"Coming to America. It kind of gave me the same feeling of pride and just feeling good about myself that Black Panther did, seeing this sort of regal, black royalty, excellence. Now, they had to hide it and disguise that in comedy which is so often in our culture and in the movie business for a long time. But there were so many lines that you can just quote and appearances from actors you didn’t even realize that were in it, like Cuba Gooding, Jr. to Jake Steinfeld. “The Queen to Be,” you know, there are so many lines. And the characters that Eddie Murphy played… They were caricatures, I guess, but it seemed like the performances were layered, actually. It was very much a comedy, but it wasn’t over the top. If they ever remade it, I would be opposed to it. That’s one of those movies that you have to leave alone."

"This was my grandfather’s first cinematic gift to me. He was a filmmaker who made commercials in Italy in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and he loved Visconti, who was always his favorite. So he would make me watch films regularly, and this was one of the few that could have felt like homework but didn’t. I love where the film comes from, in terms of the evolution of Visconti’s career. I like that he started off making this pretty dogmatic neorealism and then went on to make this operatic film. The difference between the two approaches is a really beautiful manifestation of his ability to grow as an artist and also to just do multiple things. His cinematic language changed based on the people who populated his frames, and this movie feels grand because it’s got cinema royalty in it, like Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale. The frame feels like it’s the right size and scope and weight for people of that stature."