Alden Ehrenreich

“Midnight Cowboy to me is sort of like the Mona Lisa, like Midnight Cowboy is the most beautiful movie from a cinematic standpoint. John Schlesinger, and it's somebody who's not from New York coming to the New York of 1968 or '69 and like filming it in its most sort of absurd, weird, dirty version of itself, and then inside of it are these like really extreme characters, but filled completely with such great performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, who are bring so much emotion and depth to something that could otherwise be sort of like a fascinate, like a novelty piece about these weird guys and all their, or almost like making fun of them. I feel like the version of this now would almost have like more of a satirical slant to it. And it's a miracle of a movie and was rated X and is important and is really great and I love it a lot.”

“Oh, Destry Rides Again. It's Jimmy Stewart, who's like probably my favorite actor, and Marlene Dietrich, and that alone, if you know what like their energies are, is a weird enough combination that it just makes the whole movie so wild. And there's these great fight scenes with Marlene Dietrich and I forget who the other actress is, like brawls, but Jimmy Stewart's just the most beautiful person on screen and there's this like heart and, fear and rage and just kind of everything. And, and, and so this is like a Western that's a old Hollywood studio system Western, but has just a weird other energy to it that I can't really describe, but it feels like there's something just really unique and special about it.”

“Okay, His Girl Friday, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Pre-Stanislavskian acting taking over movies, pre-Brando movie. One thing I think about with this movie is the power of having actors who are that good with really kind of stage acting, in the sense that they're able to sustain takes for 10 minutes and stay on, and actors with that level of craft, but who, who are still very real inside of that and have to do, you know, crazy, crazy technical things and pull the hat down and then throw the cigarette over to the other side of the room and say the line right at the same time. And it's just, magnificent. And, you know, I think that having really good actors in your movie is really important because then you can cut differently.”

“Yi Yi, where'd it be, Yi Yi? Here we go, Yi Yi, Edward Yang. His, eye for these little moments with children or families or turning points in people's lives or sorrows, it's not just beautiful things, it's also the sad things that people go through. It's all shown in this really gorgeous way, almost a little like Wings of Desire, where it feels almost like somebody is outside of life or there's like, an angel or something watching life itself and all of its, I want to say enumerations, but I think that's probably the wrong word, so all its different colors.”

“My final pick is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. This movie is so beautiful and pans, spans over this big period of time, almost related to Yi Yi in the sense that it, you really feel the span of these people's lives over time. And there's something really beautiful about that effect because, you know, my favorite movies, which Yi Yi and this and It's a Wonderful Life do, is that you walk out of the movie and it's not just, oh, I liked that movie, it's that you have a better, you, you want to savor and appreciate the life you have more deeply. And that's to me like the power of all these things at their best is that you leave, you know, looking through different eyes a little bit.”

“This is The Actuality Dramas of Allan King. The one I've seen is A Married Couple, which is one of the most stunning documentaries I've ever seen in my life. It's, I think it's 1969, 1969, and you're watching a couple basically get divorced. And it's an era where there is no real television and people don't really understand what it means to have a camera crew with them all the time, and so they let the camera, they forget the camera's there. From an acting standpoint, getting to like watch these events happen with people in a documentary, it is the bar. Like a great performance is a bar, but a higher bar is what do real people look like when everything's melting down around them.”

“I'm here, so I'll do this. I said to you before, I think everyone probably does this, but it's worth it, John Cassavetes. I was 15, I went to the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, which is a spectacular repertory theater that I saw a lot of first films at, and saw A Woman Under the Influence, and then I kept coming back to it. And it, there is, there is a reason that he is, you know, sort of the lodestar for so many people now. There is an imperfection to it, there is a wildness to it, a sort of refusal to be anything other than his, his himself at the edge of who he is, at the, on pushing the envelope of everything he had in him and putting it into all of these films, and defying both external and internal hesitation or guardrails against, you know, him being anything other than his fullest self. I wish that more film artists were as fearless, basically.”

“I kind of want a bunch of movies that I just haven't seen, which are not interesting to talk about, like The Before Trilogy. I've never actually seen. That's where they walk and they talk and they like each other a lot, right?”