"Watching silent films and seeing how difficult it was to come across without actually voicing stuff was such a different process. Then I started to think about Sunset Boulevard. It's a movie about an old silent movie actress who lives in the Hills on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and she has a butler and this guy who's having a little bit of trouble. She's just nuts and alone — similarly like Cleo [in 5 to 7] — talking about how she used to be the number-one film actress. She's so desperate to get this man to stay and be her partner. He's so much younger than her. This movie is so insane. I was thinking about that when I made the video for "All Mirrors." The staircase and the grandiose Art Deco feel of that is very related to the isolated feeling the woman has in Sunset Boulevard."

"It’s quite hard to consider Lean’s filmography and put forth any favorites. Lean is certainly one of the greatest film directors of all time. The scope and richness of his work, from Great Expectations to The Bridge on the River Kwai, from Lawrence of Arabia to A Passage to India, mark the career of a filmmaker who was bold and determined like no other. However, a fondness for Dickens (and for Lean’s fondness for Dickens), and for the remarkable reality and suffering of the working class of England in the early nineteenth century that is brought to life here, always brings me back. To Guy Green’s photography, to the film’s exquisite art direction, and to the acting. The cast is flawless. Guinness, a young Anthony Newley, Kay Walsh, and the emotional sledgehammer of Robert Newton’s performance. Ronald Neame produced this and other great British films."

"I’ve always found Robert Montgomery to be a somewhat mysterious figure. He was in comedies, but he never seemed very funny. He played likable people but was not well liked. His right-wing politics angered many on the left. In 1947, the year this film came out, he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. As a friendly witness for HUAC, he hurt many careers. He directed and starred in two great, innovative noirs, Lady in the Lake and Ride the Pink Horse, both made in 1947, and then stopped directing. Wanda Hendrix, who is superb in this film, really didn’t work much after Ride the Pink Horse, which is another aspect that makes watching the film curious and special. Starring as Pancho, the excellent Thomas Gomez became the first Hispanic American to be nominated for an Oscar. This postwar noir film begins at a bus stop in a Mexican border town. When Montgomery, as Lucky Gagin, steps off the bus, you pretty much know he’s going to get mixed up in something dark. The film has a haunting score, and it is reminiscent of another Mexican border “noir” by another actor-director, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. There are a couple of things that make Ride the Pink Horse art-house cool. First, it’s filled with long, complicated takes, which were innovative for the time. I remember sitting with Martin Scorsese, who turned me on to this movie. He kept trying to figure out how Montgomery had done the opening shot, where he gets off the bus and goes into the bus station, then back outside again. Scorsese said, “There was no Steadicam. I don’t see tracking. How did he do it?” So look for that! There’s sentimentality in Montgomery’s directing that contrasts with hard-boiled Lucky Gagin and that gives the film heart. Dorothy B. Hughes is the author of the books that both Ride the Pink Horse and In a Lonely Place are based on. These stories have something in common. A violent man is changed by the innocent love of a woman. In In a Lonely Place, he changes too late and loses the girl. In Ride the Pink Horse, Gagin is a solitary and cynical figure. Even while Pila is helping him, he derides her with all kinds of racist remarks. Yet she is his savior and continues to help him. It’s the oddball nature of their relationship that hooks you. He’s so powerful, such a tough guy, yet he needs this child to help him. She in turn is drawn to him. They can’t be together romantically, but there is love between them. She saves his life and his soul by her intervention."