Zoe Kazan

“I love Spike Lee. Spike Lee is, like, the patron saint of the neighborhood that I live in. I live in his neighborhood. Malcolm X and Bamboozled are my two favorites of his films. This performance is just unparalleled.”

“And this movie, I saw in college for the first time, and what he’s doing with genre here is so fascinating, what he’s doing with the history of Black people in white entertainment and then also the history of Black people’s self-generated Black entertainment and the intersection of those two things. I love art that makes the viewer aware of themselves in a different way, and I just can’t recommend Bamboozled more highly.”

“Paul always makes fun of me because– My partner, Paul, always makes fun of me because, like, I’ll often… Someone will bring something up and I’m like, “That’s my favorite movie.” And he’s like, “You say that about, like, 100, 200 movies.” It’s true. But this is one of my more recent favorites: Petite maman. It’s like a… a very intense piece of chocolate or something. It packs so much in. And it literally will take you as much time as it takes you to watch the average episode of television. I also read this piece about Céline Sciamma and one of the things that she said is that she makes a list of all the scenes that she needs to tell the story, and then a list of all the sort of, like, inchoate images, songs, moments that she knows that she needs at, like, a psychic level to tell the story, and she sort of does it like a word finder and matches them up afterwards. And then anything that doesn’t have one of those delicious bits attached to it, she just cuts and doesn’t film, which I find… or even write, which I find completely fascinating. So, watch this.”

“Koko: A Talking Gorilla, a film by Barbet Schroeder. So Barbet Schroeder was an adult in my life when I was a child. He directed a film that my father wrote called Reversal of Fortune, and he used to come over to my house and wear my tutu and let me put makeup on him, and was just a complete delight to have as an adult around when I was a child. Because we knew Barbet, my parents showed me this when I was very little, and I completely fell in love with Koko. And I recommend it. I think it’s also great for kids.”

“All right, Personal Shopper. I cannot stress enough what a life-changing experience I had going to the movies and seeing this. Now I’m a spooky girl who grew up, like, seeing ghosts and believing in the unknowable parts of life. And this traffics in that. But it’s also this rumination on loneliness and on what is terrifying about being a woman. And Kristen Stewart is extraordinary in it, and her relationship to the camera in it is really interesting. Highly recommend.”

“Pandora’s Box. I love this film. It is silent. Please don’t let that scare you, if you are not a person who watches silent films. What Louise Brooks does in this film is unparalleled. This is about a woman who does what she needs to do to get by. Through her interactions with men, we see the kind of kaleidoscopic portrait of who she might be or might have been if she hadn’t… if she didn’t have to please men in order to get by. Especially if you love performance, it’s worth watching. And then she wrote a beautiful book about her life, which is really worth reading.”

“It Happened One Night. Watching this film with my parents is one of my earliest childhood memories, and the image of Claudette Colbert jumping off of the yacht is, like, one of the first things I remembered. And then they rented it again, probably, like, eight years later when I was, like, ten or something, and it was like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen, I was like, “Oh! That’s what that’s from.” Anyways, it’s just delightful and I love a romantic comedy, so.”

“Notorious is one of the first films that my parents bought on laserdisc. We watched Rebecca first, which was another one they bought on laserdisc, which is right next to it. But when I saw Notorious, my mind was blown. I think it’s one of the great film performances of all time. Love this.”

“We watched Rebecca first, which was another one they bought on laserdisc, which is right next to it. But when I saw Notorious, my mind was blown. I think it’s one of the great film performances of all time. Love this. Love Rebecca.”

“Then as a teenager I saw In the Mood for Love. I’ve felt this way since I was a kid, I don’t really care about seeing people kiss on screen. What I care about is people wanting to kiss each other on screen, the moments before people kiss on screen. This one speaks for itself. Everyone loves this. I’m not the first person to pull this in this Closet, but I have to.”

“Then I saw Don’t Look Now when I was 16, maybe 17. My dad loved scary movies, and I grew up being the most afraid child of all time. Some switch flipped and I started to be curious about how scared I was and it led me here. It’s one of the sexiest films of all time. It’s one of the saddest films of all time. The direction, the sense of something happening both at the surface and also deep underneath it. It’s so much a film about what’s unseeable, too. Anyways.”

“In college, I obsessively watched When We Were Kings. It was the way that I bigged myself up for anything that was hard. I love being allowed to enter into a different time. This is a time capsule. It’s a portrait of an artist. I love it.”

“In my 20s, with my partner, Paul, I saw both of these for the first time. All That Jazz, Brief Encounter, Notorious, these are, like, top-five films for me. I love these two middle-aged people falling in love. There’s something really quotidian about the way that they love each other, even though they are not allowed, because they’re having an affair, to have anything quotidian between them. They exist only in stolen spaces. There’s no dailyness to their life.”

“And I love Still Walking. Still Walking was a movie that Paul was shown in a film class that he took in college. He showed it to me for the first time and it was like… it was like I had waited my whole life to see this movie. The way that this film reaches out in the most generous possible way to any viewer that might encounter it. I really, really love it, and it’s very sensual and it’s very simple, and it’s so much about what isn’t being said.”

“I’m going to end with Wildlife. Paul and I had been together maybe six years when he found Richard Ford’s book Wildlife. He started adapting it on his own, and then he asked me to read his script, and I was like, “I don’t know how to give you notes on this. I think I just have to rewrite you,” which is terrible of me. But this is a book that is told through the child’s perspective. He’s looking at his own parents. His mother is unknowable to him, and I think I felt this surge of protectiveness for her, where I felt like I wanted to understand her in a way that her son could not. And even though our film is told from his perspective, I felt like, actor to actor, I had to provide an actress with a roadmap that was full of understanding and not just mystery. Our dear friend Carey Mulligan I think gives one of the performances of her career in this. Jake Gyllenhaal’s also really special, and this kid, Ed Oxenbould, who is an Australian… at this time teenager. I’m really proud of this. So it’s deeply meaningful to us to have this film in this company, and, you know, I think that there’s something really relatable here, so maybe watch it. But, also, I’m just glad it’s here. I have enough copies of this, though.”