The BRD Trilogy

“Not the whole Before Trilogy, but the final one. Sharon Horgan and I were writing the first season of the show Catastrophe, and my wife said, 'Let’s watch Before Midnight.' And so she puts it on and watching I’m like, 'Oh my God.' As soon as it was over, I called Sharon, I was like, 'Put down your quill. We have to retool everything because the ultimate work of art about a marriage has just been made, and if we think that we’re gonna play in that arena, then we got to study this playbook.'”

“This is going to be a box-set kind of day for me. I have to do this. This is probably going to be a little obvious for you who have seen a lot of my small, intimate films, but this is The Before Trilogy by Richard Linklater. Why this is so special for me in particular is, when I was 18 years old, I had seen Slacker, I had been to all the Midnight screenings of Dazed and Confused, and this movie came out. I’ve been obsessed with these movies ever since.”

“And I’ve also got this down because, when we were doing White Lotus, a lot of us rewatched these. So, I always related to the first one the most. And then it was quite a big moment when I realized I now relate to the second one more and I’ve grown up, and there’ll be a day that the third one will resonate with me more, and it just feels like it’s a trilogy that you grow with. So I’ll take The Before Trilogy with me home.”

“I kind of want a bunch of movies that I just haven't seen which are not interesting to talk about like The Before Trilogy. I've never actually seen. That's where they walk and they talk and they like each other a lot, right?”

“The Koker Trilogy, hello? Kiarostami, I don’t want to say his name wrong, was the, you know, original gangster when it came to those kind of beautiful films that are so poetic and... Just the boy with– you know, running back and forth with the... He had the Homework and just, it’s just so... I know he didn’t use a lot of real actors, so it was just nice to see the... Those films you can just watch on repeat over and over again.”

“It’s Abbas Kiarostami. Here’s the trilogy. So... I just thought about one, but I’m happy there’s a trilogy here. I was thinking about Where Is the Friend’s House? My Friend’s House? But here I also find Through the Olive Trees. So I’m very happy. And Life Goes On. This moment with the flower... It’s cool, in Where Is the Friend’s House?, is really beautiful. And it’s kind of simplicity lesson.”

“Kiarostami. I first saw in Istanbul Film Festival his movie Where Is the Friend's House? And I didn't know Kiarostami at that time and I liked the movie a lot and it was incredible to me and next years when I come across Through the Olive Trees it was a huge shock for me. It didn't look like any film I saw before. It was completely a different type of cinema, but I liked it a lot.”

“So the Koker Trilogy the protagonist of Where Is the Friend's House? Might be one of my top five most relatable protagonists in movies up right next with WALL·E the protagonist is this little boy who accidentally took his friend's notebook so the whole movie is he's deeply worried that the friend doesn't have the notebook to do his Homework so he has to go find where is the friend's House and the way that for him the stakes are so high but to the entire Village is so heartbreaking...”

“I'm going to go with this one because I picked it up early. The Koker Trilogy. I'm going to do that as a parting gift of creative beauty.”

“Oh my box sets, don't forget my box sets. My box set of the BRD, Fassbinder, who I mean he was a post-war German young filmmaker with radical ideas. This has Lola, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss in it. So this is a real great special collection of that work and it's a great introduction to German cinema from this time period.”

“Now The BRD Trilogy is somewhere and this is one of the most coveted box sets. It's so beautifully designed. It includes three of the later Fassbinder female driven stories: Marriage of Maria Braun with Hanna Schygulla, Veronika Voss, and Lola. It is just an exquisite and perfect object collection of three masterpieces and the perfect gift.”