Panos Cosmatos Quotes

Louis Malle is maybe one of my favorite directors, but I love Tarantino.

When I discovered European filmmakers, it affected me so deeply. It redefined what cinema could be. I mean, 'Blow-Up' ends with a dead body and mimes playing tennis. What?

The movies I respond to are by guys like the Coen brothers and Edgar Wright, where it's hard to fit them into any one box.

I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.

I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway.

Bergman made countless masterpieces, but for one reason or another, 'Winter Light' stays closest to my heart.

'Pastoralia' by George Saunders. Possibly my favorite book. It's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. If Monty Python and Thomas Pynchon had a love child, and it was raised by Frank Zappa on a weird commune, that would be this book.

I was in college in the sixties when movies really got good. I'm a fan of Bergman and Hitchcock and Polanski and Antonioni. Those are my gods.

I was six years old when I saw my first Godard movie, eight when I first experienced Bergman. I wanted to be a director when I was fourteen.

There were many films made for both cinema and television, and in general I don't connect them very much with our books. I have one favorite: 'The Man on the Roof' by director Bo Widerberg, which was based on 'The Abominable Man.'

'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.

Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it.

In the fifties I had dreams about touching a naked woman and she would turn to bronze or the dream about hot dogs chasing donuts through the Lincoln Tunnel.

I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty.

I was watching Orson Welles and Jean Vigo films at a ridiculously young age.

Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there's no doubt he's influenced every one of my films.

My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.

Fleabag' is its own genre. It isn't comedy. It isn't drama. It isn't even tragi-comedy.

I love Quentin Tarantino; I love Harmony Korine, Larry Clarke.

You get all these French directors who have all these pretty, vacuous stars of their movies - from Jean Seberg on - who have become iconic but were never really good actors.

Locke' is a different way of making a film as well as being a different sort of film.

Shoot The Piano Player' is one of my favourite films, though apparently it failed very badly when it released.

I would say 'Jigarthanda' had a lot of Tarantino in it, but it ends there. 'Iraivi' is inspired more from directors like Balu Mahendra, Mahendran, and K. Balachander.

I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'