"The Bicycle Thieves is extraordinary for the technique that the director uses to stage a street-life opera; [it’s] quite extraordinary. The stealing of the protagonist’s bicycle – that whole segment lasts 15 minutes, possibly 20 minutes. The guy has created a street opera including cars, roundabouts, work men, traffic — everything moves with such ease, with such flow. It’s like watching a painting being painted in front of you by Picasso. It’s an extraordinary way to open a film that is also an extraordinary vision of a director being able to conduct almost like a conductor with an orchestra. Just a piece of solid, 20 minute music. Almost like Mozart used to do where it’s just pure music for 10 minutes. This is pure cinema for the first 20 minutes. Pure cinema. Then it gets into the scene where the guy tries to recover his bicycle and is just driving through Milan trying to do this. But that first 20 minutes — that first opening is operatic. It’s incredibly beautiful and that makes it one of my favorite films."

"Cabaret from Mr. Fosse, initially, as well as Lenny — those two films seem to have made a very big impression on me. With Cabaret — I got a glimpse of it again on an airplane; it was offered in the classics section in the airplane that I was traveling in. And there were moments in that film where it seems he has created painting. For not even an entire second — or an entire half a second — you capture a glimpse of a “creature” that seemed to exist only in the world of a night club in Berlin in 1931. And it was still, but there was smoke coming up from the creature’s cigarette. Like the cartoons of George Grosz, there was a grotesqueness to some of the laughter, and he mixed what seemed to be an almost documentary-like reality combined with a very private story and also a kind of fantastical theatrical reality as well. The camera was always in fascinating spots, the sound creeped in, in ways that captured the subconscious level."