Paul Giamatti

“I see right off the bat is something that I love very much which is the movie Carnival of Souls. I love this movie. It's the first movie I ever remember seeing when I was 4 years old... It scared the crap out of me and I think I didn't sleep for maybe a year. It's probably only a few days but it felt like a year and my parents never hired that babysitter again but it was an amazing experience and it's an amazing movie.”

“I see another wonderful movie here that I love very much, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It has a wonderful actor in it that I love very much named Anton Walbrook... This has an incredible sequence in the middle of it that I love very much where this British soldier is challenged to a duel by a German soldier and this is great sequence that builds up to this wonderful duel. It's a very funny movie, it's a very moving movie, it's a big expansive sort of epic movie.”

“Rashomon, it's the only movie that makes me cry when I see it. It's hard to make me cry, it's like blood from a stone with me, but this movie for some reason at the end the very sort of poetic ending comes out of Nowhere and it's a really beautiful movie and at the end of it always gets me.”

“Solaris. I'm a great admirer of the guy who wrote the book it's based on, Stanislaw Lem, Polish science fiction writer... I revisited it and came to love it very much. Love all of his movies but I like this one in particular and this fantastic sort of production design of kind of a crappy spaceship that they all live on. I often wonder how I feel about the very final shot of this movie which I won't give away but I sometimes feel like maybe it wasn't necessary.”

“I love these movies. I'm a big fan of these Val Lewton horror movies. Cat People. There was a sequel to it, he was a producer, this guy Val Lewton made this series of movies... I love these movies because they're very low-budget and they're this amazing example of doing all this extraordinary stuff with absolutely nothing and creating these incredibly scary effects in them... They're strange too, it all feels very sort of unreal and dreamlike.”

“This is also one of my favorite movies. I'm a big fan of Frankenheimer's movies... One of the things I really love about this movie is it's one of the greatest examples of what a terrific actor can do in a small tiny supporting part. There's an actor named Murray Hamilton in it who played the mayor in Jaws and he appears in the end of this movie for two minutes maybe not even and he barely speaks and it's one of my favorite performances in any movie.”

“This is the movie that I think for better or worse kind of really pushed me over the edge and made me go I want to be an actor... It has this kind of very great simple kind of noir story to it... I get so caught up in all the wonderful detail and the wonderful acting in it and it's got probably my favorite Performance in any movie, I would say Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in this movie. He achieved something just off the charts amazing.”

“This woman Larisa Shepitko. I've only seen this movie Wings, but Wings is an amazing movie. It's beautiful movie and this fantastic actress in it plays a kind of Soviet hero of the Soviet Air Force... There's incredible sort of poetry in it, there's all this great way she uses the flying in it and stuff to talk about this woman's interior life and it's really a beautiful movie but I've never seen the other movie she made so I guess now's my time.”