"I’m always drawn to misunderstood movies, ones that were either ahead of or behind their times. This Melville crime film about the French Resistance was both. It took thirty-seven years to open in America, and when it did, it received great acclaim. A surprise happy ending for a complicated and unsentimental movie."

"And that suggests another favorite film of mine, Army of Shadows, which in a way uses film not for a psychological study of a political question but really for a philosophical study of a basic human (as well as basic political) question: the question of killing. At any rate, I think Army of Shadows upset me more than any film I’ve ever seen. This one also deals, like Au revoir les enfants and Lacombe, Lucien with World War II. A leader of the French Resistance has been betrayed to the authorities by a young informer. The leader was arrested but has escaped, and now he has the young informer in custody in a small house. According to the rules of the Resistance, he and the three men working with him have to kill the young informer. I’m still upset when I think about that movie. It’s profound."

"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."

"I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city; in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone. My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure."

"I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city; in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone. My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure."