My films really have to be a part of a whole body of work that says something to me.

I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.

You have to put yourself in a situation, a lifestyle, that makes you do the work. Even if it's a monastery.

Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

The real truth, I thought, in terms of what faith is and what Christianity is.

One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

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.