“Violence is part of life. You can’t ignore it. You can’t walk away from it. I think the one thing about this film is that it revels in that youthful abandon. I can only imagine people’s reactions.”

“I just remember being really struck by it—being really struck by this gritty quality that it had. The raw honesty of it and the access that Barbara was able to achieve.”

“For me, 8½ is the great film of emotional verité. It’s not the truth. It’s not a documentary, certainly, and it’s not really what Fellini’s life was really like, but it’s what his feelings were really like.”

“It was like discovering a few years earlier how much I loved punk bands that couldn’t play. The real excitement lay in their fresh acquaintance with the instruments they were holding in their hands, and their inability to really do anything sophisticated with them. They still manage to unleash a power that astonished them and mesmerized their fans. I saw a quick analogy there with basement bands and L’ âge d’or. “