Jane Schoenbrun

“Bamboozled, probably the best movie about television ever made.”

“Spike Lee double feature. Malcolm X, best biopic ever made.”

“Victor Erice's El Sur. Second film, maybe not as well known as his first film which is equally beautiful, The Spirit of the Beehive. Honestly every film he's ever made is one of the best films in cinema history. This film is gorgeous. Along with Spirit of the Beehive, these two movies taught me how to film people watching, which is such a huge part of my own cinematic language.”

“Peeping Tom. When I was working on I Saw the TV Glow, a lot of people told me that I was sort of operating against like a century of film history where the protagonist being a loner, not able to look you in the eye, weird guy. In my film that character acts this way, I'd say risking spoilers, because of queerness. And so revisiting these films and thinking about them through the lens of queerness is always something that I'm really interested in.”

“Werckmeister Harmonies. I watch Béla Tarr films when I have the flu because they make you feel bad in the way that having the flu makes you feel bad. And sometimes when you're feeling bad, turning on a movie that's going to just meet you right there is about all you can ask for.”

“My dear friend Angel asked me to get them Autumn Sonata. Angel's my queer family. I spend most nights at Angel's House watching movies on their couch and I told them I was going to bring them home a Criterion that we could all watch and so here is Autumn Sonata for Angel.”

“The Grand Budapest Hotel, maybe becoming my favorite Wes Anderson movie. I was obsessed with Wes Anderson in high school. I don't think there are any American filmmakers out there who are building their own language and have been doing it for as long as he has and as beautifully as he has. I feel like this is the movie where his style starts becoming obsessed with nesting doll storytelling until the film itself is almost this hyper elaborate and beautiful nesting doll of a world.”

“I like thinking about David Lynch before he was David Lynch, when he was just some dude in a warehouse using all of his savings and essentially abandoning his family to make a movie that at the time I can't imagine that too many people understood. Filmmaking is an act of faith and I think it's beautiful to imagine someone like Lynch putting it all on the line to make something as insane as his first feature film, Eraserhead.”

“Got to go for the box sets. I've wanted this forever. I love Jacques Tati and honestly, the more I make films, the more I am just in love with any film that feels like it was just sculpted as its own universe. I rewatched PlayTime recently and it's almost like a music video before music videos existed. It's so ambitious and so gorgeous. So I'm very happy to have now my complete Tati.”