Griffin Dunne

“This is one of the great, one of the really great screwball comedies, The Awful Truth. Irene Dunne, Cary Grant. Irene Dunne spells her name the same way as mine, Griffin Dunne. And she was married to a guy named Dr. Griffin. Go figure. It’s about as great as it gets. Leo McCarey. I wish I was in it.”

“This is one of the most intense war movies, World War II. Come and See. Beautiful artwork, by the way, Criterion. You’re capturing just the horror that exists in this war, of the Germans just plowing through these peasant villages. It’s so intense and so brilliant. And again, great art.”

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller is my favorite Altman movie. This… Warren Beatty, Julie Christie. Opium dens, nineteenth-century prostitution, hard drinking, gunfights, and at the center a beautiful love story.”

“All right, this is one of… It’s a very troubling movie called In a Lonely Place. Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame. Nicholas Ray directed it. It’s a very dark movie about Hollywood, about a screenwriter, about a man who has a malevolence about him in Bogie’s Performance. And it’s set in a… in an apartment complex that I happened to live in when I was working in Los Angeles four years ago.”

“Oh, yeah. Gotta get that. Okay, this is Taste of Cherry. You know, I’ve been seeing a… I’ve been seeing a woman, she’s one of the great cineastes of all time, for a couple of years now. And one of the very first conversations we had was, “What are your favorite movies?” This came up. And we’re still together. It’s about suicide, but it’s about life. It’s about the reaffirmation of life.”

“Antonioni’s La notte. This is all in one night, is just… even the actors don’t know what’s going to happen next. And rain pours out of the sky. And it’s just mood. Mood. And it’s set in Milan, and parties that are just sort of empty, and the relationship of this marriage at the core of it is empty, and it’s desperately sad, but also quite beautiful, and has an incredible ending that is very controversial and very true.”