"I emigrated to Canada with my mother the year Mon oncle Antoine debuted, the same time that the U.S. was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was flourishing. Canadian radio was given a mandate to stop playing American bubblegum round the clock. In this era of radical identity building, along came a candle-lit holiday fable set in an undertaker’s home in rural Quebec. The nephew of Antoine is a young boy coming of age in a world that no one outside his cloistered family could imagine. Mon oncle Antoine is about the sexual, material, and death’s-end taboos in a small village—and the taboo against anyone outside of it ever learning of such things. Some people puzzle over why this film keeps being called Canada’s finest decades after its release, when so many other artists have surpassed its modest ambitions. It is because of this: It was the beginning of saying, “We are not the back forty of the U.S.; we are not a trinket of the queen’s; our land and generations have given us a purchase of our own.” It was the beginning of remarkable Canadian filmmaking."

"My all-time favorite. You gotta remember, I’m old enough to have seen it in theaters when it first came out, with all the hype. The fact that it was such taboo material at that time was so incredibly powerful. If you didn’t live through it you can’t really appreciate the fact that there was so much hype going around, that people were saying that, after they watched the movie, they were getting possessed. People were buying into that, so it made it even more scary to go see it, because you were worried about going to sleep. And the movie was so well done. It still holds up. This many years later, I still think it’s a pretty damn good movie. I’ve always liked horror movies, even from the beginning when I was a little kid and saw The Birds. Scared the **** out of me. It was like the precursor to Jaws. Every time you looked at a bird that was staring at you from a tree, you would think, “Oh ****, it’s going to come down and pluck my eyes out.” And I’ve always liked action movies. That’s probably why I went into stunts. I always enjoyed watching the guys perform feats that looked like they were impossible, and I thought, “You know, I’d like to try that.”"

"This film takes place in Dijon, France, in the mid-’50s. It is a coming-of-age film about a boy in his early teens named Laurent Chevalier, who is from a bourgeois family. He has two older brothers who are always teasing him and who introduce him to a prostitute for his first sexual experience. Laurent has a beautiful mother and a successful father who is a gynecologist. After getting scarlet fever and discovering he has a heart murmur, Laurent must stay in bed for several months to recover. When he is better, he travels with his mother to a very fancy resort (sanatorium) in France. The second and third acts of the film are about his coming-of-age experiences at the sanatorium with the other young people who are staying there. It is also about him developing a strong personal relationship with his mother. This film is so daring and touches on many taboo issues—it’s astonishing that it could be made then (1971) and even now it would be considered to be pushing too many boundaries. In the end, it’s a beautiful, deep love story between adolescent children growing up in a privileged life, and about the closest relationship between a mother and son. I wish more films today could push boundaries like Louis Malle did in Murmur of the Heart. This film reassured me how important it is to push boundaries and to pursue issues that are considered by some to be untouchable. It is a truly inspirational film."