"This was my grandfather’s first cinematic gift to me. He was a filmmaker who made commercials in Italy in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and he loved Visconti, who was always his favorite. So he would make me watch films regularly, and this was one of the few that could have felt like homework but didn’t. I love where the film comes from, in terms of the evolution of Visconti’s career. I like that he started off making this pretty dogmatic neorealism and then went on to make this operatic film. The difference between the two approaches is a really beautiful manifestation of his ability to grow as an artist and also to just do multiple things. His cinematic language changed based on the people who populated his frames, and this movie feels grand because it’s got cinema royalty in it, like Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale. The frame feels like it’s the right size and scope and weight for people of that stature."

"This is the most terrifying film I’ve ever seen. It’s a story about a quiet young woman named Carol Ledoux who is a manicurist in London. As the story unfolds we see that she is more and more disturbed and strange. We learn that she is sexually obsessed and actually repulsed by sex at the same time. Her sister and her sister’s lover share an apartment with her, and she’s more and more disgusted by hearing their lovemaking every night. When they leave London to vacation in Italy, she barricades herself in the apartment, and as the days pass she becomes more and more insane. The story escalates, but I won’t tell you the ending. It would spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. This film freaked me out so much that it was a long time before I could stay alone in my apartment—and I must admit, I’m still affected by it."

"In My Voyage to Italy, the documentary that we made about Italian cinema, we started with this picture. For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters. I was experiencing the power of cinema itself, in this case made far beyond Hollywood, under extremely tough conditions and with inferior equipment. And I was also seeing that cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience. Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along. The result—in that episode, and in the Sicilian and Neapolitan and Florentine episodes as well—is still startling: it’s like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes."