"I’ve been directing television for almost twenty-five years. In that time, one thing that I have learned for sure is that Douglas Sirk is the godfather of all dramatic television. It all comes from him. The best of television is redolent with his sense of ironic and knowing melodrama. He piles on the conflict in each and every scene. Bad things and disappointment stalk his characters, but always with style. The first ten minutes of Written on the Wind are literally drunk with this style. Robert Stack drinking from the bottle in an intensely yellow sports car, hundreds of leaves that blow through a Texas mansion, pages of a calendar that flip through time, and, above all else, Dorothy Malone. Nobody mambos like Malone: the sequence where she drunkenly mambos in her room while her father dies of a heart attack is choreographed for the camera like a Minnelli musical. Sirk blocks a scene with such dynamism and artfulness you can turn off the sound and know exactly what’s going on. All That Heaven Allows got me into Sirk, but Written on the Wind is the poster on my office wall—it’s a touchstone, a timeless piece of popular art."

"Harvey is one of my all-time favorite films. This movie I saw when I was younger and I feel like it struck a chord with me, then, probably primarily because of Jimmy Stewart’s performance and the kind of magic that is this character that he refers to that we don’t see as an audience. But I think… I loved it and I’ve watched it many times since, and it’s a movie that has gotten more profound for me as I’ve gotten older, and I feel I’ve gotten different things out of it every time. It’s a movie whose construct is kind of up for interpretation, I think. You could easily make an argument that his character of Elwood Dowd is a drunk, for instance, and, you know, Harvey is a manifestation of that. You could say he’s a man who has given up on reality and, therefore, he’s happier, and Harvey is a manifestation of that. It’s such a beautiful film and there’s such humanity in the film and there’s something so enlightened — regardless of what is actually genuinely going on with Elwood’s character — there’s something so enlightened about him that everyone else is actually more insane than he is, and that always really struck a chord with me."