"When I was a little girl, someone gave me a copy of a book called The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair. The chair grew wings and could fly away to other worlds. I started using books for that very purpose from a really early age. Books helped me to endure, learn, navigate, believe, imagine and hope. It also made me realize that the world I was growing up in was not the only one out there and I could use words as wings in my own way too. I still have a really old copy of it although I haven’t read it in decades."

"In recent years, with financing so much harder to come by and the best television raising itself to the level of great filmmaking, I’ve been happily earning a living working in serialized cable dramas, while still trying to get my own films made. For me, Berlin Alexanderplatz was the grandfather of all the best of modern television, using the expanse of hours to dig ever deeper under the skin of characters, seducing us into caring for a dark antihero in spite of ourselves, and showing that television can be as visual and inventive and surreal as the best movies. I hope we get a Blu-ray version soon!"

"In which Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play two broken goons who bond, bicker, and ultimately level each other during one rough night in Philadelphia. May made this just a few years after The Heartbreak Kid—a perfect movie, and one that I hope Criterion can add to its catalog someday!—and while the two films couldn’t be more different in terms of tone, they both zero in on a kind of self-defeating, self-aggrandizing male psychology that’s a little too relatable at times. And Falk and Cassavetes are so remarkable here that you can’t help but wonder which two modern actors would play these roles today."