Volker Schlöndorff

“Eclipse, the very first, next to my first movie. Eclipse is the one I wanted to have, that's what I came for. And as it is sitting next to Young Törless, it makes it even nicer, isn't it an honor? Well, you see, the Eclipse is really the one why I came for, and isn't it magical that you come in there, hundreds of them, and the first one I see where I stop is the Eclipse. I might just as well leave right now. But I'm very happy with L'Eclisse and All That Jazz.”

“I'm proud because I see a few of my own. The Coup de Grâce, again with Margarethe von Trotta.”

“I'd like to have All That Jazz because when we were shooting Circle of Deceit in Beirut, once a week we got dailies sent from the lab in Paris and we went to a still working local cinema in the mid of the Civil War and all the time they were playing All That Jazz. It became like our leitmotif during the shoot: 'Bye-bye Happiness, I think I'm going to die,' which was exactly how we felt like often.”

“I'm glad you have Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder's film. They tried all kind of titles. I thought the last release was called The Big Carnival.”

“And the pharmacy in the province, in the French province, like Le Havre. Another great one about the French province. Actually, maybe the French movies set not in Paris, maybe even better than the ones set in Paris. More authentic. Certainly true of French novels like Stendhal.”

“I have to start with Boyhood because it was somehow so unexpected and was so wonderful. A miracle of a movie. How could he in the casting, especially with the boy, have the intuition that 10 years or 14 years later this boy would still be wonderful? And same with Arquette and everybody else. Hawke is just fabulous to see people really age on screen, no fake makeup, and still remain in their character. A miracle of a movie.”

“By Claude Chabrol. I remember the very first screening of this in the grand auditorium of the Sorbonne. It was the first film of the Nouvelle Vague. Actually, I, at the time working with Jean-Pierre Melville, I thought it was a bit amateurish and they didn't quite understand how great it was just because of that. Wonderful.”