David Byrne

“This is a film by a Georgian filmmaker. His name’s Parajanov. And it’s called The Color of Pomegranates. It challenges your idea of what a film can be. Images and ritual and processions and costumes and everything. It’s fairly surreal, but if you’re okay just letting go and going with this thing and being… immersing yourself in another world, it’s pretty good that way.”

“This film is called Dead Man. It’s by Jim Jarmusch. I think it might be my favorite Jim Jarmusch film. It reminds me in some ways of a Cormac McCarthy story, in that this guy goes on a journey, he encounters people, he runs into a Native American community in the Northwest. Oh, the score is by Neil Young. Apparently, he did the score by going into a score-recording studio and just saying, “Play the movie and I’ll just improvise.” It’s a period movie, black and white.”

“This is one of the films by a great duo of filmmakers, Powell and Pressburger. They’re English. And this one was also known as Stairway to Heaven. And it’s, again, fairly surreal, but in… as is their wont, it’s also very sentimental. It’s a World War Two pilot whose plane gets shot down. Unlike the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, he says, “These are extenuating circumstances. I’ve fallen in love. You have to let me live.” I believe the earth is in color and heaven’s in black and white.”

“This is a Hitchcock movie. Before he went to Hollywood, I believe. He did a lot of films in England. This one’s called The 39 Steps. It’s like some of his later ones, like North by Northwest and some of The Others, where an ordinary person suddenly falls down a rabbit hole and they’re wrapped up in this kind of conspiracy, and they don’t know why, but they know they have to– they have this thing that they have to do, which leads him on a kind of chase throughout Britain.”

“And look, here in the candy store, I found a film that I made in the mid-’80s, called True Stories. This is the star of the movie, John Goodman. Takes place in a small town in Texas. Influenced probably by many of those other films I’ve just talked about. But I’m going to put it back because I have this film. I have this copy at home.”

“This is a box of Jacques Tati movies, but maybe we’ll just talk about… talk about one. Let’s talk about PlayTime. He’d done these successful, I think, very successful comedies using… where he invented this character, Monsieur Hulot, played by him, a kind of very ordinary French man with a little hat and a pipe. It’s really droll. There’s no out-and-out jokes. Everything is, again, him observing the modern world, its kind of somewhat inhumanity and ridiculousness. Anyway, great film.”