"Ah, the days when Hollywood harbored existentialistic realists, and the entirety of America—from its back roads and highway saloons to its hinterland betting subcultures, working-class desolation, gone-wild farm fields, and small-town cafeterias—was a metaphor for itself, and for all of our postwar lostness. Monte Hellman’s career peak is easily the greatest film I never even heard of as a film-hungry 1970s kid, vanished and hardly ever TV-broadcast, even as I thought the sobering, grown-up likes of Deliverance and Chinatown and Scarecrow were emblematic of an American cinema that had finally reached adulthood. Then came Star Wars."

"Citizen Kane is, like you see now, P.T. Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood. It’s a good movie; it’s the same kind of thing. You follow a crazy character who gets really successful, and in a very bitter way. So I really love those two movies. It’s still one of the biggest crimes of Hollywood that they didn’t finance Orson Welles’ movies after a while. To have a genius like him, sitting there and trying to get his last 5,000 bucks together to make another movie after he did a movie like this… (Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, was notoriously completed and re-cut without his input.)"