Excerpt from Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, PART 1

On his time in London in 1950, and what influenced Pather Panchali:

Of the roughly one hundred films that Satyajit saw while he was in London, including La Regle du Jeu which he rates one of the best films ever made, the revelation was unquestionably Bicycle Thieves. It 'gored' him. 'I came out of the theatre my mind firmly made up. I would become a film-maker,' he said in his 1982 lecture, though characteristically, he did not let on about this even to Clare. 'The prospect of giving up a safe job didn’t daunt me any more. I would make my film exactly as De Sica had made his: working with non-professional actors, using modest resources, and shooting on actual locations. The village which Bibhutibhusan had so lovingly described would be a living backgrop to the film, just as the outskirts of Rome were for De Sica’s film.'
--From Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson