"Just a preface: All of these are movies that I can’t escape. You know, there’s ones that you’re interested in, in the moment, because they’re inspiring you in certain ways. But these are ones that I’ve always kind of revisited and can always get something out of it. So Nashville is one of them. It’s such a world that I didn’t know about, and you have all of these insane concerts in real time with all of these people. All of these emotions and ideas all happening within the performances, and everything is happening almost at the same time. And I just kept sitting there, like, how did he do this? And it just kept happening, scene after scene. There’s this one scene that’s unbelievable, when Keith Carradine’s singing the “I’m Easy” song, and you literally see the same song affecting three different people in the audience, totally differently, at the same time. It’s literally one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had. And just going in to listen to these performances and then to recall these emotions that I never had before, but I feel like they’re mine, is incredible. And the sound in that movie is an achievement that I don’t even understand how they did it with the actual performances, the audience, whatever. Incredible."

"The notion of making a fiction — meaning you look at it and you think it’s all documentary footage, but it’s all shot. And the reality factor of that is something that makes you able to escape into the film; the fabric of that fiction is so believable and completely knitted together that you buy the proposition of the film — even when you see people getting shot and there’s no blood coming out of their bodies or whatever. There’s something about shooting something [in black and white] — and I’m talking about two movies that are in black and white, we should say, except for the part [in Andrei Rublev] where they show the color of the fresco of the Russian icons. I really like movies that are in black and white, because you feel like you are watching a movie. We associate it with things that were filmed at that time, that would have been filmed in black and white. So there are different concessions and commitments to make to a limited palette for a reason. When I make a movie like Miral, there’s a kind of reversal stock that I’m using outside and sometimes it really feels like Technicolor, like a movie like Exodus, and there are other moments when it’s rougher and it feels like The Bad Lieutenant, or something like that."