Carl Franklin

“The Killers of course is one of the great film noirs of all time and of course I love film noir.”

“My Life as a Dog I really like. I couldn't tell you anything about the making of it. It's just was I think one of the sweetest movies I've seen.”

“Les Enfants du paradis, Children of Paradise. When I did Devil in a Blue Dress, the street scenes in this film inspired me to do the street scenes and the way that I did them in Devil in a Blue Dress. And so I just, you know, thought it was very rich and I gotta have it.”

“Tokyo Story, one of my favorites.”

“And Late Spring, where is that? Ozu, one of my favorite directors. And what he does is so simple, you know, the camera's on sticks, it's about three feet off the ground and a 50 millimeter lens. And he just lets it stay and lets the characters work the frame. And what happens is that he focuses so much, here it is, he focuses on intimate relationships and by kind of the repetition of the routines of the characters you get to know them in a way that you would know someone in your own family.”

“Interesting thing about Eight and a Half, I saw this movie a couple times. I was at the AFI at the time and it inspired me to write and to shoot a little project that I should have made into a full-length feature and maybe I will someday. That's about a fundamentalist minister. I have no idea why this movie inspired me to do that, maybe I'll discover them when I make the movie.”

“To Sleep with Anger. Charles Burnett was a major influence in my life actually. His movie which I don't think we have yet is Killer of Sheep, the one that I saw at the time. He doesn't follow any kind of a conventional structure, you know, and what he does is so quirky and so brilliant that, you know, it defies your ability to replicate it.”

“Death in Venice, I want to see that. Visconti, The Leopard is another one of his I want to see.”

“And there's another one I'm trying to remember the name of it, The Damned, yeah. I'm just racking up here.”

“'Round Midnight, which I already have, is one of the great jazz movies.”

“Oh, Chimes at Midnight, which is a compilation of the Falstaff stories, Falstaff from Shakespeare. Anything that Falstaff appeared in with Orson Welles. And that's actually a very interesting depiction of those times.”

“This is Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, which has several films on it, several that I don't know, but the one that I do know and that the reason why I'm getting it because I don't know how to get it otherwise, it's Pixote. One of the sub themes of it is the kind of evolution of a criminal which I explored in my thesis film at the AFI and you know some of what I saw in the movie and what from my own experiences or actually what I what I you know kind of saw around me in the area that I...”