A Matter of Life and Death

“This is one of the films by a great duo of filmmakers, Powell and Pressburger. They’re English. And this one was also known as Stairway to Heaven. And it’s, again, fairly surreal, but in… as is their wont, it’s also very sentimental. It’s a World War Two pilot whose plane gets shot down. Unlike the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, he says, “These are extenuating circumstances. I’ve fallen in love. You have to let me live.” I believe the earth is in color and heaven’s in black and white.”

“A Matter of Life and Death is also, oh my God, this is one of the best movies I ever saw in my life. It's a tale of love poetry, a story about the war like a romantic tale for lovers.”

“Now A Matter of Life and Death, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I was fortunate enough to get to know Michael Powell towards the end of his life. He was very helpful to me, something of a mentor. I told him A Matter of Life and Death was my favorite of his films and he said, 'But it is my favorite too.' And it is extraordinarily well written by Pressburger. It's in a way a courtroom drama about history and about the relationship and the influences of Europe on America and vice versa.”

“A Matter of Life and Death. Initially in Janet Planet we were going to have a character disappear on screen and we were obsessed with how to do it. I kept watching the disappearances in this movie on the Criterion Channel and sending them to you and you would calculate how many frames the disappearance was. There's just something about the way that Powell and Pressburger films look. Their cinematographer Jack Cardiff was incredible. There's some scene where the fog lifts and it's so trippy.”

“Matter of Life and Death. Okay, so Powell and Pressburger, they managed to embrace the surreal and the avant-garde and still make something accessible and popular. And that is such a hard thing to pull off. And they do it so well. But A Matter of Life and Death is wonderful. David Niven. Funny, witty. Deals with mortality and love in a fun way. I love them for that. This film in particular is a great one that deserves repeated viewing.”