Mary Harron

“Naked City. It sort of relates to stuff that I love like Sam Fuller and kind of really great B-movie stuff of the you know 40s, 50s and 60s.”

“My favorite John Cassavetes film is Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I look at it over and over for the way he filmed this. It's so present and real and there's an amazing scene in a back room of a restaurant where something bad is about to happen and the way it's filmed is incredible.”

“Oh, great. Sid and Nancy. I knew Nancy not well, but I knew her a little bit, and I knew Alex Cox because we were at college together., this is a great movie.”

“Mala Noche. I think Gus Van Sant's work in the 80s had a big effect on me. I think this and then seeing Drugstore Cowboy just told me that there was a different way to make films outside of Hollywood and outside of the classic films that I loved. This was happening now and it was really unsentimental and quite harsh and it was a different way of making a movie.”

“This is a really underrated movie, Lost Highway. It's got a lot of sort of 40s Noir femme fatale mythology in it, but it also has this crazy metal soundtrack. I really like the way David Lynch captures the world of Dreams, the complete disorientation of suddenly you're in one place and then the other. People minded the way it jumped around and people changed identity, but you know, that's the life that you have every night in Dreams.”

“This is My Man Godfrey. It's the wonderful Carole Lombard and it's set in the Depression. There's just a lot of fantastic rapid-fire 30s comedy. A lot of the time when I'm trying to direct people, the main piece of direction I give usually is 'do it faster.' Sometimes I say 'do it like 30s comedy, just rapid fire,' because comedy is pace and they knew that. I just love that.”