Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.

Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.

There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo...it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange.

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

I have a desire to tell stories. And I'm never quite satisfied.

Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. Let the learning continue.