Leslie Harris

“I have to take this. This is like the if you want to learn how to make a movie about Rules of The Game. Renoir really has, you know, his father was a painter and he has a great sense of mise-en-scène and where to put the characters within the frame and it's a phenomenal—if you're talking about blocking and staging, this is a phenomenal film. It's the blocking reflects the emotions of the characters which is something that I think everyone kind of can appreciate and enjoy.”

“Scenes from a Marriage. I did a talk at Brooklyn Academy of Music and I introduced John Singleton's... Baby Boy. I mentioned this with Bergman because sometimes John Singleton was looking for the truth of character... You see that in this too. Sometimes black directors get pigeonholed and we think the violence is just about our culture but this shows that their marriage is just as tenuous and sometimes just as violent and emotionally violent.”

“If you want to laugh, Divorce Italian Style.”

“Oh big Fellini fan and for this film it just it the opening when you see the opening when he's in the car is a phenomenal opening and it taught me that an open the first scene and the opening of the film should set the tone for the whole film and that's what this [does].”

“This is Agnès Varda, she's one of my favorite directors. Her really great film Cléo from 5 to 7 is wonderful. I also love Vagabond... It actually inspired me to do my movie because it showed a woman who was a complex character. She wasn't just a good girl or a bad girl, she was really complex in this movie and it was a realistic portrait of a woman going through homelessness and despair but still having a sense of who she is.”