"This is my favorite film. By all accounts, the making of Godard’s first commercial movie was a nightmare for him, and you can see his own contempt written all over it. First he tells us that what we are about to see is fake, and then he proceeds to mock the commercial film industry for the rest of the movie. Some moments in the dialogue seem intentionally ludicrous, like when Paul describes his relationship with Camille through a heavy-handed interpretation of the Odysseus/Penelope myth. The stream of visual absurdities (Prokosch’s tiny book, Paul typing with two fingers, even the final car crash) discourages us from ever taking anything too seriously. Yet because Godard never tries to make us buy into a bunch of psychological hoopty-hoo, this film is devastating and feels realer as a depiction of a crumbling relationship than anything else I’ve ever seen. We’ve all known this couple: after the first flush of romance, the woman finds herself financially dependent on some self-centered, brutish mediocrity with a roving eye. We watch Camille vacillate between the horns of her dilemma in a totally believable way before making the decision to leave Paul and go back to being a typist. As the only non-cartoon character, with her convincing mix of youthful insecurity and defiant self-regard, Camille becomes the whole world of the film. The cinematography and score are perfect, and the final shot of the Mediterranean destroys me every time."

"I would probably say À ma soeur!, the Catherine Breillat film. If you could put that title instead of Fat Girl. I’m just kidding. I don’t really like saying my movie is related to that. I do think Catherine Breillat is brilliant and her movies have so much psychological weight to them. Those two sisters, they’re just, like, titanic, in terms of the conflict between them. The sexual scene with the boy is one of the most charged, terrifying, strange, impossible-to-describe scenes ever, that long take. The sort of depth of… Anaïs? The main girl? Just the depth of her look, how significant her neutral look and gaze is. Her stare is one of the best stares ever. And I stole the swimsuit from that movie and put it in my movie. I just completely stole the lime green one-piece and put it in my movie. I just love Catherine Breillat. I just think she’s incredibly smart. It’s very exciting, and it’s a sign of a really incredible director to show how much tension and tone can be wrought out of a scene of a younger sister staring out of her covers at her older sister from the bed across the room. It’s kind of incredible how powerful and charged that movie feels before it becomes insane at the end. To me, the brutality and shock of the ending, I was feeling throughout the entire movie. It’s just crazy when it shows up literally."