"“Shoplifters” is not a traditional narrative by any means. It is more an “observational” fiction film, in the same way we call certain documentaries ‘observational’. Each character has a trajectory that is followed, but until the very end, when there is a sudden dramatic change that unravels their fragile ties, there is little conflict between them. Instead we are let to enjoy this extraordinary meditation on what is the true meaning of family and love. Each character is drawn so precisely and yet we come to understand that they are a random family, or a chosen family, or a shoplifted family. When their fabric is finally torn apart, we know that their blood families and their future families will be so much less than what they created before. The film is full of beautiful metaphors, not the least, the insistence that food be part of nearly every scene. The importance of food as nourishment and love and pleasure is shown in glorious ways, least of all a wet, sticky scene in the middle of summer where two of the characters slurp down cold noodles only to end up in a long forgotten sexual embrace."

"I found out about Leonard Cohen from Nirvana, from Pennyroyal Tea. I was vastly too young and I didn't understand [his music] at the time, but you still want to be into what's 'in' and it's tough to make such bold strides, whether you understand it subconsciously or not. When you've got someone that has a voice, that voice only gets better with age and… fuck, there's so much character on this record. It was a tough album to listen to after he died, the same with Bowie's Blackstar. When you go back into a record and listen to someone talk about mortality on a level where they're really trying to understand it because it's imminent… that's an intense listen. There's been a lot of media attention because of his passing, and I got to catch some documentaries on his life with some really beautiful moments I'd never seen before. There's a show he was playing in a university for this crowd. He walks off and is out the back smoking, and they're chanting his name but he's got nothing left to play. He walks back out and he's crying, playing one more thing, and everything's silent as he's still drying his tears, overwhelmed by this love from strangers."

"As someone who’s really passionate about what he does, I have a lot of opinions about documentary films. A lot of documentary filmmakers don’t really think about their films cinematically, and some documentaries almost seem like they were just copy-and-pasted like Microsoft Word documents. I’ve always loved how Errol Morris takes a wrecking ball to those conventions. His films are constantly exploring the idea of what a documentary is. His films tweak and twist reality, and they don’t just try to serve the audience digested ideas on a platter. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s his transcendent 1988 classic The Thin Blue Line, which recounts a murder case and then riffs and re-riffs on it like a Bach fugue. It was the first film to really use re-creation and reeneactment scenes in a new and highly cinematic way, both to explore a case and to challenge a viewer’s own bias and subjectivity. Nowadays, its approach and editing style loom over every one of these multipart true crime series and podcasts. The Thin Blue Line is almost like the influential band that’s been ripped off so often that new converts may not realize just how significant it is."

"I guess I’d start with Blade Runner, which is a film I’ve watched many, many times, and bought many times on different formats, and seen in the cinema many times, and bought books about it and read about the making of it, and watched, you know, all the documentaries that I could get my hands on. I think why I like it is that it’s a film that so transports you to somewhere else. It’s not even just about the story, which is reasonably straightforward, it’s the texture of it — every frame of it, every grain of film, or every pixel on Blu-ray or what not, holds information. It’s so densely packed. You can watch it again and again and see different things in it all the time. That’s the genius of it. I think that period of Ridley Scott, with Alien and all his adverts around that point… I mean, it’s just never dated. If you watch something like Black Hole, which is kind of around the same period, and you look at it, Disney’s Black Hole looks like a films from the ’40s in comparison to Blade Runner. Blade Runner could be made today and it wouldn’t look any different." """

"When I’m not making my own movies, I’m usually working on a trailer for someone else’s. Since I was twenty-two years old, I’ve been a professional trailer editor. I began editing trailers for big Hollywood films (I was one of the editors on the trailer campaigns for the Scream movies, The Matrix movies, and a zillion others), but I eventually left that world and turned all my attention to art-house films. In recent years, I’ve had the unbelievable fortune to have created the trailers for several modern masterpieces now enshrined in the Criterion Collection, including Heart of a Dog, The Great Beauty, Yi Yi, Cameraperson, and Like Someone in Love. Another highlight in my trailer career was editing the rerelease trailer for The Battle of Algiers. Not only was there so much incredible material to use, but Pontecorvo’s masterpiece had always been one of my all-time favorites. It’s a huge influence on how I think about filmmaking, from the handheld camera work to its daring and quick editing to its strong use of music (Morricone!) to how Pontecorvo just throws a viewer right into the deep end from the get-go. Also, like the best documentaries (see The Thin Blue Line up the page a bit), it puts the responsibility on the audience to draw its own conclusions. The Criterion disc also includes some amazing extras, including a not bad rerelease trailer. ;)"