"How can you go wrong with a Tennessee Williams script (originally his play Orpheus Descending) directed by Sidney Lumet, with the great Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Marlon Brando (playing a retired guitar player named Snakeskin, who is trying to turn over a new leaf in a very racist southern town). An obscure classic."

"One of my most precious books is Lucretius. It was published in Venice in 1515 by Aldus Manutius, who was a Venice printer who published the equivalent of Penguin in paperbacks. All great classical authors, or most of them, were published by Aldus Manutius in a small book in a wonderfully elegant italic script typeface."

"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."

"A movie I like very much by Roberto Benigni. It’s a way of talking about a very serious matter through a comic form. A touching form. That was a new way of speaking of a moment in the history of humanity. Very painful. [Having worked with him on The Tiger and the Snow], Benigni is somebody who [writes] the script and he is somebody who [interprets] the script, but he will let you very free. He is not a dictator. Basically, he is a poet. Somebody who sees the world through his own eyes in a poetic way. [The Tiger and the Snow] is a movie I like because he wanted to talk about the war through his eyes, and it is a very honest movie. Very"