"I was lucky enough to work with Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote Nashville, and the process that she used to make the film is something that I find to be very helpful. She went to Nashville and wrote about the people she encountered when she was there. So in that way, the film was born out of the place. It wasn’t a film that tried to encapsulate the place but a film that tried to grow out of it. There’s so much realness there. For people who didn’t live in that time, that’s the image we now have of Nashville then, in the same way that Paisan created that image of Italy."

"A Married Couple is the first Allan King movie I saw, but I think I watched Warrendale right after that, on the same day. Somebody had lent me the Eclipse set. It’s a very frustrating movie; it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. Sometimes you even like these people in a weird way, but then you also sometimes detest them. You know they’re playacting in front of the camera and that they know it’s there, but when you start to realize just how much they’ve been playacting with each other in this marriage, it’s very disturbing. It makes me start to think about how much people playact in life and in relationships."

"Jaws was the first scary movie I ever saw. Even though I did hate it and it made me scared of sharks, it stuck with me. Every time it’s on, I do have to watch it. Especially now that you know the behind the scenes stuff. The shark didn’t work. So then it became a creative choice to just not show the shark until two-thirds in. It was freezing cold and these people had to be in the ocean. Then, the ocean was freezing so these people were freezing cold and raining and all of that kind of stuff. It just made it more movie magic for me."

"I watched this film at a small theater in Paris, with an audience of mostly French people in their sixties. In that environment, it actually managed to resensitize me to cinema violence, something I assumed was impossible. Hearing the gasps from the audience allowed me to see the film as intended. These poor old French people were being assaulted by the film. It was rocking their world! When the lights came up, I was both upset by the film and delighted by the expressions on the faces around me. We were all just looking at each other in silence. After that, I better understood the power of a collective cinema experience."

"Once again, another movie that I don’t think people could watch these days because they have to sit too long and listen to people talk. This is a brilliant movie, and Paul Newman, out of everything he ever did, this was his greatest performance. When he got the Academy Award for The Color of Money, I think it was a make-up job [by the Academy]. Jack Warden was terrific in it, as well as James Mason. I hated [James Mason] in that movie more than any character I’ve ever hated as the defense attorney for the Catholic Church. He was really mean–cold, really. All the actors are terrific, too."