"I like movies like Gone with the Wind, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I’ll actually choose Traffic. When I did not speak the language, I watched the movie sex, lies, and videotape, and I didn’t understand; I thought American movies were always blockbusters, hard movies, with action and male leads. But that film was like pieces of life, pieces of dreams. I did a movie called Nipples, based on my dreams, with different characters coming together…very sexy, and very modern, and very open. I think that’s something that’s very contemporary and I didn’t think a lot of American directors were [that way]. [Steven Soderbergh]’s mind is very modern. I like Traffic because he shot it like a documentary, but there’s mystery, there’s modernity. There’s an unknown danger in it. When the characters are crossing the border — I just like the momentum of life, when people cross each other, when lives cross each other. In that moment of life, what can happen."

"Timothy Hutton turns in one of the best male performances I’ve ever seen. And that family dynamic was so subtle in what could have been a really angsty movie. Everything from the way it was shot to the way it was acted. John Bailey was actually the DP on my movie that I directed (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) and he was saying that when they shot the psychiatrist scenes he started out with the camera right over their shoulders, and then he moved the camera back slowly and changed the lighting, because he said that if you’d been going to therapy for months, then the lighting would be different every time of the same day. And I thought, “That’s insane that someone thought of that.” And then he moved the camera back 100 feet so that they were compressed on each other so it was a much more intimate scene. I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, this is insane!”"