"OK, so, I’m gonna start with my first film, Days of Heaven, because it’s my first film. It’s probably, unfortunately, my best film. It’s very hard to follow up on a film like that."

"The brilliant teacher I had for a Shakespeare seminar at Yale (Joel Dorius) asked us one day if we had an idea of what heaven, for us, would consist of. What you’d hope it would be. His own answer: “Just to sit in a screening room, watching Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise projected repeatedly and endlessly throughout eternity.” Hard to argue with that when you see and resee this classic. Dorius’s version of heaven beats hell out of harps and angels."

"I think he is funny. Badlands is funny. The voice-over in Days of Heaven has all sorts of humor. I watched both with my mum, and I really like Badlands but I was slightly frightened of watching it with her because I thought, “Oh, it’s violent,” but Badlands is so exciting. She really liked Badlands, and Days of Heaven she was kind of “hmm,” you know; she liked it, but it’s not as pulpy. There’s just something about the atmosphere of Days of Heaven and the end-of-days feel of it; and Sam Shephard’s performance, there’s something so great about it. It’s one of those films that — it’s almost like the question is, “What would you happily watch now, even though you’ve watched it a million times before?”"