Alex Winter

“Make sure you see No Bears if you haven’t. Speaking of No Bears, I am actually going to take that as well. Sorry. Panahi is, in my opinion, honestly, if someone put a gun to my head, I’d say the greatest filmmaker alive at the moment. I know that’s hyperbolic, but I mean it. And, hey, I’m a filmmaker, hyperbole comes with the job, so, if you haven’t seen this, please, please, please see this movie. It is one of the greatest films of this century, in my opinion.”

“I'm also going to take Saint Omer here, from Alice Diop. This was one of my favorite movies of the last several years. It's just a beautiful, concise, powerful, emotional, heart-wrenching, and very, very aesthetically sophisticated film, from a filmmaker who has made many documentaries that I also love. But this is a very, very strong narrative and I'm taking it.”

“This is my very favorite movie of all time. I show this to a lot of actors when I'm making films, because I haven't made a film that isn't heavily stealing from Ugetsu. There's an opening shot of this film where he pans across the village. I actually was just told it got cut off one of the versions, which is terrifying. It's on this one, but this idea of a film that kind of operates almost as one continuous piece of movement has heavily influenced my filmmaking. I grew up dancing, and movement and physical movement and acting are important to me. And this is, in my opinion, a towering masterpiece, one of those films that you watch and you just think, "How on God's earth did he do that?" Hurrah!”

“Amazingly enough, I don't own this. This is one of my very favorite docs, it's one of the greatest documentaries ever made. It's Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, USA, and it is a film about a… a striking workers' skirmish that they embedded themselves into that got quite violent and terrifying. I think it speaks timelessly to the struggles of workers everywhere, but also to how documentaries can actually have something to say about society while being art. Because I make documentaries myself about political things often, I can tell you that's very, very hard to do. It's a high-wire act that Kopple wrote, in my opinion, the book on, in terms of modern doc cinema, so, can't say enough about that one.”

“The grand master of cinema, in my very, very humble personal opinion. There is no one above Luis Buñuel for me. He encapsulates surrealism, humor, the barbarism of society, the beauty of society. He's our Dostoyevsky, as far as I'm concerned, and Él is made during his Mexican period, which is… I have weird… We all do, but my affinities for Hitchcock's British period are similar to my… I have an affinity for Buñuel's Mexican period: Los olvidados, Él, the films he made in Mexico speak, I think, the most honestly and openly towards his worldview, aesthetic and social. I like the later movies, though they're a little, like, hang around the dining-room table with your bourgeois friends. They're great, but Mexico Buñuel, great Buñuel.”

“I'm going to end with Keaton, which is where I started. I was… I was about five or six years old, and my babysitter was a movie theater. It wasn't TV. My mother taught dance at a university, and they just socked me in the campus movie theater, and I discovered Keaton and Chaplin and Hitchcock and Fred Astaire and all the things that informed my early love of movies. And Keaton has remained for me the kind of… the great synthesis of performing arts and cinema. I'm an actor and I direct, and I've always synthesized those things, and I do not profess to be the towering genius that Buster Keaton is, but he remains probably my greatest influence, so, I'm very happy to walk out of here with The Cameraman, which is a masterwork, like all Buster Keaton.”

“I'm going to start here with the Kiarostami Koker Trilogy, which I'm absolutely going to take. Where Is the Friend's House? Which is my very, very favorite Kiarostami film, but I also love Through the Olive Trees. And he made other great movies, don't get me wrong, and we now have great Iranian filmmakers who are making incredible cinema to this day, so make sure you see No Bears if you haven't.”