"Oh my God, how could I forget it? Jules and Jim. It’s that one with that very famous French actress, [yells at her husband to look up the name] Jeanne Moreau! I had never seen acting by a woman that way. She was so layered and complicated, and she threw things away that other actresses would nurture for a whole film. Do you know when I saw that movie — I saw it by myself — in the middle of it, it was so overwhelming I had to walk back and watch it from the back of the theater. I couldn’t just sit in my chair. It was so wonderfully honest and complex about relationships between men and women. And you saw aspects of her that were really dark that came out, as opposed to the stuff that was coming out back then."

"It’s a typical choice maybe. I’m a huge Coppola fan – I’ve seen it many times in many different versions and formats and that movie, to me, is just fantastic storytelling, interesting characters, maybe the best war film I’ve ever seen. You are transported into his incredibly exotic world and it tells the story of something that is based on reality but the director kind of creates his own reality. He constructs this horrible place – his own interpretation of hell and he that makes me believe in it. It’s a movie that I can always watch again and never get tired of, and it always feel like I’m in the presence of a genius magician. I think I prefer the theatrical cut of the movie. The Redux, with the scene with all the French colonialist people, I didn’t feel added much."

"When people have asked me suddenly, “What is your favorite film?” I have sometimes said “Contempt by Godard,” also in the Criterion Collection, and sometimes I’ve said “The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) by Jean Renoir.” There are a couple of more recent films that seem to sometimes be my answer to that question, but those two have stayed on my “perhaps my very favorite” list for a long time. I first saw The Rules of the Game around fifty years ago, and I saw it again quite recently. Apparently I’m the same person I used to be, because I still felt that everything in the world is in that film, and I’m inside of it myself somehow. By the way, another French film that made an enormous impression on me was À nos amours by Maurice Pialat."

"Italian, a black-and-white movie. If you go to the internet, you can find it. Dino Risi movie, with Vittorio Gassman acting in it. And a French actor named Jean-Louis Trintignant. It is about somebody who is pretentious, who’s always speaking [loudly], always speaking about himself. And somebody in front who is shy. The story is about changing personality, and the moral of the story is, “If you want to change your personality, change with your own rhythm. Don’t try to imitate people.” [This was] reality because so many people try to imitate things that they have seen without any reasons inside themselves. They just want to imitate because they have seen that on screen or in a book. Instead of following their own rhythm, their own needs. I still remember that… long time ago. 30 years ago."

"I know it’s a cheat to select three films as if they were one, but it’s almost impossible to consider Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero as anything other than a linked narrative of the ashes of World War II and of the struggle to rise out of that dustbin of history. They are vital, raw, even primitive in style, full of nonactors who are alternately charismatic and arch; there is an aesthetic in these movies that is stripped to the bone. These films, taken together, are immediate godfather to the French New Wave. When Truffaut saw the cinematic journey of the eleven-year-old Edmund Meschke in Germany Year Zero, the seeds of his Antoine Doinel character were planted. The interviews and documentary extras in this set are one of the great treasures of neorealism research."

"I know it’s a cheat to select three films as if they were one, but it’s almost impossible to consider Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero as anything other than a linked narrative of the ashes of World War II and of the struggle to rise out of that dustbin of history. They are vital, raw, even primitive in style, full of nonactors who are alternately charismatic and arch; there is an aesthetic in these movies that is stripped to the bone. These films, taken together, are immediate godfather to the French New Wave. When Truffaut saw the cinematic journey of the eleven-year-old Edmund Meschke in Germany Year Zero, the seeds of his Antoine Doinel character were planted. The interviews and documentary extras in this set are one of the great treasures of neorealism research."