Il Posto

“Here is a film that is… that is not that known, and it’s called Il Posto. It’s another film about working-class people. It’s about this guy, this very naive guy, lost in the bureaucracy of work. I love films where you can have a sense of the political and the social situation, but you go… you get to this part through the humanity of a character, and this is a very beautiful character. I absolutely adore this film, Il Posto.”

“Il Posto. You got all the best films here. Ermanno Olmi. I remember I was at a… I used to work for Chasin-Park, which was an agency, a talent agency, and some Italian producers came in and I was really excited about– “Oh, some Italians are coming in, so we can talk about Ermanno Olmi,” but it was a… a real sort of… a disappointment because they were very commercial, and… Ermanno Olmi was making films that were really relevant, but not exactly commercial. So he wasn’t very popular among produc...”

“It’s I fidanzati, Il Posto. Two of his first films.”

“Benny, this kind of changed your life a little bit. Oh my god, Il Posto. I was going to be a physicist. I dropped out of my school and then Josh told me to come to his class and they were showing all these neorealist films and this was one of the films that they were showing that day and I remember just being like, oh my god, you can make movies like this? And it was so shocking and then I left and I went to the same school.”

“I’m going to take this. I actually watched this when it was on the Criterion Channel during a Thanksgiving– Covid Thanksgiving, right after we made The Lost Daughter, as a double feature with Babette’s Feast. God, the first 20 minutes of that movie, and the title sequence. Definitely ripped off the title sequence for the beginning of The Lost Daughter.”