Benny Safdie

“I want to know what it feels like to go through that,”

“That everything outside is worthy of being on screen if it's truthful and it's emotional. You can find the opera out there on the street.”

“But you're like, I'm going to put my money on him that he's going to get there. I don't know how, but I'm confident he's going to make it. That uncertainty is what makes it really beautiful.”

“[Redford's performances are] able to give you full confidence that he's going to get through whatever obstacle he has in front of him, but at the same time, he has no idea if it's possible or if it's even going to happen,”

“There's an opera out on the turnpike. That is something I wholeheartedly believe in,”

“He said to me, 'Not a lot of people talk to me about my acting. Everybody comes up to me and talks to me about the things I've done in the industry, or the movies I've made, but they don't talk to me about my performances,'”

“He’s such a larger than life guy you don’t know what to expect, and then when I met him I was just like, ‘Wow, this guy’s unbelievable, he really is like the real deal,'”

“There’s a juxtaposition of grit and desperation along with these loving moments in Gems,”

“You walk in, and there are all these loud noises, big guys punching shit, hitting each other,”

“I’d sit and watch ‘House Hunters,’ ‘Fixer Upper,’ ‘Flip or Flop,’ all of them. I became hypnotized by it,”

“It’s a natural progression of what we each want to explore,”

“I will direct on my own, and I will explore things that I want to explore. I want that freedom right now in my life.”

“What if she wasn’t there? Your life is potentially over because you’ll never see her again.”

“That was the first time where I had a vision beyond four feet in front of me,”