Alden Ehrenreich

“Midnight Cowboy to me is sort of like the Mona Lisa. It's The Most Beautiful movie from a cinematic standpoint. John Schlesinger, and it's somebody who's not from New York coming to the New York of 1968 or 69 and filming it in its most sort of absurd weird dirty version of itself. And then inside of it are these really extreme characters but filled completely with such great performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman who bring so much emotion and depth.”

“Destry Rides Again, it's Jimmy Stewart who's like probably my favorite actor and Marlene Dietrich. And that alone, if you know what their energies are, is a weird enough combination that it just makes the whole movie so wild. And there's these great fight scenes with Marlene Dietrich. Jimmy Stewart's just The Most Beautiful person on screen. This is like a western that's an old Hollywood studio system Western but has just a weird other energy to it.”

“His Girl Friday, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Pre-Stanislavskian acting taking over movies, pre-Brando movie. One thing I think about with this movie is the power of having actors who are that good with really kind of stage acting in the sense that they're able to sustain takes for 10 minutes and stay on. And actors with that level of craft but who are still very real inside of that and have to do crazy technical things. It's just magnificent.”

“Yi, Edward Yang. His eye for these little moments with children or families or turning points in people's lives. It's not just beautiful things, it's also the sad things that people go through. It's all shown in this really gorgeous way, almost a little like Wings of Desire where it feels almost like somebody is outside of life or there's like an angel or something watching life itself and all of its different colors.”

“My final pick is Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. This movie is so beautiful and spans over this big period of time, almost related to Yi in the sense that you really feel the span of these people's lives over time. And there's something really beautiful about that effect because my favorite movies, which Yi and this and It's a Wonderful Life do, is that you walk out of the movie and you want to savor and appreciate life you have more deeply.”

“This is the Actuality Dramas of Allan King. The one I've seen is A Married Couple, which is one of the most stunning documentaries I've ever seen in my life. It's 1969 and you're watching a couple basically get divorced. From an acting standpoint, getting to watch these events happen with people in a documentary, it is the bar. A great Performance is a bar, but a higher bar is what do real people look like when everything's melting down around them?”

“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?”

“John Cassavetes. I was 15, I went to the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica and saw A Woman Under the Influence and then I kept coming back to it. There is a reason that he is sort of the load star for so many people now. There is an imperfection to it, there is a wildness to it, a sort of refusal to be anything other than himself at the edge of who he is, pushing the envelope of everything he had in him and putting it into all of these films.”