“These are a group of films I’ve not seen, Josef von Sternberg: Underworld, The Last Command, and The Docks of New York. I love Josef von Sternberg, and I love Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. I don’t think she’s in any of these, but that German expressionist aesthetic, the way of the shadow, the early photography, it was just such an important benchmark in underground dreaming. The glass ceiling of the technology gave us a window, gave us an opportunity to explore a very specific aesthetic that was particularly beautiful, that celluloid aesthetic, and the way that black-and-white film received light and expressed it.”
