"This really scared me coming out of it. You knew it was made for 10 cents – that was obvious – but it actually had some fabulous performances. Some of the moments – like when Leatherface kicks open the door and comes after them – I mean your blood just runs cold. It was just amazingly visceral visual storytelling. A few years earlier, I was at college and I wrote a synopsis for a novel and my teacher feedback was “this would make a great movie!” And I was crestfallen, but it made me realise I had a great visual imagination as well, and for years I fought it but eventually realised that was the thing I could do"

"This is an amazing film, so visually stunning and strange and melancholic. It’s a good film to remind me of a time period that I was living at that time; it made me feel very heavy, you know, as a kid in 1985. I would have been twelve or thirteen, and it was just a formative time of existence. It affected me in a pretty intense way, just simply by its mood alone. Terry Gilliam’s imagination was so surreal and rich. And the propulsion of the story with the atmosphere in this world, and the gadgets and inventions and trials that all these characters have to go through, it’s a fantastic voyage of the mind."

"Buñuel’s work is very important to me because it made me understand how far you can go with imagination and still be so close to reality. For me, The Exterminating Angel is so real—maybe Buñuel wouldn’t be happy to hear me say that because he’s not famous for his realism. But even if it’s a surrealistic parable, I’ve been so many places where I felt like I was living inside the feeling of this movie. It’s like a documentary about society. When I was making my movie Happy as Lazzaro, I surveyed movies that all talk about how to be good, because Lazzaro is a good man. Viridiana came up as something to watch."

"Buñuel’s work is very important to me because it made me understand how far you can go with imagination and still be so close to reality. For me, The Exterminating Angel is so real—maybe Buñuel wouldn’t be happy to hear me say that because he’s not famous for his realism. But even if it’s a surrealistic parable, I’ve been so many places where I felt like I was living inside the feeling of this movie. It’s like a documentary about society. When I was making my movie Happy as Lazzaro, I surveyed movies that all talk about how to be good, because Lazzaro is a good man. Viridiana came up as something to watch."

"For most other filmmakers, making a movie as good as Mysterious Object at Noon would be a crowning achievement. Because it’s Apichatpong, the film is usually considered relatively minor, a promising start. That’s nuts. A portrait of the collective imagination of Thailand, the movie doesn’t just anticipate many of his long-term themes––memory, the boundaries between real and unreal, dislocation––it explores them deeply, intricately, and with a radical appetite for play and invention. Neither documentary nor fiction, and existing somewhere between the total control of his later features and the experimental spryness of his short films and gallery work, it’s a unique masterpiece by the best filmmaker in contemporary cinema."