"Another film with Alain Delon. It’s interesting — probably he was my favorite actor when I was 16, and then I was a bit disappointed of how he changed when he became older. I guess also politically, but that doesn’t matter. As a young man, he played some very enigmatic and wonderful roles. Another favorite film of mine … It’s a genre film, Le Samourai, by Melville. It’s an incredibly cool gangster film. Just the opening, I think, is 20 minutes where not a word is spoken and you always see Alain Delon with his hat and his trench coat. It is just an incredibly stylish and aesthetically wonderfully shot genre gangster film. In German, it’s the Ice Cold Angel, but the Germans always have these funny titles."

"Potemkin is taught in film schools worldwide, more like a fossil than a real, breathing animal that must be dissected. Watch it because it’s important. So budding filmmakers are taught about formalism and montage, and they rarely get to watch Eisenstein’s later works, like Ivan the Terrible. They’re missing out: imagine a biopic run through the meat grinder of German expressionism, with every image connoting the pitfalls of absolute power, with cutaways of faces that are thankfully forever captured in celluloid marble, with a sense of mounting state paranoia and ever-crumbling artifice. Potemkin may have the classic scenes, like the dish, the lion, the guns, but Ivan has taken all those early lessons and boyhood feints and given us a masterpiece."