But I was trying to make a film in the spirit of the filmmakers who inspired me: Sidney Lumet, Robert Townsend, Hal Ashby, Kathleen Collins, John Cassavetes. When I was making the movie, a lot of people initially discouraged me from shooting on 35-mm. To me, that’s the subway every day, and he captures it in that movie: the way that desperation of people is bubbling to the surface. You see this guy giving this long-winded rant about woe-is-me, “How can the system work this way? I’ve tried everything - I’ve looked for jobs, I’ve done this and done that,” and then the camera slowly pans and reveals this other woman sitting next to him at the welfare office just looking so claustrophobic about this raving lunatic sitting next to her. Watching that movie, you see people who somehow can remain afloat without having what you or I might think of as the wherewithal to actually succeed at living in New York. That’s a very New York kind of person, and Fred Wiseman always - but most overtly to me in Welfare - captures that Manhattan maniac. That kind of Manhattan eccentric who’s wearing a blazer but looks like he hasn’t taken a shower in two months. There’s this type of person in my world - you see him in the front row of a movie at MoMA with Strand bags at his feet, piled full of God knows what.

Funny lines from the movie players club