"Like Night of the Hunter, this is a movie that captures this uncanny, twilit feeling of childhood, one that’s full of wonder and possibility but also the dread of carrying the burden of a parent’s secrets. Of course here it’s inextricably linked to the Spanish Civil War and a reflection on the Franco era. But seeing El Sur for the first time, with very little knowledge of Spanish history or that Erice considers the film “incomplete,” I was still completely enraptured by it. I find the idea of a daughter discovering and living with her father’s hidden longing unbelievably powerful, and Erice and José Luis Alcaine’s imagery is unparalleled."

"I was tempted to replace this with Something Wild—along with Blue Velvet a key movie of the ’80s, when Demme was its finest mainstream director without a hit. But this is undeniably Demme’s greatest achievement—one of his only hits, and rumors persist that it was taken as a job. It contains maybe the most complexly realized heroine in a procedural and two of the most iconic performances in American movies. It seems Demme has been apologizing for its gore and violence ever since, but it’s a nearly perfect film while also a haunting reflection of the George H. W. Bush years in the same way The Coens’ No Country For Old Men seemed like a reflection of the waning years of his son’s presidency."

"Then I got into film school at the age of 17. Because I was young, the day I turned 18 my mother wanted me to see [Pier Paolo] Pasolini’s Salò. She said now you are old enough to see a precise portrayal of human cruelty. Maybe because my parents escaped Argentina during the dictatorship to avoid ending up in a torture camp like their friends ended up, she had a particular concern about the portrayal of human cruelty and torture. So she said, “You want to know how bad life can turn? Come with me and see this film.” And I saw it. And I know that movie stuck to my mind for, like, 12 years in a very precise, shocking way. And I never felt, for 12 years, the need to re-watch it. I said it was great to see it, but I was not ready to admit the perception of how bad people can be. It’s those very hot and cold — how do you say the people who study insects? -– entomologists. Sometimes you feel almost like an entomologist describing the life of ants. But the vision is sharp. The lesson is sharp. And also what I like about the movie is that, although the movie is about masters and victims, Pasolini — he’s not on the side of any. He’s just — like a dark situation, sharing the pain of one, or the dark joy, or the dirty joy, I don’t know. It’s almost like they’re above the character that they’re describing and they don’t identify with any particular one. You can also have that in The Battle of Algiers. But in any case, at 18, that’s a very major movie. I think nowadays that’s one of the very major movies in the future of cinema. It’s something strong that has not been copied in any way since. And that’s why, in my movie, I wanted to put Pasolini’s Salò poster above the bed, just to remind me that whatever I will do, my movie cannot shock, because of some people before us who made these extremely daring movies that really shocked their time. When people tell me I’m provocative I know that I’m not at all, compared to these masters of cinema."