"This relates to my Maggie O’Farrell obsession. She recommended Lucia Berlin in an interview I read a few years ago. So, like any good stalker, I checked it out. These stories feel very contemporary. I suppose if I’ve learned anything from reading, it’s that people don’t change very much through the ages. Our personal problems and our joys are entirely relatable, whatever the era. The women Berlin writes about seem entirely real. You can feel them in the room with you. There is humor and real beauty in her words. If I was the underlining type, these books would be heaving with biro. But I’m no vandal."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."

"For some reason, Maurice Pialat doesn’t get the same attention here in the States as his contemporary Cassavetes. But I feel he deserves just as much. Without this film, we wouldn’t have Sandrine Bonnaire, and the complexity of the family dynamic is like nothing I’ve ever seen before on film. I’m proud to be neighbors with Tom Stevens, the actor who played the young American tourist. We were speaking in our New York City apartment building stairwell, and Tom told me that he had been in “a little film that you probably never heard of called À nos amours”—I nearly fell down the stairs. The extras are fantastic on the release, including an interview with Catherine Breillat."