Glenn Close

“Another story that I loved when I was growing up was The Black Stallion books. So The Black Stallion I first knew as a book by Walter Farley. So when the movie came out, I was really nervous because, a book, you can fill everything out with your imagination, a movie, it’s all there. I think it’s a spectacular movie. I think it really, really captured the essence of that book. Again, the relationship between a child and a wild animal. Caleb Deschanel shot The Black Stallion.”

“Another movie that I absolutely love is In the Heat of the Night. And I just watched it again recently, and it is one of the great, great performances of Sidney Poitier. And of course, the moment in the movie is when he slaps. Rod Steiger plays the police. There’s one moment at the very end that I wished hadn’t happened. When Sidney Poitier gets back on the train and he looks back at Steiger, he smiles. And when I last saw it, I thought, 'He shouldn’t have smiled.'”

“In The Comfort of Strangers, Chris Walken, Natasha Richardson, Rupert Everett, Helen Mirren. Gosh, I gotta watch this again. But I remember this moment: out of the blue, Chris Walken, with all his might, punches Rupert Everett in the stomach, and it’s like, 'Oh!' And it’s so powerful. It’s so shocking. Watch it. And that moment will either shock you or you’ve gotten so inured that it won’t shock you. But it certainly shocked me.”

“Oh, I’ve got Big Chill here. The Big Chill was my second movie. Larry Kasdan, this incredible cast. And the unusual thing was that we rehearsed for a whole month. And we would riff, we would sometimes change parts, we certainly talked about everybody. And that was such a luxury. Nobody did that at that time. Rehearse for a month? It was unheard of. But what Larry was trying to formulate with all of us was a sense of long-term friendship.”

“Images that stay in your mind forever: Amarcord, a Fellini movie. In Montana, where I live, there are cottonwood trees, and in spring, it’s like cotton is flowing through the air. It’s kind of an amazing… And it gathers in the streets and there is, at certain times in Amarcord, that same thing of floating cotton in the air. There’s also another incredible image of a peacock on a wall in the snow. A movie full of images that just communicate in a way beyond words.”

“I also remember vividly, and will always remember vividly, this, Women in Love, that he was in. There’s a famous, famous wrestling match: Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, naked, in front of a fireplace, wrestling. There’s also a very famous – again, the images that stay in your mind – of eating figs, and it was incredibly sexual and nothing had to be said. It was just eating a fig. So if you haven’t seen Women in Love, you should.”

“Cries and Whispers is one of them, because I remember the scene… My memory is it’s mostly of this woman’s face and she’s basically mutilating herself. I remember thinking, 'I can’t sit in this seat. I can’t stay in this theater.' I did stay and I watched till the end of the movie, but, wow. And what a wonderful job of direction and acting, of course, of cinematography, because it went straight to my throat, to my heart, to my gut. A gift from Ingmar Bergman.”

“I started watching movies, I think, in the late ’50s, where you could go down to the library on main street in Greenwich, and that’s the first time I saw a movie called White Mane. And it’s actually in the Criterion Collection, along with The Red Balloon. A little boy on a white stallion being chased and they end up… I don’t know if I should tell you the ending. It’s in France, in the Camargue, and they end up going into the ocean and just swimming away.”