“The movie is very much like Orson. You know, seeing things from many different points of view, unusual way of telling stories, bored by cliche, innovative, excited by innovation, born storyteller. Exciting, you know, youthful—even in old age he was youthful.”

“I guess what struck me, and I would hope that I would have seen it even back then, is the desire for society to find some quick solution to violence and crime, to find treatment that would curb or stop that. If we could just sit somebody in a chair and weld their eyes open, and then all of a sudden they would be a model citizen.”

“The film changed my identity. I realized that what I wanted to do was make films. Not only that, but I realized what I wanted to make films about: my own life, to some extent. I’ve gone both ways on that, but I suddenly have been criticized for doing that a lot, and you can blame Fellini. Don’t blame me, blame Fellini. I saw a film that truly investigated what the filmmaker was going through. It was the most autobiographical film ever made, yet it was universal because he was telling about issues that all people deal with. I recognized that, even at the age of twenty.”

“More than the actual plot, you experience the film through the way the human face is used. The ability to hold on a face speaks to an absolute trust. There’s an incredibly long shot of Liv Ullmann as she’s listening to the Bach, which then uses a very slow, physical fade to black. It wasn’t an optical effect; I believe they actually began to change the light. All of that was really impressive to me at the time. The sculptural sense of the film, and maybe the idea that the screen becomes an installation—Bergman’s insistence on the screen as a sculptural device.”