"I’m going for a bit film school-y one, because I love Akira Kurosawa films, but I don’t want to go for Seven Samurai, so i’ll go for Yojimbo or Sanjuro, those ones that all the spaghetti westerns were based on. I know it’s not fair, but that clump of Japanese samurai films were just beautiful films. Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero and there’s something really empathetic about him. There’s this lovely thing with his face where you really can just tell everything that he’s thinking. He doesn’t have to do much at all; you can just sense what’s going on with him. So I love those films, anything with Mifune in actually, but that period in particular, he was the best hero ever."

"All these stories piling together and crossing over — I think that is the simplicity of life — these five degrees of separation that divide us all. I think it was a great cast of people; it’s a good story. Films that I enjoy are films that tell stories and not necessarily on the bounds of believable, but in life, anything can happen. I like action films. I guess Pulp Fiction is fairly violent, but I’m an action film kind of guy. It depends on what I’m in the mood for when it comes down to it."

"I’ve always been drawn to ensemble work. Renoir’s films constantly give a sense of joyous communal activity. All the characters in this film, as in most of his films, are specific and memorable—and Renoir’s vision of life is never pat: he can go from farce to tragedy in a moment, seamlessly, and all the while managing to be above the emotional content of his films. Understanding of it, compassionate towards his characters, but fearlessly above it. In addition his staging, both of the actors and in the camera work, is breathtakingly imaginative."