"I remember it as a strong anticolonialist film, with parallels with the American civil rights movement. In fact, a scene you won’t see in Medium Cool, of black militants going into a theater where The Battle of Algiers was playing, was deleted as a concession to Paramount’s concerns that it would provoke violence against Paramount executives. Paramount argued that if audience members came out of Medium Cool and committed a violent act, Paramount would be liable."

"The next one would be Dead Alive by Peter Jackson. Again, another animated cartoon with live actors, and this is a film that really showed me how you can take a violent, dark situation and make it comic. Lots of blood, lots of decapitation, lots of violence, and yet it’s a comedy. That was a big influence on me when I started doing I Married a Strange Person!. I really referred a lot to Dead Alive."

"These are two of the ripped-from-the-headlines social realist films that Warner Brothers made in the 1930s. I Am a Fugitive is like a classical tragedy, majestic and horrifying, and very thorough in its presentation of systematic injustice. Heroes For Sale is more melodramatic, covering a mixed bag of problems – drug addiction, displacement of workers through automation, and violent labor struggles. Wellman used real workers and homeless people in some of these scenes, which increases the impact."