"As with Bresson, I could have picked almost any Godard flick. I went for this one because it’s the one Criterion carries that I’ve seen most recently. Also, the filmmaker (who credits himself in this movie as “JeanLuc Cinéma Godard”) could do no wrong in this period of fifteen films in eight years, starting with Breathless in 1959 (though I prefer his most recent, late movies). As is often the case in Godard films, characters in this one come to a bad end. The director has a deep, fatalistic, despairing streak. Truffaut, who conceived the original story for Breathless, described how, when at the end of that movie Belmondo is shot, Godard wanted one of the cops who’s responsible to shout to the other “Quick, in the spine!”—but Truffaut persuaded him it was excessive. While, again, what’s really striking about Band of Outsiders is the sheer thrill of life in it. It’s so pretty and overflowing with life it hurts. Even when the director is boring or a buffoon, it’s moving and happy to see. You feel like he wants you to come out and play with him. It’s inspiring, the way a guy could have Godard’s grasp of cinematic “language” and then just say to hell with it and do whatever he feels like: run away to the south, start dancing, turn the sound off. His sensibility in that eight-year period reminds me of Frank O’Hara more than anybody else. Godard is a great poet—and I mean as a writer, of film reviews, etc.—as well as a filmmaker."

"I would probably say A Woman Under the Influence [for my fifth movie], although it’s a deep, deep tie between that and the movie Opening Night. And A Woman Under the Influence was, I think, more celebrated, but Opening Night might resonate more with me. It is a story about an actress coming to terms with aging and her mortality. I think I’m also really drawn to the way those movies were made, and you can kind of feel the hammer and nail that was used to bring the whole thing together in this way that’s sort of extraordinary and that you can just almost feel the effort made by everyone involved – which is what happens when you make any movie. But sometimes [it affects you] when you know that everybody’s friends were there and they’re all making food for people to eat while they’re making this movie, to make this movie, to tell the story, not to serve any bottom line, or anything other than their creative interests. [In Opening Night, writer, director, and co-star John Cassavetes worked with Gena Rowlands, his then wife.] You don’t always have that luxury. And I just am always very moved by the way they made their movies and what a family they were and what places they could go because of it, because of that intimacy, because of that ease and that history between them. They were able to do things that I don’t know that you could achieve or accomplish in any other fashion, you know?"