"A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando. I just want to put there. All these movies that I’ve listed, including Casablanca, you have flavors, which I like it. Drama. Comedy. And again, we may argue back and forth about what is drama, what is a comedy, right? What is melodrama? The Room never did melodrama. The thing what I listed all the movies, they’re not melodrama, they are relate to real life. Streetcar Named Desire, for example, you have, my understanding was, the time the movie was made, the main characters, Brando and… He actually raped the girl. And they cut this on the movie. That’s my understanding, that it was part of the script. So this is again saying that Streetcar Named Desire give us some evidence that people were still cautious what we present in the big screen that certain ideas or situation between two people, you cannot do it. Today’s society, as you know, we go extra miles. The Room is perfect example. We show the nudity, we show the certain stuff, because I myself, I was struggling as a filmmaker, as a director, how I present the scene. Same, you see, if you look at Casablanca, a relationship between two main characters, how they, you see… I love it, black and white movies. Sometimes you can educate yourself that you don’t have to physically show it, sexuality, but it’s there because you can feel it. Now, just because of our culture, I decided to say, “Hey, we go extra miles.” And I was struggling with this. You see, I had talked to Greg. I don’t know if he remembered but I said, “Hey, okay, is it Johnny naked or not?” I said — and I was so frustrated — and I say, “Hell with everything because I don’t know how… I want to be real as much I can.” Even though people say… Remember, The Room, and is again, The Room is supposed to be play. People forget that; they are short-handed. [laughs] I don’t want to be too negative, but that’s the history of The Room. So I will say, originally I was supposed to… I wanted to put into play, but it didn’t come out right. Actually it come out better because more people can see it. That’s basically what happen."

"Another incredible thing about Criterion is that in addition to the classics, the treasures, the widely acclaimed, they also have a true love for cult and lowbrow cinema. Director Herk Harvey explains on the Carnival of Souls commentary that they had hoped the film would have an art-house release, and they actually approached a distributor successful in that market and were told that, since it wasn’t in a foreign language, it didn’t really fit. I’m sure being American-made wasn’t the only reason this was a hard fit for distributors, but it was interesting in terms of what art houses were looking for at that time and how the filmmakers saw the film’s niche. This film taught me how to watch Mulholland Drive . . . which is to say, if you stay with the mood, without fighting it, your intuition will serve you far better than the plot and structure and logic your brain is craving. Because essentially all stories are simple; what isn’t simple is the underneath of it all. And that’s more rewarding in the end. I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic. Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . ."