"Like The 400 Blows it’s incredibly personal, but as opposed to naturalism it’s much more expressionist; the whole mix of reality, memory, and real fantasy — the character’s fantasy versus the movie fantasy that’s unfolding through the real-time story. The character being a director making a movie, and how it all gets jumbled together and mixed together … to me it creates this amazing concept, that a person’s identity isn’t just one fixed thing. It’s actually — and this is very Fellini-esque — like a carousel of several things that are just always changing and swapping around. You don’t only have one identity, you have several of them, and they’re always changing and you’re always trying to satisfy all of them. Hence, we’re never happy and we never get it right, and it’s all very confusing. But you know, for Fellini, 8 ½ is incredibly optimistic in its own humanistic viewpoint on the beauty of that, as opposed to being smothered and depressed by the realization that this character will never be satisfied and is always disappointing other people. There’s an embrace of the life around him that I find really beautiful. I guess people can say it’s sentimental, but I think he earns it by the end of the movie because it explores so many truthful, and often dark, corners of the human soul."

"A beautifully done movie that now, unfortunately, tragically, as a parent you watch and has a very troubling ending. But I have to say as a kid when I saw it and I was unburdened with having my own children, it was absolutely transporting and, again, an incredibly subtle piece of work. Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr’s relationship falling apart, and Melinda Dillon’s journey… It’s full of wonderful, subtle acting in a movie that a lot of people thought was about spectacle, and it’s so not. And you can see the enormous influence that that movie had on all the big sci-fi movies after it. Nobody has quite duplicated the amazing sound design on it. People have tried — I mean that movie Twister, there were moments in it I looked around and was going “They’re totally doing Close Encounters.” People can try it, and try to mix that reality with the more spectacular stuff, but people have a very hard time achieving it. It’s really a very simple story. He believes something that his wife doesn’t believe. But it’s done so kitchen-sink and perfect and so influenced by the films of the ’70s with the overlapping dialogue and a very vérité sort of style to it. Also, when Spielberg wants to put on a show, he really can."

"The notion of making a fiction — meaning you look at it and you think it’s all documentary footage, but it’s all shot. And the reality factor of that is something that makes you able to escape into the film; the fabric of that fiction is so believable and completely knitted together that you buy the proposition of the film — even when you see people getting shot and there’s no blood coming out of their bodies or whatever. There’s something about shooting something [in black and white] — and I’m talking about two movies that are in black and white, we should say, except for the part [in Andrei Rublev] where they show the color of the fresco of the Russian icons. I really like movies that are in black and white, because you feel like you are watching a movie. We associate it with things that were filmed at that time, that would have been filmed in black and white. So there are different concessions and commitments to make to a limited palette for a reason. When I make a movie like Miral, there’s a kind of reversal stock that I’m using outside and sometimes it really feels like Technicolor, like a movie like Exodus, and there are other moments when it’s rougher and it feels like The Bad Lieutenant, or something like that."