Derek Cianfrance

“First one I’ll take here is Short Cuts, Robert Altman. This isn’t streaming anywhere, so this is like some gold right now. When I think of this movie, the first thing that comes to mind is this scene at the end of the movie with Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin laughing as an earthquake is happening, and singing. Very special.”

“Oh, okay. To Sleep with Anger. The opening of this movie has this Sister Rosetta Tharpe song as Paul Butler, his shoes start to catch on fire, and then the still life of the fruit starts to catch on fire. And Danny Glover’s pretty amazing, kind of playing the devil in this movie. Charles Burnett, to me, is just… I love his movies so much because he makes movies about family, and this is just one of his masterpieces.”

“Okay, so I should do my close-my-eyes one? What I get here? Certified Copy. All right, great. Kiarostami. I’ll take that. I haven’t seen this one. Where Is the Friend’s House? Is one of my number-one movies, so I’m very excited to see this.”

“Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers: Freaks, The Unknown, and The Mystic. I haven’t seen The Unknown or The Mystic, but Freaks is a movie I try to watch maybe once a year. You hear about coming in the Closet and what do you do? You pick all the movies you’ve already seen before, but this is so exciting because I have two movies I haven’t seen here.”

“Nine films of Pasolini, Pasolini 101. This has a couple of my favorite movies of his on here: Accattone and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, especially The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. I grew up Catholic and going to church every Sunday and catechism once a week. But I never paid attention. I, like, daydreamed the whole time. Then when I was in my early 20s, they were playing The Gospel According to Saint Matthew at my… at a film program at my film school.”

“Brakhage Anthology: Volumes One and Two. So I studied at the University of Colorado. Stan Brakhage was one of my professors. The first movie I saw of his was Mothlight, which… Well, you just have to see it, but it’s a collection of… he emptied out a bunch of light fixtures in the ’60s and pasted them onto clear strips of celluloid and had that developed, and so what you see is a flutter of shadow and light. He was trying to create what your eyes see in film.”