“If I said that every creative person I know is insecure, I’d be doing a disservice to very few people. It’s just something about creativity, that you can’t be sure. That’s whether you’re filmmaking or composing, or writing a book, or painting, or whatever— ‘Am I doing good?’ You’re so dependent on people that everything they say has such meaning for you.”

“I wear a hat. And people always comment on the fact: Why do you wear a hat? I know that somewhere deep inside, all I can tell you is it has something to do with Mastroianni [director of 8½] wearing that hat, which he only wore because Fellini wore a hat. I remember thinking, when I came home, ‘Oh, I need a hat.’”

“The whole point of the experience of this film is that you trust the madness that Coppola was in while editing it. And supposedly, he was literally holding editors ransom at the end, forcing them to try things. And from a cool, rational perspective, you would think, ‘Surely it’s a good idea to let Francis have a relook at a film and think how he might want to change things.’ But no, the whole point about it, when you see it, when you see it at the end of—what was it?—a three- to four-year journey to make it, that’s what you see. What you don’t want to see is a reexamination of it from a more leisurely perspective. The fact that it’s edited from inside the storm, that’s where you want to see it edited from. You don’t want to see it edited in a proper, rational, professional way. You want to see it edited by someone who is insane or going insane.”

Kimberly Peirce on The Godfather: “There’s an inherent sense of scope. [Michael]’s the young military guy, then he’s the gangster, then he goes all the way to Rome, and he has a possibility of another life, and then he comes back. We don’t have that many movies that have that kind of scope. What can you compare to The Godfather?”