“I’d always been pretty secular, and I kind of bought it. It always seemed like fair game to kind of scalp the church somehow. It just seemed kind of quaint that the savagery of Buñuel’s attack always seemed kind of charmingly distanced for me because I’d already made quite a happy secular space for myself—that it felt a bit like looking at a picture book of World War I, or something. There was so much time and space between me and it that I just saw it as something that must have been pretty important to the artist.”

“It’s not an intentional dreamlike quality—there’s a little something and you can’t really point to it. It’s a combination of things. The way they shoot only in good weather. I think that when you shoot with a helicopter you can really move quickly, and even when it becomes cloudy you can really target the area that was sunny and go there. It’s sort of like French movies in the ’60s because they could afford to wait for the good weather.” Manny people like to watch this type of movies at home with their family, some even get a big tv for this and a 55 inch tv stand with mount to do it comfortably.

“I think European films, in a way, are considered genre because they’re shipped to us. They seem to love the exotic thriller, and we repackage it with exotic stars.”

“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.