"Apocalypse Now is sort of a fever dream of a movie. When you watch the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, you suddenly understand what everybody went through while they were making that thing, and what a huge, unruly beast they got involved with, not even knowing what the movie was going to be. Everybody just decided to be a part of it even though it was just this evolving daily disaster. That being said, it is an amazing tribute to the film, that the beautiful cohesive piece that it is, is what emerged from that craziness. So many scenes that are just so memorable, the amazing lines, and how it just totally transformed war movies because it would have those incredibly realistic moments but also, you know, the huge “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter attack. And it’s amazing that it worked at all, you know, besides the fact that it actually managed to work beautifully."

"The strange thing about Altamont, with all its horrors—brilliantly and intimately documented by the Maysleses and by Stanley Booth in his book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones—is that one still wishes one had been there. (I interviewed Stanley onstage in 2012 after a screening of the film, and he still seemed traumatized by the gig, all these years later.) The film and Booth’s book can both be usefully cross-referenced with Sonny Barger’s autobiography, in which he concedes that while it may have been a big night for the Stones it was just another night for the Angels! One of the great moments in documentary is when we focus on Barger at the edge of the stage, looking at Jagger as though he might still decide to beat the crap out of him, as no one had looked at him since he was a little boy at school in England."

"I remember first listening to this during the OK Computer tour, too, with Colin [Greenwood]. The only thing I'd really known by him before – Bill, I mean, not Colin,– was 'Lovely Day'. When I'd got into him, he'd retired from the music industry, but years later, a documentary, Still Bill, came out about why he'd done that, and I'd really encourage any fan of his to get hold of it. He's just this lovely family man, doing joinery, talking about how he doesn't want to make music for the sake of it in this really lovely, gentle way. 

There's a wisdom in his personality, too, a wisdom really comes out in his singing voice, and his music. He doesn't come across as an artist driven by the need to express himself creatively either, which is interesting. He comes across as a human being, a husband and a father before he's a musician. He talks about why that's important, and that really resonated with that way of thinking.
"

"""When it comes to documentaries, I am not a fan of current trends of reenactments and celebrities reading the words of unavailable subjects. Skip the elaborately constructed interstitial animations and give me old-school talking heads and archival footage with scripted, voice-of-God narration to help move me where you want me to go. The Times of Harvey Milk is what I’m talking about. Winner of the 1985 Oscar for Best Documentary, Rob Epstein and Richard Schmiechen’s powerful account of the assassination of San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official remains one of the most riveting documentaries ever made. It tells the story of San Francisco’s gay community and the fight for gay rights in the late 1970s through dynamic talking-head interviews, gripping archival footage, and devastating narration by Harvey Fierstein. It is also one of the very few gay-themed films to be selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry."

"I like movies like Gone with the Wind, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I’ll actually choose Traffic. When I did not speak the language, I watched the movie sex, lies, and videotape, and I didn’t understand; I thought American movies were always blockbusters, hard movies, with action and male leads. But that film was like pieces of life, pieces of dreams. I did a movie called Nipples, based on my dreams, with different characters coming together…very sexy, and very modern, and very open. I think that’s something that’s very contemporary and I didn’t think a lot of American directors were [that way]. [Steven Soderbergh]’s mind is very modern. I like Traffic because he shot it like a documentary, but there’s mystery, there’s modernity. There’s an unknown danger in it. When the characters are crossing the border — I just like the momentum of life, when people cross each other, when lives cross each other. In that moment of life, what can happen."

"In My Voyage to Italy, the documentary that we made about Italian cinema, we started with this picture. For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters. I was experiencing the power of cinema itself, in this case made far beyond Hollywood, under extremely tough conditions and with inferior equipment. And I was also seeing that cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience. Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along. The result—in that episode, and in the Sicilian and Neapolitan and Florentine episodes as well—is still startling: it’s like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes."