"The distinguished director of The Passion of Joan of Arc in a moment of strangeness. He said Vampyr was not a horror film. Certainly, in a setting where images and voices fade through a sort of ghostly mist and shadows take on an independent life, where the leading man drifts from one bizarre and unsettling episode to another with a look of incomprehension on his face, an atmosphere of threat and unease is created, but it is the unease of dream, of nightmare, and is ultimately more unsettling than Hollywood’s brash efforts."

"Directors going independent to make precisely the film they want was not begun — as we sometimes think — by the latterday Johns (Cassavetes and Sayles). After World War Two John Ford formed an indie with the legendary producer (war hero also) Merian C. Cooper: Wagon Master was the lovely result, a film that seems like folk art. The stirring score and brilliant diagonals of Ford’s composition greatly inspired us in the Barcelona edit room — though I’m not sure if any trace of that influence could be found in our film."

"It’s hard for me to pick one Cassavetes film, so I’m going to default to this great documentary about him, which is included in Criterion’s John Cassavetes: Five Films set. See them all, but see this first and get a sense of what he’s all about. There’s no more unique and important filmmaker in American history—his impact on independent film was massive, having arguably invented it in the States, and his films are honest in a way that Hollywood simply is not. Many imitate his loose style, but he's the master of the raw conversation. Although now that I’m getting into Bergman . . ."

"I purchased this around the time that I decided I needed to own as many Criterion titles as possible. Also may hold my personal record for shortest time between first seeing a film and spending thirty dollars to own it. I just loved this film and was always rewatching it. Jarmusch was fairly major for me in my early discovery of truly lo-fi independent cinema, and I often found myself returning to his earlier films to study just how simple a film can be and still seem wildly innovative and truly, idiosyncratically the director’s own."