"This is the single most underrated film of the entire French New Wave. Its near obsessive tracking of Maurice Ronet through the wet Paris streets as he retraces the steps of a wasted life makes for one of the most tightly focused of the era’s film portraits of a desperate man at the end of his rope. Its slow build toward an inexorable end is Louis Malle’s most nuanced work—this from a director who was already noted for his almost classical discipline. Ronet, until then largely thought of as a lightweight romantic film actor, surrenders himself to the downhill yet strangely transcendent fate that awaits him on the mirror of his room."

"I love that movie. I worked with him [director François Truffaut], but I remember seeing that movie long before. I didn’t even know it was such a fantastic film for everybody. When I saw it for the first time I thought, “I’m actually looking through a window back to the 1920s Paris.” Everything I love about that era. I met Truffaut and I was with him for about six months on Close Encounters and I realized suddenly that he had done 400 Blows which is really the story of my life as a child. I wondered who would make a film like 400 Blows, why? And then I met him. I love that one."

"A book I read at least once a year. I took American studies as part of my degree, and found Hemingway a little late, but “The Sun Also Rises” is the ultimate of the modernist school. I’m not sure why I read it so often, but much has to do with the huge love affair at the heart of it—and the setting, between the wars, within the world of this lost generation of expats. It just completely transports me from wherever I am to Paris and Pamplona. And his writing has such hidden depths—every time I read it I find something new. It takes a lost soul to convey so much."

"I left Africa and childish things, and went to live in Paris, where Thérèse Raquin kept me on the straight and narrow. Read at an impressionable age, it’s a very important moral life lesson about guilt and consequences—without ever having to stick your finger into the pit of hell itself. At the time I was going to the American Library, and looking at the handsome boys who didn’t know I existed because I was a little chubby teenager. The descriptions of Therese sitting there with Laurent, playing dominoes in their house above the shop, and that burning desire for somebody rang very true for a little plump 14-year-old on the banks of the Seine."

"Frank and April Wheeler are a young married couple who’ve moved from Greenwich Village to the suburbs. They consider themselves intellectuals, and they’ve left the city with regret. The way they justify it in their hearts is to assume that they are better than their neighbors. But one night, while with another couple, Frank tells a story, and in the middle he realizes he’s told it before. It’s an awful scene—a moment when Frank and April come to terms with what their life really is and how fully they’ve compromised their dreams. They try to reclaim one: to live in Paris. But that fantasy is only a reprieve, and when the moment passes, the reality sinks back down."