Stellan Skarsgård

“I can take The Seven Samurai? Because that was the first Akira Kurosawa film I saw. And I’ve shown it to all my children. I think they have to know it. If they want to see violence properly made, they see that.”

“La strada. It’s… It is Fellini at his best before he just started to float out all over the place. He’s fine, even if he floats out.”

“Naked, is that the…? Yeah, it’s a Mike Leigh film with my lovely actress Katrin Cartlidge, who died unfortunately very young, but she was fantastic in that film.”

“City Lights. I love melodrama, but not when it’s… I hate sentimentality. So I never cry. I mostly throw up when I get to sentimental films. But I love melodrama as a structure because if it is truthful, or I think it’s truthful, then it works fantastically for me. The end scene of this film, I cry every time and I can’t help it, you know. It’s fantastic.”

“One of my favorite French films from the wartime is Les Enfants du paradis, Children of Paradise, with Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Herrand. There’s a scene in this film where Jean-Louis Barrault... He’s a mime... He sees Arletty and Pierre Brasseur, and he understands immediately they have an affair. And he’s still performing, and he’s got a smile on his face, but it cracks, and his white makeup cracks in that moment. It’s always about showing the crack and what happens behind the makeup.”

“And this, what is this? It’s the fat one. Cassavetes. That’s the Birth of the modern cinema, really.”