"I first saw Wanda when I was in Paris making a movie and a cinephile friend of mine told me I had to see it, so I found a DVD of it, but I’ve still never seen it projected. When I was making Invisible Life, I was looking at films like it as a way to build my characters. I was very inspired by Barbara Loden’s performance and the drifting aspect of that character, who was very similar to one of the women in my film."

"The first book I fell in love with at the Elizabeth (NJ) public library. I found it on my own, memorized it (I must have been around four and couldn’t read yet). I loved it so much I hid it so my mother would not be able to return it to the library. I thought it was the only copy in the world. To this day I feel guilty. It was the first book I bought for my daughter’s library when she was born."

"Number two would be also Boris Karloff, as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein. That was another performance that left me just chilled and with such imagery that’s emblazoned in my mind, and he channeled something completely different for that. He was a completely different character. It showed his diversity as an actor, and his subtleties. That was an era of filmmaking where people over-did it a lot, and he found subtleties as Frankenstein’s monster that I just thought were [wonderful]. Less was more, and he knew that."

"I didn’t know anything about this film; I decided to just try it. I loved it. An old-style movie, and Mifune’s wild-man performance gives it special stature. There are not many actors with his charisma, a true strength, and humor, vulnerability, and truth. The film is well told, strong, honest, and simply filmed. I found it refreshing to be reminded that these simple qualities made the film, now fifty years old, beautiful and alive to me; a classic just like you promised, Crit"

"I saw this movie in Cincinnati right before I began shooting a new film, which was a terrible thing – because I couldn't get it out of my head and found myself spending too much time thinking about it and not on the work I had at hand. It's a real mystery of a movie, and I don't think I'll ever quite figure it out. Nor would I want to. If my new movie suffers, I'll hold Olivier Assayas partially accountable for making something so wonderful."

"Bo Widerberg is – like, to a certain extent, Jan Troell – one of the great modern filmmakers who has been least recognized. In a way, he was a Swedish Pialat – another great filmmaker whose international recognition remains problematic – his cinema intensely sensitive, inscribing itself in an osmosis with nature observed with an eye like that of the impressionists. The dry lyricism in this work is also that of revolutionary hopes at a labor movement’s inception, a lyricism also found in another of his films, Joe Hill."