"Steven Soderbergh totally rocks. He is the bravest, smartest, most original filmmaker in the U.S. today. I don’t like all his films, but I not only like but admire most of them; and even in his minor work there is still more genuine love and understanding of cinema than in the most accomplished works of some others. Che, the one movie ever made that seriously deals with military strategy, helped me imagine Carlos on a scale that otherwise would have intimidated me."

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth tellers in life are so often written off as crazy."