When you have great actors you want to get in there and let their faces tell the story. Ellen in particular does unbelievable, subtle little things with her face. I can give her 120 notes on each take and she hits all of them perfectly–Direcor Jason Reitman

I'm a child of the movies, so I guess I can't help it. All my life, even at the most dangerous moments, even when I was being hunted down by the Pinochet dictatorship, somewhere inside my body running, inside my body hiding, inside my exiled body, a breathless voice kept absurdly whispering: If I survive, hey, this would make an interesting movie!–Novelist Ariel Dorfman

I had this image of a mother and son riding a train. I didn't know yet who this mother and son were; I didn't know where they were going; I just knew I wanted to write about it. I've discovered that it's better for things to remain fairly mysterious as I go along. I feel my way around in the dark, and as things come together, then they become much more fine-tuned. That's when the more analytical part of the process comes in–writer-director Noah Baumbach

Characters in melodramas are rarely familiar or heroic types. They can be unsympathetic, or even downright despicable. But that does not prevent audiences from responding to them. Hannibal Lecter changed everything. Who of us has known someone who eats other people How is it possible that a character says, 'I'm having someone for dinner, and the audience roars with laughter, knowing that he's going to eat them–Lumet

“Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation” has an absurd title, but one which aptly sums up the major themes of the film. I retraced General Sherman's destructive Civil War route, interweaving this journey with portraits of seven southern women I met along the way–Ross McElwee