“‘I think it’s an instinctual thing,’ Covino explained. ‘There’s something about when emotions get heightened, moving to a more objective perspective can allow us to see that in its totality, and it can be mined for comedy. You have this opportunity to juxtapose a wide shot that allows you to take in the absurdity and laugh at what someone’s going through.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/28/2025
“These are the kinds of pictures where if the characters stop at a store, the shopkeeper is going to have a whole story of his own going on. They’re generous films, warm in a way that can’t be faked. The sets are cluttered like people actually live there, the mismatched thrift shop fashions messy the way life is. Demme was a rare filmmaker who actually seemed to like people.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/19/2025
“If there’s a conspiracy that means your wife died for a reason. One of the things about people dying, especially when they die young, is that it seems meaningless. We have evolved to look for meaning in everything. It’s one of the strengths and weaknesses of our species. And if you can’t find meaning, you invent meaning, and that’s what a conspiracy theory is.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/24/2025
“You feel safe when other people are laughing. That’s why the movies are still playing. That’s why they find new audiences. People come up to me and say I saved their life, which is staggering to hear. But they just mean that wherever they were growing up, they didn’t think that anybody was like them. Then they saw these movies and realized there is another way.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/19/2024
“We’re here for such a short period of time, and so often we’re asked to think that the point of our life is to accumulate a lot of stuff, or have other people think we’re fabulous, right? As if that’s gonna change anything. What I find so moving about Miss O’Connor is that because the reality of mortality hit her so young, she wrote about that mystery better than anyone else.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/22/2024
“I think as a trans person who now looks back at their obsessive youth caring more about Buffy’s high school experience than their own, it’s hard not for me to interrogate the ways in which the screen was a place for me to put my love that was safe. The fiction available to me on the screen was almost like microdosing something that I wasn’t getting in my real life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/09/2024
”’Godfrey is a fun hang, absolutely. But I tap out fast,’ Soderbergh admits. ‘It’s so abstract. I leave inspired, excited and confused. It’s one of those things where I go, ‘I’ll never see the UFO, but I believe he saw it.’ You go with that. You go with the resume, which is absolutely unique among American filmmakers. With each film he creates a new grammar.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/08/2023
“’It’s easy in our lives to see the people we meet as characters. Even in your own friend group, you know? He’s the drunk. She’s the party girl. He’s the one who gives me advice.’ Vengeance is about a man coming to realize that the people around him are actually much more complicated than the characters he’s assigned them to play on his podcast.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/27/2022
“That was just where we were. This was just what was around me. Making work like this and exposing it to an audience, you learn a lot about yourself. In some ways, it’s like having a terrible therapist. People are gonna give you a whole lot of feedback and they’re gonna tell you all about yourself. Some of it makes no sense at all, and some of it’s pretty painful.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/27/2022
“There are bits that you could do a couple years ago that you can’t do now. When has that not been true? Culture evolves and mores change. You can’t go back. And the flipside of it is, you have to let people adapt. If you said something that was untoward eight years ago, well it was eight years ago. Good for you, if you’re willing to learn and grow.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/28/2021
SPLICED PERSONALITY 