"Actually, I just thought of another one which really affected me. I don’t know if I’m going to pronounce it correctly. It’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf — Lovers on the Pont-Neuf [aka Lovers on the Bridge]. It has Juliette Binoche in it and Denis Lavant. He’s very good. I was a university student when this came out. It’s kind of a love story of a privileged girl who’s going blind and she kind of runs away from her privileged life to live on the streets. And she falls in love eventually or creates this friendship with this homeless man. It’s an extraordinary film. It just blew my mind. Again, the filmmaking was incredibly brave and just committed and front-foot and so unique. Again, a film that looks at relationships and has a life in the characters — very alive. I don’t know. It was just an experience to watch that film. I just love it."

"For the early part of my life, I was almost exclusively interested in sports (basketball in particular). I wanted to play professional basketball, and I really couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life. My love of the game never quite recovered after viewing Hoop Dreams near the end of eighth grade. It exposed something fundamentally flawed about organized athletics. I still tried out halfheartedly for the high school basketball team, but when I didn’t make the cut, I never looked back. My obsession switched almost overnight from sports to films. I wound up, coincidentally, studying film at Southern Illinois University, where Steve James had studied almost two decades before. The school hadn’t changed much, and I had many of the same classes and professors that he did. I have gotten to know Steve over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever told him that he might be responsible for leading me from sports to films."