director
“Mishima by Paul Schrader. That's one of my all-time favorites. It's made I think 30 years ago. It's about Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer. And it's a strange blend of almost a documentation of a life blended with art. And I think it's structurally one of the most sophisticated films ever written and shot.”
“All That Jazz. Bob Fosse.”
“High and Low by Kurosawa. High and Low by Kurosawa to me is like the perfect entertainment film. It's a great chase, three acts, a perfect script, a sense of a film being allowed to be different things yet very developing in its dramaturgy.”
“Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage. I know this for a fact was on Ingmar Bergman's top 10 list. Swedish silent classic. It's an experimental film again with structure. There's Dreams within Dreams and ghosts within reality and it's very imaginative and it's very ambitious about pushing the silent film into different corners to imagine what cinema could be.”
Picked without comment
“White Material. Claire Denis. Claire Denis is someone that meant a lot. I think Claire Denis has helped my generation of filmmakers develop a sense of mise-en-scène, her way of using handheld with her cinematographer Agnès Godard has been very inspiring to me and many people I know and this has the lovely Isabelle Huppert who I've been fortunate enough to work with myself in the lead.”
“The master, the master. Okay. I haven't pulled down a Tarkovsky yet, you know.”
“Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. Goodness, film history is so cruel. I remember having the Guinness Book of World Records as a kid and reading this title Heaven's Gate is like the biggest flop of all time or something. And it's a great film. It's a really great film.”
“The Jan Troell's, The Emigrants, and The New Land. It's a great film that made me understand something fundamental about America as European.”
“This girl ran away with my copy of La Jetée and Sans Soleil a few years ago and I think I need another copy.”
“Jacques Demy. I want the box.”
“Oh, the Agnès Varda box.”
“Eric Rohmer box. Eric Rohmer. The fantastic thing about Eric Rohmer is he's so subtle. It's hard to kind of pitch him, which is often the quality of good cinema. It's hard to explain. You got to see it. There's something so seemingly subtle and everyday about his movies, yet they are always very precise in their depiction of humans and their strange endeavors.”
