you can go on Amazon.com and buy that movie called Angst."

"For years and years in American cinema, thick-handed, pock-marked gangsters have planned and schemed in smoky strip joints with out-of-focus dancers shaking their hips behind them. The most these exhausted, hard-working strippers could hope for might be a B camera topless shot where they wink at a James Gandofini or Robert De Niro. But then Lorene Scafaria stepped in, grabbed the camera and rack focused onto these hitherto silent background characters, and with the movie “Hustlers,” changed the way we look at crime and American culture by telling their story. Scafaria has been known for her razor-sharp comedies for years, but with “Hustlers” she fully jumps into the world of Martin Scorsese or David Chase and makes their gangsters seem like they’ve had it easy. And she does it most impressively of all without framing her characters as victims. Destiny, Ramona, Annabelle and all of her characters are powerful and have wants and desires that drive them to break the law. Full stop. These women may have been born without the opportunities of the bankers they dance for, or may have children to feed, but they are at the end of the day fully conscious, fully aware criminals. And this movie is their story. Scafaria dares us to not view them as anti-heroes or heroes or villains but instead as complex contradictory characters. A few filmmakers have tried to tell the story of the 2007-08 financial collapse (myself included), but Lorene Scafaria took a page from the legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin, who rather than cover JFK’s funeral back in 1963, interviewed his gravedigger. It was an affecting and surprising piece that made Breslin’s reputation. And like Breslin, by choosing the characters we’ve traditionally overlooked, Lorene Scafaria gets to a side of our collective story that for years has been relegated to the background and makes it real and affecting without apology or judgement."