"I was introduced to Fassbinder’s plays at nineteen and his films at twenty. His humor is handled with a kind of wonderful seriousness. Theatrical and absurd and full. The blocking alone makes me weak in the knees. In Beware of a Holy Whore, there’s a scene in which a woman is slapped in the face. It’s really not great, but the degree of detachment after this moment is so severe that it makes sense—not that she was hit but that people hit and get hit. Feelings are constant and often uncontrollable. I think in a past life I must have been German."

"All of Pasolini’s films are very surprising and impressive because they come from somebody with a deep culture who, through cinema, managed to remove himself from that culture. It’s as if he took culture off and, naked, went and walked off into the world. In this film he really succeeded in adhering to the deepest meaning of the text, of the epic narration and storytelling, without adding any element of pathos, psychological feelings, or sentimentalism—which would have been a very easy pitfall. He just tells the story the way it is without adding to it."