"We always recommend it to our students. We both teach high school classes a lot, and most of them aren’t aware of this movie, even though it’s the most honest and accurate depiction of that age. I guess they’re early high school or middle school, they’re about fourteen or fifteen. There’s almost a documentary feel to it. At the time, the [kids] weren’t professional actors, though a lot of them have gone on to acting. [Director] Peter Sollett did such a beautiful job. It’s so loose and warm and real and naturalistic and funny and unexpected. So much of it wasn’t rehearsed, and they let a lot of that process unfold while they made the movie. The kids sort of do their own dialogue. But I remember seeing it and thinking, “I’ve never seen it done that well before.” Usually I think teenagers are overwritten, written by much older people. Sort of reinventing."

"Another movie that is hugely influential to me and I never get tired of watching it. The cinemascope photography is unbelievable, evolutionary and fantastic. The performances, the production design and the pacing – it’s kind of slow but it draws you into it and it makes you wish there could still be movies like that nowadays. I mean most movies these days are made for teenagers. It’s almost as if people’s brains work differently these days. Maybe its commercials and music videos and videogames and you just want more stimuli at a faster pace. Filmmakers seem to be afraid to trust the audience more. I don’t mean that movies should be slow and boring, but if you have a good enough script you should be able to use the power of the image to tell a story. It’s like if you look at Pixar movies like Wall-E, actually I do think they have a slower pace, there’s such richness in every frame."