John Sayles

“This was a kind of mind-blowing movie when I first saw it. Anthony Quinn was a film actor from much more mainstream movies than I had ever seen, so it was interesting to see him. There's this really kind of stark story, very human, that Fellini made. There were a whole bunch of directors who I started tracking down their stuff—Mario Monicelli being one of them, and Ermanno Olmi, and certainly De Sica and Zavattini's movies were ones that I started tracking down.”

“This is a Mario Monicelli movie called The Organizer with Marcello Mastroianni. It's one of his greatest performances. It's set in the industrial north of Italy when unions were a pretty new idea up there. A wonderful cast... He was very good at what I eventually figured out was Italian regional humor, so there's usually some Roman who's full of himself dealing with some Neapolitan or some Sicilian and making wisecracks based on how awful each other's region is.”

“This is a movie, His Girl Friday, that I had not seen many of these except on TV. These kind of fast-talking comedies... This is based on a play that Ben Hecht was one of the writers for. This is one of those dialogue-driven movies where the dialogue is so good that you forget the filmmaking's actually pretty good too. This is Howard Hawks and he was one of the first American directors to really capture that people often talked at the same time.”

“This is State of Siege. You know, I saw this, I had seen Z first. This is a movie in a very, very political time. You could actually, if you weren't an American, get away with making a very political movie. This was a filmmaker who had really a lot of political analysis about what was going on in the country but managed to make these thrillers. When we shot our movie Men with Guns, we didn't shoot in Guatemala... So we shot it in Mexico across the border.”