"I knew and liked David Lean, a director of genius, who was very kind to me when he was making The Sound Barrier for my Uncle Alex, and Brief Encounter has always seemed to me the very best of classic British filmmaking, with its fiercely restrained emotions and good manners trumping passion, typical of its era. It is the best of the “small” British pictures, which my Uncle Alex tried to replace with “big” British pictures in an attempt to outdo Hollywood, rather than coexist with it, after he left it for Britain in 1932. Lean, who in Brief Encounter made this most English of English films (a distinction perhaps shared by This Happy Breed and The Fallen Idol, see below), moved onward and upward to ever bigger pictures, by way of The Sound Barrier, Summertime, and eventually the biggest and best of all epic films, Lawrence of Arabia, escaping from the confines of England to “international” films that challenged and beat those of the Hollywood studios. But Brief Encounter was a perfect, close-up view of a shabby, threadbare England, the England of “books from Boot’s, good drains, and class distinction,” in John Betjeman’s words, and of a muted, sad, doomed, and very English love affair. It has always been a film that puzzles the French, who find it hard to believe in a love story with almost no eroticism, and in which the lovers are usually dressed in raincoats. It is also Trevor Howard, a wonderful actor, at his best."

"When Eraserhead came out in France, it came out with the weird title, The Head to Erase. It was in French. I remember I was reading my parents’ newspaper — it was a socialist newspaper — and there was a whole page of how much this famous film critic didn’t like the movie. He was really trashing the movie. But the way he was saying it was very awful, disgusting, it made me — I was a 14 or 15 year old kid — want to go to the other side of the city and see it. And then it was like my own secret. And I went there. And I loved the movie so much, that I believe I went to see it four times in one month. Then after two weeks it moved to another city and I went to see it again in a screening with my friend. Then maybe one year later, it was replaying near my house at the midnight screening, so I went again with another friend. And for me that was the confirmation that cinema could also portray your inner world, that cinema could portray dreams and nightmares. And I hadn’t seen, at that time Un Chien Andalou by [Luis] Buñuel but Un Chien Andalou is one of the rare movies that is written in a mental language, a dreamt language. Eraserhead is another one. Kubrick said once that he regrets he didn’t have the idea to do that movie. In any case, it had such a strong impact on me that I would say Eraserhead — it made me get into film school two years later. Maybe it was a mix of 2001 and Eraserhead. I don’t know how many times I saw Eraserhead in the movie theater, but I guess it was maybe 15 times. I had an addiction to this movie, which is the kind of addiction kids can have to their mother telling them a story. You want to listen to the same story over and over, and have a hypnotic feeling and relaxing feeling. It created some kind of relaxing feeling in me. That I would enjoy all these movies — that are nightmarish– as if it were a dream, especially when the girl comes out saying everything is fine in heaven. There’s a fact also that David Lynch made that movie with almost no money over a period of five years. Then when I was doing I Stand Alone, I had a lot of money issues. I had problems completing the movie, then doing the editing, also. All the time I had in mind that David Lynch did that movie in five years. And I said well, “Maybe it will take me 10 years to finish the movie. If it takes ten years I’ll do it and I shouldn’t worry.”"