"That’s something I always wanted to do, damn that Keira Knightley! The costumes are phenomenal in that movie, the message is fantastic and there’s just a grandeur and beauty in the scope. We don’t even make movies with that kind of scope anymore; I don’t think anybody would sit there for that long for that movie anymore. It’s about being yourself, and not forgetting yourself really. Even though you move forward or you move up, you still are you. When they’re at that racetrack she’s talking to the horse and she’s going, “Go Clover,” and then she goes crazy shouting, “Move your arse, Clover!” And she’s got that phenomenal hat, fantastic dress on, but she’s Eliza Doolittle you know? I love that movie, and why can’t a woman be more like a man? I love that song; I love his confusion with that."

"Bresson is my favorite director. He personifies my values in movies. My fetish film of his is The Devil, Probably, but it’s not available from Criterion. The ones that are offered are all magnificent, but I have to go with the donkey. Above all, Bresson is unconventional; he had the vision and fortitude to penetrate and disintegrate received ideas and habits to make films that start from square one. He’s ultra-intelligent and ultrasensitive, with the eye of a painter; his films are near-noir in their bleak, unblinking presentation of human existence—a large proportion of them include suicide of the protagonist—while they’re also exhilarating and uplifting in their God’s-eye views. Balthazar, of course, stars a saintly donkey, the beauty of whom rivals that of his costar, a mournfully angelic young Anne Wiazemsky."

"What’s my fifth favorite movie? Now there have been quite a number of them. See now I’m sort of in no-man’s land, because I’m thinking Bonnie and Clyde, I’m thinking Chinatown… I’m just wandering around now. [laughs] One of my favorite books was Black Beauty; I read it when I was eight-years-old, and I’m trying to find if there was a movie, like that, that sticks with me. Oh, I know! Moby Dick. Yes. Now that was filmmaking. John Huston. Call me… Ishmael. I read the book, and there are very few books that I have read and seen the movie and liked the movie. Gregory Peck was in two of ’em: Moby Dick and To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck was one of my favorite actors. Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart, those guys."