'The Great Escape' reference

I was watching the "Great Escape" the other day, and one of the opening scenes in the prison camp is a meeting between the commandant (sp?) of the camp and the highest ranking prisoner. In this scene, the commandant is talking about how this prison camp was made to house all the prisoners of war who had escaped many times. He has a stack of files and he is going through them and tossing them aside as he's saying stuff like "escaped, caught again, escaped again."

Why am I telling you this? Because it reminded me a lot of the scene in "A Life Less Ordinary" where Gabriel is going through the files of people on earth and saying "divorced, divorced, divorced."

Does anyone else see the similarities between these scenes? Does anyone know if the writer/director of "A Life Less Ordinary" ever made a mention of this?