"Number four is Superbad. I love Superbad. It’s the same kind of feel I get from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where you kind of want that, but they’re not winning the whole time like Ferris is. They’re kind of losing the whole time, but still, you want them to win. They’re losing the booze and they’re getting into fights. They’re doing all this stuff looking for the great outcome. But even then they don’t win because they really just want the girls. I feel like everybody can relate to that — just anybody — no matter if you’re a guy or a girl. That blind faith you have in yourself, when you’re just speed-bumping it or tripping over life as a teenager, but you still know you’re going to prevail in some way, shape, or form. But you really don’t know. It’s really just hope. That’s a cool part of that movie, and it’s just funny as f—. Excuse my French. It’s just funny as hell. I love that movie. I love McLovin. I love everything about it."

"The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were leveled, humanity’s faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didn’t look away from harshness and violence—quite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance. I’m thinking of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51, the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world."