Mitski

“The first movie I'm going to bring up is... Daisies. So my family moved around a lot, but in seventh grade for one year we lived in a place where I could walk to a video rental store. They had Daisies, and I knew nothing about this movie. I just watched it as a seventh grade girl and it blew my mind. I was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen. I felt like so much freedom, I felt so absurd in the best way. Daisies was my very first experience of the Czechoslovak New Wave.”

“Moonstruck. I mean, this is one of the greatest films of all time, but for me it's significant because it was the movie that started my journey of Nicolas Cage fandom. When I first saw him on screen in Moonstruck, I was like, is this a god? Who is this? This man is so, like, looks unlike anyone else I've ever seen, so magnetic. I still believe that he's someone who is meant to be on screen. He has described his acting style as 'nouveau shamanism'. I think of it as like dream acting.”

“For millennials and older, a big experience in the household was that you had a certain amount of videos and you just watched those over and over and over again. So Breakfast Club was one of those videos. And I first watched it before first grade, way too early. I didn't understand most of it, I didn't know what a hot beef injection was, but I could recite it over and over. So thank you to The Breakfast Club for creating a part of my mind.”

“Next one is The Piano Teacher. I can't do every Haneke movie, but this one was right in my Q zone. This one, I watched it during a formative time when I was a teenager, and it hit me right when I was in my phase of like cold repressed sexuality. This film has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard. The use of music is so perfect in this, the Chopin, the Schubert, everything. And Isabelle Huppert is one of the best actresses, if not the best.”

“My Own Private Idaho. I think again, I watched a lot of art films way too young. And this is definitely not for children, but I remember I think it was one of my first experiences of like unconventional directing and acting. I still remember the scene where the actors are like staying still, and it opened my mind to so many different possibilities. Like, I thought movies were one thing, and then I watched this and I was like, movies are a lot of different things.”