Evaluating a movie requires some context. Who made it, when, under what circumstances, based on what pile of possible influences? But I try to disregard a director's stated intentions. The director's chance to communicate with us is in his movie, not in the PR campaign that accompanies it.

Besides, the people who made the movie may not know about everything they've done. As Stanley Kubrick has said, half the fun of watching a movie is finding things that the filmmaker may not even know about.

But every once in a while, a tidbit comes your way that's hard to get out of your head. And sometimes, I admit, these little factoids can be fun.

I thought about this recently after watching Ozu's Late Spring. A bit of this movie, the part where Noriko and Mr. Hattori ride bicycles to the beach, appears on a TV in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Good Men, Good Women (one of my favorite movies, and a movie I have threatened to write about for this site).

Why does this shot appear on that TV? Well, I suppose it's a gentle nod at the audience, many of whom have compared Hou to Ozu. But the two movies also share some abstract concepts: parents losing children, a woman's duty to her spouse, people clinging to past comforts instead of moving on with their lives. And there's a mysterious shot late in Hou's movie of the back wheel of a bicycle riding along a road. It's one of the movie's rare travelling shots, and one of its briefest. It appears when the lead character is finally making peace, perhaps, with her dead lover, and we hear her voice singing tearfully to him as the bicycle weaves. It's not a pair of bicycles as in Ozu's movie, but one alone, riding through the dark. The shot is never fully explained, although we can infer that the bike is ridden by someone bearing bad news in the movie's historical timeline, which itself interlocks with the present.

Hou's explanation for the inclusion of the Ozu clip is simple: the character in his movie is an actress and she has been told to study films from the 1950s, which is when her movie takes place. That's all. He said this in an interview in Cineaste. Late Spring is her homework.

In another personal favorite, Robert Altman's movie Nashville, Geraldine Chaplin plays a star-struck reporter from the BBC. She pesters people for their thoughts and shoves a tape recorder into their faces. In a recent interview (I wish I remembered the source), Chaplin said that, to her, the character was American, not British at all. In the movie she deliberately says "British Broadcasting Company" instead of "Corporation," a slip that a British person would be less likely to make.

Learning Chaplin's intentions has changed my impression of every scene she's in. She now seems like someone going to great lengths to look sophisticated. She's "Opal from the BBC," faking her accent. "Un deux trois quatre," she says into her microphone, first thing in the morning, before crawling out of bed.

Hou's detail doesn't change much about what we know of the character in Good Men, Good Women. Even without it, we don't sense that she's an Ozu fan necessarily; she's asleep in front of the TV. Chaplin's detail does change things somewhat, but not dramatically. We already knew that Opal is eager to meet and sleep with stars, eager to throw around her credentials with people who don't seem to care about the BBC. She's wearing a mask, we already knew. But the size of that mask is considerably larger and the character therefore more pathetic that we might have thought. She speaks with her accent even when she's alone, wandering through a field of yellow school buses.

Whether Altman was aware of what was in his actress's head — and whether Hou intended us to link the bicycles of Late Spring with other parts of his movie — is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag the moment the film is released. And even if I'd like to disregard these irresistable extra-filmic morsels, it seems pretty hard to do so at this point. The body of context has just grown a little fatter.