Matt Dillon

“Touki Bouki, which I just saw recently, which is really an amazing film. I just shot a film with Claire Denis in… in Senegal, and this was a film made in Senegal, and very modern, really interesting. You kind of get the feeling that they’re kind of discovering the film as they’re going along, and that’s really special. And so I’m going to watch this one again.”

“That brings me to Claire. This is one of my favorites of Claire’s: White Material. And it stars Isabelle Huppert, among others. And it’s interesting because the film that I did with Claire recently was a play by a really, really interesting playwright named Bernard-Marie Koltès, who was originally slated to write this film. But that didn’t happen. But this is a really interesting, really interesting film shot in Cameroon.”

“This is a film that’s really a must. And it’s… It’s Memories of Underdevelopment, and it’s a Cuban film. And I saw this film actually before I took my first trip to Havana, back in the very early ’90s. And if you want to see what was happening post-revolution, this is really great, and it’s sort of a mix of… It’s a narrative, but also with elements of vérité, archival footage. It’s very powerful, and it’s one of my favorites.”

“Okay, Thelma Ritter, Pickup on South Street. Classic by Sam Fuller. Sam Fuller’s a hero to me. And this is a great. Pickup on South Street.”

“That’s great. I didn’t know that Drugstore Cowboy, that they had put it on DVD at the Criterion Collection. This was really great. I’m happy to see that. I really like that poster. I think Gus would like that, too, because he’s really into the hats. “No hats on beds.”...”

“So, Wages of Fear is really a favorite of mine. It’s a film where the characters and the atmosphere are really powerful. And they later remade the film. William Friedkin remade the film into Sorcerer, which is also really good. It made me think of something that he said when I was talking to him about it. He said, “The greatest location is the human face,” which, I have to say, I couldn’t argue with that.”

“Okay, this is fantastic. Now, going back to Friedkin’s “the greatest location is the human face,” this is something that Pasolini understood. Accattone is a masterpiece. I mean, I think it’s as good as any Italian film I’ve seen from the ’60s, and that’s saying quite a bit because there’s so much great cinema from the ’50s, ’60s, and, yeah, this is…...”