"The Producers is one of my favorite movies, and I don’t mean the musical. I mean the original one that Mel Brooks directed, with Zero Mostel. I saw it when it first came out. I saw it in the movie theaters, back in the ’60s. I just think as a comedy, and also being in the business as I am, and coming from theater, it just had that much more impact for me. That’s a movie I like very much."

"Alone in the Wilderness is weird. Somebody gave me this documentary years ago, and I put it in and I watched it about four times in a row. Nothing is really happening in it. This guy is just building a cabin in the woods and sort of narrating it. It’s a true story. It’s actual live footage, 16mm footage of him. I gave it to a buddy of mine and he said the same thing — he was like, “Yeah, I watched it like two or three times in a row.” Another buddy said the same thing. I don’t know what it is. It’s just this guy building this cabin in the woods. I feel like it’s this sort of dream that every guy — or man — has. to go out into the woods and build a cabin and live in the woods. This guy does it, and does it for 40 years, and finally comes down when he’s 80, in Alaska. He just makes it look so feasible or accomplishable that — I don’t know, you just kind of watch it and start dreaming that you could do it too, you know? I think that is what a lot of my buddies felt when I sent them the film. It’s just something I’ve been toying around with — making a movie about it — sort of similar to the events that took place in the documentary, but not."

"I saw her at a Mississippi Records evening at Café Oto. I went there because the guy from Mississippi Records had somehow inherited 700 hours of footage by a man who woke up one morning, I think in the 80s when the technology of hand-held cameras had just appeared, and he felt like he had a mission to go and film people, poorer people, and how they expressed themselves, artistically and spontaneously. So we're not talking about people who were trying to make records, just people who play the guitar and sing or whatever, just musically expressing themselves. And that man felt like these people would soon disappear, that society would disappear and it would be extinct. And I think he probably had a very strong intuition that proved to be right. I think technology will soon take us away from just picking up a guitar and singing some songs, spontaneously. It's refreshing because we don't see that on TV, where everything is manufactured and filtered. It felt so good for my brain and my senses to be connected into that, and to witness all of these expressions."