“I think there was a time when it first came out on video in the ’80s and suddenly you’re aware of all the things that are dated about it. And you reject things that meant so much to you. But then I got it again when it came out on DVD and looked at it, and I was just struck by the kind of brilliance of the writing”

“Every now and then they’d talk, and I love when you can hear the tape recorder or whatever they used, the big discs, when they started recording the sound. You can hear the stylus digging into the grooves and you could hear the silence ending, the records being changed in the soundtrack. I loved the feeling, the clunkiness. It’s like looking at a painting and loving the paint and not what it’s representing.”

“Yeah. He’s like a magnet sucked into this position. It’s his calling. He’s the smartest, he’s the shrewdest—the one they’re going to trust the most because of his innocence. And yet it’s in that moment that he surrenders that innocence. He takes on the role of the head of the family even though he’s not really yet.”

“There’s just so much mischief in him, and it’s sort of taught me that something’s not quite done until it’s got . . . an extra twist. It just seems like a film isn’t quite right unless it’s got just that Buñuelian twist, that little sense of mischief. Where it’s just this soupçon of cynicism, but mostly kind of acrid truth.”