"""I’m just trying to do ones that really stuck with me. Paths of Glory. I was, I don’t know, probably 13 or 14, and it was a Saturday matinee at the local cinema, and all the kids were dumped there by their parents to keep them out of the way on Saturday afternoons. I was sitting there, and this black-and-white thing came on. I was utterly blown away, because it was the first film that I really appreciated the injustice in the world that’s waiting for all of us, and just the tracking shots through the trenches. My version in Brazil in the Clark’s Pool was all about the shots from Paths of Glory. I remember going to school on Monday, telling everybody, “You’ve got to go see this movie.” Nobody did, because it was too serious. Everybody was basically normally going to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies, which I also loved. That’s the pratfall side of my nature."

"The next one, I think we got to go to Bergman. We go to go to Seventh Seal. Seventh Seal just knocked me dead. On many levels, it’s such a simple film. You’ve got Mary and Joseph, the young people with their little traveling theater, and then you’ve got the knight. I think it was the way he dealt with the Middle Ages and intrigued me with Death there at playing chess. Those were images that just stuck in my head. It was funny. When I was doing Parnassus, I went back and looked at it, because I was trying to remind myself what Mary and Joseph and their little traveling theater was like. I had forgotten so much detail. That was just a really important film, and Max von Sydow was something… The first time I had seen basically a non-American actor at work. He looked different. He behaved differently. Because, you know, I grew up with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, Rock Hudson — shiny teeth and beautifully combed hair and all of that nonsense. Something profound was going on in that movie without pointing fingers at anything. It just did it. The squire — that was Gunnar Björnstrand, I think — was just a great character, the cynic in the midst of it all. I remember when he was talking, when he was in this church, and all the frescoes are there, and it’s just profound filmmaking."