"For years and years in American cinema, thick-handed, pock-marked gangsters have planned and schemed in smoky strip joints with out-of-focus dancers shaking their hips behind them. The most these exhausted, hard-working strippers could hope for might be a B camera topless shot where they wink at a James Gandofini or Robert De Niro. But then Lorene Scafaria stepped in, grabbed the camera and rack focused onto these hitherto silent background characters, and with the movie “Hustlers,” changed the way we look at crime and American culture by telling their story. Scafaria has been known for her razor-sharp comedies for years, but with “Hustlers” she fully jumps into the world of Martin Scorsese or David Chase and makes their gangsters seem like they’ve had it easy. And she does it most impressively of all without framing her characters as victims. Destiny, Ramona, Annabelle and all of her characters are powerful and have wants and desires that drive them to break the law. Full stop. These women may have been born without the opportunities of the bankers they dance for, or may have children to feed, but they are at the end of the day fully conscious, fully aware criminals. And this movie is their story. Scafaria dares us to not view them as anti-heroes or heroes or villains but instead as complex contradictory characters. A few filmmakers have tried to tell the story of the 2007-08 financial collapse (myself included), but Lorene Scafaria took a page from the legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin, who rather than cover JFK’s funeral back in 1963, interviewed his gravedigger. It was an affecting and surprising piece that made Breslin’s reputation. And like Breslin, by choosing the characters we’ve traditionally overlooked, Lorene Scafaria gets to a side of our collective story that for years has been relegated to the background and makes it real and affecting without apology or judgement."

"I often listen to Simon & Garfunkel now and think they’re terribly produced, but they’re certainly a band who are perfect performers on record. There’s something to be said for their restraint; on a lot of tracks you think there might be a drummer but it’s just so quiet in the mix. When you think about what The Beatles were producing at the same time it’s kind of crazy actually - but it doesn’t matter, because their voices were always there when you needed them and that was all you were listening to essentially. They would supply the harmony for each other, as well as the melody and the words. “’Wednesday Morning, 3am’ has got this absolute perfection to it. Fleet Foxes get pretty close in terms of recording multiple voices, but it’s not somewhere people tend to go. I loved it so much, because you could sing with it and you didn’t even have to sing either of their parts; there was always room for more. I always liked choral music growing up, but I felt that this was what choral music should be doing. “I’ve always loved this particular song: just the sadness in it, the description of his girlfriend and the description of having to go because he’s committed a crime. It’s a really weird angle about these few hours he’s got left and it makes me sad every time I hear it. There’s loads of stuff that I didn’t understand in it too: a ‘hard liquor store’ for example. I had no idea what that meant! But they went to dark places. “By the time I’d heard something like ‘7 O’Clock News/Silent Night’ the whole collage thing had been done so much and it didn’t seem that powerful to me. You’ve seen a hundred films that do it now and having sample speech in songs isn’t that crazy. But I bet when it first came out it would have been pretty amazing."