Karyn Kusama

“I really wanted Visconti’s The Damned because I wanted to see his approach to notions of decadence, ambition. I love a lot of his movies, and I’ve heard this is a beautiful edition. So I’m going to take this one.”

“The other thing I want to do is address some of my favorite women who make movies, and I was really excited to see that Martha Coolidge’s drama, docu-drama Not a Pretty Picture is in the Collection now. She’s a real hero of mine. She made a movie called Valley Girl that is probably a desert island top five for me. And I’m really excited to see that this is her first foray into filmmaking and to personal filmmaking, and I can’t wait to see what she did with it.”

“And on that note, I’m also going to take Chilly Scenes of Winter, Joan Micklin Silver. I just think she was one of the names when I was a kid that I heard as a filmmaker, and hearing her name, hearing Martha Coolidge’s name, it gave me permission to imagine that I could do this too.”

“I really am excited for the new edition of No Country for Old Men. This film is I think kind of revolutionary for a bunch of reasons, and the way that it took a sense of genre filmmaking and kind of mashed it up – crime thriller, horror almost, psychological drama – and then really brought it to mainstream audiences. I’m very excited for this edition and imagine it looks really beautiful.”

“I was really excited to see that Criterion released Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight. And there was something about the idea of this movie that feels so relevant today, this idea of casual misogyny needing to be interrogated by men themselves, that, in this case, it’s not Lili Taylor’s character who has to do the work of explaining herself to him, it’s this kid played by River Phoenix who has to do the work of recognizing something in himself.”

“Back to that notion of power, I feel like somebody who’s really always poked fun at it and done a great job of exploring it with humor and surrealism is Luis Buñuel, and there’s a Buñuel set of three films: Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire, all in one set. I’m going to get that and have my mind blown again.”

“I also was curious about some of the Eclipse series. One of them that I had my eye on was the Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu, and it’s got Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn, and The End of Summer. I’ve seen some of these recently on the big screen, restored, as part of a retrospective at the Academy Museum in LA, and the color work is so shockingly beautiful, so to have these in my collection is going to be really meaningful.”

“And finally the last thing I am really excited to bring home is The Qatsi Trilogy. I have such powerful memories as a young person seeing Koyaanisqatsi in the theater, like it was a regular movie at the multiplex. And then Powaqqatsi, I have such a powerful memory of it. And I never got to see the third film. So I’m excited for The Qatsi Trilogy.”