Frederick Wiseman

“Bicycle Thief is a film that I saw oh very long time ago, 50 years ago or so. I was just so moved by the story 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 literal aspects of a story and the abstract, 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, suggest more general ideas. Knife in the Water was a movie 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 try to use in my own work.”

“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 the company in the trenches.”