Three Films by Luis Buñuel

“Back to that notion of power, I feel like somebody who’s really always poked fun at it and done a great job of exploring it with humor and surrealism is Luis Buñuel, and there’s a Buñuel set of three films: Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire, all in one set. I’m going to get that and have my mind blown again.”

“Look at these two. Okay. Look at these two. One of the reason I become director, because I work in cinema from six years old, you know. I went to a school late, nine years old. I never know what is school, but I work in cinema in the projection and this and clean the, you know, cinema after the people leaving. But the first time I see the one photo, Buñuel is coming, I think it's maybe early '60s or something, come to America and he's a little bit old and he's sitting here, Hitchcock here, Billy Wilder here, Robert Wise here, everybody looking to him, look like God. He's shooting these days almost maybe eight days, one week, two weeks, three weeks. He doesn't have a patience to do it more than that, and he make it miracle in the set. The people look into him, yes, they do anything he wants.”

“Viridiana of Buñuel, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie of Buñuel, which I think would be the perfect title for my new feature film, Force Majeure. It should have actually had a name of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”

“Oh, my favorite filmmaker ever. I couldn’t leave him out, Luis Buñuel. It’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire. I mean, I watch them often. And I guess Phantom of Liberty was quite inspiring for Kinds of Kindness, the structure of the three different films that are not necessarily related. And this looks like a bargain. There we go.”

“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In fact, I like that, but I've got three films here, and The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire. Now, Serge Silberman, who was my inspiration as a producer when I was growing up as a young producer, I was looking at this man, and then I met him, and he gave me advice, you know, and he said to me, "Jeremy, you can only do well by using your own taste in choosing your projects. Never let anybody else choose your projects for you." And that was a very, very good piece of advice from this wonderful man.”

“Yes, and I was, it just appeared. Okay, the Luis Buñuel collection. The stuff he threw out, the dramaturgy, the craziness, the, you know, just the concepts that he was talking about, it's so sophisticated and modern, and yet with a lot of humor and a lot of intelligence as well, you know? And so this collection has The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, El discreto encanto de la burguesía, which is perhaps one of the best titles ever. I never got to know Buñuel, of course. I was very young when he passed away, and but I got to know really well Jean-Claude Carrière, and the screenwriter of these films, but also the screenwriter of many others. And he was such a mentor and such a wonderful person that we could spend nights doing... This is that he knows a lot of the, I mean, he must have known over a hundred corridos from the revolution in Mexico, and nobody would expect that because he spoke many languages and he was like interested in many, many things. But through the corridos and the way he sang them, it was amazing. And I don't know if there's a there's a record of him singing them because he also has such a great deep voice, you know, and he would sing them in such a beautiful way. So I miss him and I think he the things he told me about cinema and, you know, the support as well and supporting me as a director also with the stuff I've done and hopefully the stuff I will do, he was really, really helpful and really encouraging. So I mean, such a genius. This is how it ends, with Luis Buñuel, the best director by far. I mean, yeah. Gracias.”

“Recently Criterion had a 50% off sale and I took that opportunity to grab the three films package of his.”

“This is amazing. Three Films by Luis Buñuel. For me, the reason that Buñuel’s films work so effectively is that they don’t look weird. They don’t have that kind of Lynchian, dreamlike cinematography. They look very straightforward, which makes it so much stranger when a family sits around on toilets, talking about politics and things like that, and when they go to the bathroom to eat their dinner. Phantom of Liberty and Discreet Charm, two of my absolute favorite movies ever.”

“This is my lovely director, Luis Buñuel. It’s very difficult to read. It’s really not easy to understand his statement in his films. And from the other side, he’s very, very easy and his films are very simple. And I’m a friend with Arturo Ripstein. He was… first AD for Angel Exterminator.”