"Then the second one – and let’s say, this was in no particular order – but A Man Escaped, the [Robert] Bresson movie. That has to be my favorite movie of all time, just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I’ve achieved something that the character achieves. And it tells you what happens in the title, and it makes it no less suspenseful the entire way. You’re literally feeling the sound of the gravel as he puts his foot down – those shots of the foot or the spoon going into the slot. All of these things, the editing of it, the character, the way he’s using these actors who you don’t really know, they just – you feel like they’re real people. It’s just so perfectly put together, and it’s something where I kind of feel like I’m going along with the escape in a way that’s just done by a master. In a weird way, I feel like Bresson is the Fontaine character in that movie. But what’s weird is I’ve watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it, where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other. And then you realize Bresson is just kind of making the same movie every time, just with different [settings and characters]. One’s World War II, one’s Lancelot."

"Melville is a very, very dear filmmaker for me because I feel he suffers when he’s making a movie. He puts a lot of effort into it. I have a feeling that it doesn’t flow very naturally, but that’s exactly what I like, that he’s working and putting in so much of his own feelings and vision in a way that’s complicated for him. In Le silence de la mer, which is one of my favorite films ever, he creates this feeling of intimacy not through dialogue but through a space, a certain type of light, and the sounds of a specific place. How is it that, with a film, he can make you feel the weight of a living room and the solace it can give? It’s all about nostalgia and reminds me of the way I think of places in the past. I can imagine that Melville must have been an intense and passionate person, especially given how he deals with the past and his memories. Army of Shadows is done very intellectually and very elegantly. He’s always so classical—not in the sense of rules but in the sense of proportions and elegance, like something Greek and old. That’s a quality that belongs to people who were living during the Second World War, people from another era with an aspiration for a better humanity."