"It [was] unlike almost anything else before it. I think so often movies try to do too much, especially when you try to adapt a big, sprawling novel into a film, and you try to compress hundreds of years or generations. It can work, certainly, if you’re Kurosawa or David Lean or somebody. But a lot of times, the best movies are not novels, they’re poems. That movie is just this beautiful tone poem. I don’t know how many pages of a script that is. It’s probably a very short script, but she used the medium so well. And when we saw that, we thought, “Wow.” We kept thinking about that movie, too, when we were writing, although we ended up writing something much more verbose."

"One summer, they were doing a ’70s movie revival at the Film Forum in New York, and Soter and I would go see double features; you pay for one, you see two. All ’70s movies. It was great, so we’d go there all the time. One of my favorites was John Cassavetes‘ Husbands. That was a great, funny movie; first of all, it was cool because a lot of it was improvised. There’s Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes…one of their buddies dies, so they basically decide life’s too short and they’re going to go get drunk one night and reflect on life. So it’s one night of these guys going out and drinking, but then they end up going to London."

"I grew up not understanding racism — I was never around anything that would have led me to that. All of a sudden I went to the premiere of this film and it struck me so hard. It made me brothers with my fellow man more than any other film that I’ve ever seen. It changed my life. The perspective it gave me was incredible. I don’t have a lot of films that changed my life, but that one made me realize we’re all in this together. Michael Pena is a good friend of mine, and this was the first film that put him on the map. He was so good. When the lights went down in that movie, we were taken away. It was unreal."

"Often, when I read filmmakers’ lists (including mine), I am frustrated by the absence of their contemporaries. The present is always the hardest to read, and no one will argue if you focus on masters of the past instead. But here are a few names, filmmakers whose work I have been lucky to follow since their beginnings; we’ve crossed paths, more or less frequently, but I have admired them constantly, also because they have been an inspiration. I feel I have had a dialogue with them, or with their films, and it is reflected in my own work. Edward Yang is gone, I miss him a lot, he invented modern Chinese cinema alongside Hou Hsiao-hsien, he was my friend."

"Apocalypse Now was one of the first films that I saw that showed film could be a malleable art form, something that could exist outside of a super-traditional three-act structure. Martin Sheen and his character are sort of wrestling with more than just trying to find courage, but also trying to find some reason for why he was there in the first place. Speaking to a lot of Vietnam vets, I know it’s especially prominent in the Black experience. Soldiers felt incredibly disenfranchised about Vietnam because they weren’t being respected back home, but expected to have the motivation to fight for their country. But looking at it even from Martin Sheen’s case, his character is white, but that was part of his motivation."

" Complete faves, yeah. We’ve spent a lot of time together, even before we started the film — that’s how we knew we could work together, by comparing films that we liked and talking about them. And so, our first one’s The Breakfast Club by John Hughes. Obviously, in ParaNorman, we’re picking up on different high school stereotypes, and John Hughes touched on that so beautifully — especially in this movie. I think the most amazing thing about this film when you watch it is that it’s just pure character. There’s no spectacle or anything. When you watch it — you know, it was a mainstream, successful movie and everyone went to see it — but when you watch it, it’s almost like an art movie."