"Throughout my life, I’ve carried with me the image of a woman crying in the shower. At various times when I have experienced loss or grief, I think about that woman and find comfort in her image. Not because she is experiencing deep sadness but because I know how she feels, she knows how I feel, and that kind of recognition makes the feelings manageable enough, so they don’t swallow us up. It wasn’t until I rewatched The Big Chill after not seeing it for over twenty years—and after making my own film, The Intervention, which was inspired by the way The Big Chill made me feel—that I realized that the image in my mind was of Glenn Close in this movie. Sometimes a film can become a part of your DNA, and this one definitely has for me."

"I will give you Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano. Oh, it’s a great movie. It’s a Russian movie; [Nikita] Mikhalkov is the director, and it’s a Checkhov play, really — it’s based on Platonov. Chekhov is unbelievably difficult to do, to capture the mood, to capture the humor, the incredible sadness and pathos of the characters, all that. It’s very rare that you see a great production of Checkhov. I saw this when I was rehearsing a production of The Cherry Orchard. The great British director Peter Brook was directing, and he set up a screening of this movie for us. It’s just, it’s also a beautiful movie to look at, and also it was a great director, but it’s the characters, both the acting and the depiction of this wonderful, very specific group of Russian characters is unmatched."