Frederick Wiseman

“Bicycle Thief is a, Thieves, is a film that I saw, oh, very long time ago, 50 years ago or so. I, I was just so moved by the, by the story and, and the opportunity, the feeling that I had that I was watching, even though it was staged, that I was watching real people, and I was getting some sense of how they acted and how they felt.”

“Knife in the Water I saw when it first came out, which must have been in the early '60s. Polanski's capacity to deal with both the, the literal aspects of a story and, and the abstract, I found, I, I've thought about it many times over the years because making my own movies, the relationship between the literal and the abstract, how you take movies—a very literal medium—and how you take something specific and suggest more general ideas. And Knife in the Water was a movie that I thought that, helped me understand how to think in film terms.”

“Down by Law, I think it was one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. I've seen it at least six times. Jarmusch is a master of straight-faced comedy, and I'm a big fan of straight-faced comedy, and it's something that I always try to use in my own work.”

“And I've always been a big fan of war movies, and Paths of Glory, I think from my point of view, Paths of Glory is the great Kubrick film because I felt that I was with, I was with the company in the trenches.”