"When I was first living in Los Angeles. I was in love with a French girl, now my wife, and I became immersed in the way her culture viewed life. There was a different set of priorities at work, a value of simplicity and pure ingredients, both in the food and the filmmaking. This film blew my mind. The cast is all children. It contains one of the great suspense sequences of all time: a toddler climbing out an apartment window trying to reach a kitten while his mother talks on the phone, ignorant to the tragedy at hand. Another vignette follows an older boy teaching a younger boy how to pick up girls. Very French, but so honest and pure. I remember watching the extras on the DVD of A Man and a Woman, another great film. The crew consisted of a handheld Bolex and a sound recordist, mostly natural light. Everything was in the eyes, the body language — just two people learning each other. It informed the way I made Safety Not Guaranteed. Stripped down, but not messy or ugly. Clear and audible sound, like what your ears would capture if you were there. Intimate. Real. The best."

"Jean Pierre-Melville was the undisputed master of the French crime drama. Here he turns his gaze on the French Resistance during World War II (of which he himself was a member) in an entirely unsentimental, unflinching portrait. It not only de-romanticizes the movement with its rigorous and austere account of the day-to-day operations in this gray world, it also indicts it. For all the good the Resistance did, its members were only human: prone to betrayal and petty revenge. The movie is so specific in its regard of the loneliness and fear of these operatives, whose everyday lives alternate between boredom and peril. Unreleased in this country for thirty-seven years, the film was an absolute revelation to me when I saw it upon its release in 2006. Already a major fan of Melville’s crime films, I loved how this one both expands and distills his unique technical skills and his ability to tap into his characters’ emotional states. What emerges is something both complex in design and deeply personal. Casablanca it is not. Melville shows us the inner workings of something so intricate and important while also asking us whether the ends truly justify the means."

"Malle is one of my favorite directors. He flirts with genres, tries all sorts of things, travels all around the world, refuses to let go of documentary, his first love (or first milieu)—although his fiction movies are acclaimed. This film, close to his skin and past, is a strong coming-of-age work, set in France under Vichy. Often, in the middle of the day, I think of scenes from Au revoir les enfants, moments of grace like the restaurant sequence, with the mother. French officers burst into the place and ask for citizens’ papers. They find an old Jewish man dining quietly at his table and start to reprimand him, asking him if he knows how to read; the place is, of course, forbidden to “youtres,” as the young French officer says insolently. Suddenly, every patron at the restaurant starts yelling at the officers, insulting them (“Collabo!”), forcing them to leave. And then, among the clientele, German officers stand up and order them to exit the place. Strong turning point. That is exactly Malle, in there, striking again. Contrast, antagonism, emotions, brute emotions. The rest is craft and mastery. But emotions. That is what he aims for. That is what we get."