"This play represented such a turning point for me as an actor. I'd just come out of drama school and I was playing opposite Geoffrey Rush. I had to leave my own baggage at the door and take on this character who would be understood by some and hated by others. Mamet has taken all the extraneous stuff away and left you with just this searing, polemic essential battle to the death. Geoffrey and I keep saying Oleanna is an inkblot test, because your reaction to it reveals to you your own sense of politics. It's so provocative — afterward, people were shouting at one another passionately. To see that happen in the theater lobby, which can be such a bourgeois, polite space, I just knew this is what I should be doing with my life."

"If David Thewlis in Naked is my favorite male performance, then Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that. I’ve always felt that the first films he made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances. But when he moved over to France with Code Unknown and then The Piano Teacher, something happened where he started making very passionate filmmaking. The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality."

"The second time I went to see this was only a few weeks after the first time. My band was on tour somewhere in Florida, and one person went to a multiplex to see The Silence of the Lambs while the three of us who had already seen it went next door to The Five Heartbeats. I think the opening credits of The Five Heartbeats were still on the screen when I knew I really did not want to sit through what promised to be a dreadful movie. I quickly calculated that I would be considerably more entertained seeing Silence of the Lambs again, even having just seen it, and ran out of one theater into another. I felt like I’d escaped from jail. Just great. Not surprisingly, this film warrants repeated viewings!"