Charlotte Wells

“This is Minding the Gap by Bing Liu. Bing was actually in my class of Sundance writing lab fellows and directing lab. We've got to know each other there and I saw his film there for the first time and I adored it. It feels like a really nice first pick. It's very cool that this is in the collection. It's the quickest I've ever made a decision in my life.”

“I have the French poster to A Woman Under the Influence in my office. It's the image of Gena Rowlands with her hand held up. Gena Rowlands is in my mind the best actor that there has ever been. The sequence in this film where she is out on the street waiting for her children to arrive home is one of my favorite scenes in any film that there has ever been and so strikingly reminds me of my grandmother both in appearance and in mind. I'll take an individual copy of this because I adore it.”

“This is David Lean Directs Noël Coward, which includes Brief Encounter. I actually haven't seen the other films in this collection, which is exactly the type of thing I wanted to take on today. Brief Encounter has one of my favorite strings of dialogue of all time. She says, 'I've fallen in love. I am an ordinary woman. I didn't know such violent things could happen to ordinary people,' which is devastating and that's generally how I like my cinema.”

“This is Chantal Akerman in the Seventies, which is a part of the Eclipse Series. When I was invited to come in here, this was the first thing that I knew I wanted to grab. La Chambre, which is a short she made in New York in 1972, was the inspiration for the last shot of my film, which is kind of 360 degree. And there is a tracking shot down a hotel corridor, this is very directly inspired by Hotel Monterey. News from Home was definitely on my mind while I was making this.”