“The last little story I have, revolves around this movie, Tales of Hoffmann. Let's see, I had a girlfriend, like, mid-2000s, we were both obsessed with the Criterion Collection, and, there was this video, store, like a chain called Hollywood Video, they were going out of business. And so I thought, wow, like they're selling off all the Criterion DVDs, like, super cheap, like we got to go get, like, all of them. So what we did is, like, we went together and went, like, all around town and bought, like, as many Criterion DVDs as we could get. And, like, each, like, store had, like, different ones, it'd be like, cool, like we found Picnic at Hanging Rock or we found Diabolique, but I found my favorite movie then, from Criterion, The Red Shoes. But I've always wanted this one because this is the follow-up to The Red Shoes, and I consider The Red Shoes ballet like the most beautiful sequence in film. That when I first saw that sequence, it like moved me to tears, it was so beautiful. And I think they thought, like, hey, like that was so great, why don't we do, like, a whole movie like that? And so The Tales of Hoffmann is pretty much just like, hey, let's do The Red Shoes ballet, but like a bunch of them, and it's pretty wild. And I've actually never had this, like always wanted it, it was like elusive. And so it feels like cosmic that I'm finally getting it now, like today at the actual Criterion Closet.”
