Tunde Adebimpe

“Fellini’s 8½. If you’ve ever had an idea and you’re on a timeline and lots of people are waiting for you to finish the idea, just watch this, because it’ll give you the extra anxiety that you need to either procrastinate more or to put a fire under you, because it’s tense. There’s a lot of tension. Beautiful, surreal tension.”

“True Stories. I love when a visual artist-slash-musician makes a film. This, I feel, is a very personal expression, and it looks like David Byrne sounds. And there are a couple videos that came out of here, like the video for the song “Wild Life” came out of here. That was one of the first things I saw on MTV, where I was… it kind of shaped my opinion of who I wanted to be around and what I wanted to do. I highly, highly recommend True Stories.”

“Black Girl by Ousmane Sembène. And he’s a Senegalese director. And I love this movie because it tells a very good story of the… the difficulty in the life of somebody coming from their country to the… the country that colonized that country. And it’s just beautifully shot. It’s… It’s one of my favorites.”

“So, yes, this is Pariah by Dee Rees and it stars one of my favorite actors. It’s Adepero Oduye, who’s also of Nigerian descent, which I’m also fully behind all the time. Also, Bradford Young shot this, and I don’t know if it’s the first thing Bradford did, but Bradford is now, you know, top tier legend among cinematographers. So this is a altogether great thing to have.”

“Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme, which is one of my favorite films. I had the great opportunity to work with Jonathan Demme in a movie called Rachel Getting Married, and it’s one of the best experiences of my life. And he was great and, just in my experience, a really– a good dude who is missed. So grabbing Silence of the Lambs for JD.”

“This is Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. And I would get every Kurosawa movie in here if I could, but this particularly, I guess is a late Kurosawa movie, and it’s so colorful and playful and has Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh. And I saw the storyboards for this in a book that was published I don’t know how long after, but Kurosawa can draw. And I think that anybody who… You know, it’s not everybody, but I like directors that can draw a little bit, and he can draw a lot. All right. You’re mine....”

“Okay, and here we have By Brakhage, and this is An Anthology. This is Anthology: Volume Two. I just– I love someone who’s going to take a… take a roll of film, shoot on it, and then scrape it up and draw on it and freak it around. Very punk rock to me, Stan Brakhage.”

“I’m going to pick this up. So this is Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975. And this is great because I was going to try to get a couple of these. Attack All Monsters was the one that I liked because it has all the monsters in it. But this is fantastic. I just got shown this and I want it. And someone… An illustrator I really admire, Yuko Shimizu, did the cover for this, and it’s great. I can’t wait to get into it.”