"Alone in the Wilderness is weird. Somebody gave me this documentary years ago, and I put it in and I watched it about four times in a row. Nothing is really happening in it. This guy is just building a cabin in the woods and sort of narrating it. It’s a true story. It’s actual live footage, 16mm footage of him. I gave it to a buddy of mine and he said the same thing — he was like, “Yeah, I watched it like two or three times in a row.” Another buddy said the same thing. I don’t know what it is. It’s just this guy building this cabin in the woods. I feel like it’s this sort of dream that every guy — or man — has. to go out into the woods and build a cabin and live in the woods. This guy does it, and does it for 40 years, and finally comes down when he’s 80, in Alaska. He just makes it look so feasible or accomplishable that — I don’t know, you just kind of watch it and start dreaming that you could do it too, you know? I think that is what a lot of my buddies felt when I sent them the film. It’s just something I’ve been toying around with — making a movie about it — sort of similar to the events that took place in the documentary, but not."

"In many ways the perfect double bill with Young Mr. Lincoln. Democracy in America, Part II. There is a lot of carbon dating at work in this movie (how an interior, a suit, a gesture spell class—as in middle or working—and the historic moment, 1969, in which these classes function); but this unfurling of specificity is there to give us its metaphysical sense and resonance (the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success). A lot has to do with the amount of space the frame encloses and how resolutely off center it chooses to remain. For all its relentless attention to the matter at hand, Salesman is never a claustrophobic film. It is a film that often goes one (or two or three) better on what a long line of American writers (from Dreiser on) have tried to pin down. Which might explain why Salesman often feels like a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character, registering the cusp moment after which it will cease to do so. One can look at Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind; one can—maybe naively—take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre might still produce; one can celebrate the film as definitively proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. I tend to go for the latter."

"To me, these are the two best resistance films ever made. And each is its director’s best film. I saw them very early, and they were very formative for me. They really show the complex nature of resistance, glorifying it but also showing the compromises you have to make when you’re in wartime. I love that The Battle of Algiers starts off with that line: “None of this is documentary footage.” What audacity to be like: this is going to feel and look so real that you’re going to think this is a documentary, so I need to tell you that it’s not. It’s a way of setting the bar so high, and then the film lives up to it and surpasses it! You feel the ambition in all of it. It’s just spectacular in every sense of the word. Army of Shadows is similar, though obviously it’s much more in Melville’s cinematic language. Something that has always struck me is that by the end of the film everyone does exactly what you would expect them to do, what they’re supposed to do, but it still just leads to fucked-up situations. It’s this real mess of an ending, but it’s all grounded in very real decisions that I can sympathize with across the board. It’s rare to see a film that gets to the humanity of every decision, to the point where they’re lived-in, not just plot points."