Miller’s Crossing

“Let’s see, Miller’s Crossing. The Carter Burwell score is so haunting and evocative. The image of the hat drifting through the autumn woods and, you know, Turturro begging for his life. It brought style and also emotional realism, coupled in a way where it was sort of uniquely my– what I thought was the Coen brothers. It was part of the formative period of my life when I was watching movies and inspired to want to be a director.”

“I was the cinematographer on Miller’s Crossing. Trey Wilson... Miller’s Crossing was written for him in the lead. They found Albert Finney. Albert came in with less than two weeks and knew every single line of dialog. Miller’s Crossing, perhaps the best lit movie I’ve ever shot. And if you look at it carefully, you’ll see that I never motivated the light. You don’t have to motivate light to make something look beautiful.”

“So another Coen Brothers film that's here, absolutely one of my favorites is Miller's Crossing. This is a movie, I'm just going to tell you, you need to watch it not twice, but you need to watch it three times at the very least, because the story is so intentionally, almost willfully, convoluted. And Gabriel Byrne is incredible. Marcia Gay Harden is phenomenal playing the character of Verna. Albert Finney, extraordinary Performance. But it's Turturro, John Turturro plays a character named Ber...”

“Would you say Miller's Crossing? Wise, would there be a,, a Criterion closet without a Coen Brothers film in it? I have a specific love for this movie because as a comics person, I always thought it was kind of the version of Will Eisner, The Spirit, that if you did The Spirit, this would be it. People who burns are being punched in the head. He wears his head low, kind of his eyes. And at the end he turns out to be a little bit smarter than almost everybody else, except for Marcia Gay Harden...”

“Miller’s Crossing. I mean, there’s not a bad Coen brothers movie for me, but this one, there’s just sort of an entirely new vocabulary this film teaches you in the first 30 minutes that you have to understand to appreciate the rest of the movie, and so it’s so much better on each rewatch. And let me tell you, not one of us is ever gonna wear a hat as well as Gabriel Byrne wears a hat in this movie. Best hat work in cinema history.”