Annie Baker and Lucian Johnston

“We're going to start with L'Enfance Nue by the director and writer Maurice Pialat, one of my favorite, favorite writer-directors. So this is from 1968. It's about kind of a foster child being shuttled around France and moving from family to family. It's like one of the most unsentimental movies about childhood I've ever seen. I felt like it was the first movie I'd seen with like a child lead who you didn't necessarily sympathize with for most of the movie, and then once you understand him by the end of it, it's like totally devastating. I feel like very at the mercy of Pialat as a filmmaker when I'm watching his films, like kind of like anything could happen. I feel like the films are kind of out of control in a way that is like really like almost disturbing in a way that I think for some people that could be interpreted as like a cold approach or something, but there's no like calculation there.”

“Okay, L'argent. Other than Pialat, the other filmmaker we talked about a lot when we were cutting Janet Planet was Bresson. I feel like Bresson was more of like an aesthetic like reference for us too. I remember specifically about L'argent we were talking about depictions of offscreen violence. Yes, that's what I was just thinking. I always think of the end when at the farm, the old couple, the when the husband slaps his wife, it's instead of seeing the slap, he cuts away and you just see the teacup on the on the little saucer and it just kind of moves a little bit. I like he has a thing about suppressing intention and this idea of like actually what you need to do is like suppress people's intentions and so accidents can happen.”

“Oh yeah, A Matter of Life and Death. Okay, initially in Janet Planet we were going to have a character disappear on screen. I don't feel like that's giving away too much, and we were obsessed with how to do it and we ended up just not doing it. But I kept watching the disappearances in this movie on the Criterion Channel and sending them to you and you would like calculate how many frames the disappearance was and it's like three. For me, there's just something about the way that Powell and Pressburger films look that is that's why I love them so much. I mean, their cinematographer Jack Cardiff was incredible, but there's just nothing that looks like a Powell and Pressburger film. There's some scene near the beginning where like the fog lifts and it's so trippy. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like at the beach. And I remember reading, I got really into reading Michael Powell's memoir, and it just was Jack Cardiff like breathing on the lens. Yeah.”

“We'll not, we're, we I'll do Godland. This movie was one of my very, very top favorites of 2023 and maybe ever. The DP is our amazing DP, Maria von Hausswolff, and so much of watching this movie for me was like seeing Maria, the way Maria sees nature and the world through the way she shot this movie, and it makes me so, so happy. I think in particular of like a shot, sort of like descending shot of a waterfall at one point, one of those like incredibly humongous Icelandic waterfalls. And there's this moment where the camera sort of almost like pauses and wavers in the middle because the camera kind of stops and then keeps going. It almost feels like an accident or something, and I've seen you get those types of like happy accidents in performance a lot. Like I see that a lot when I'm cutting performances where an actor will kind of mess something up or say the wrong line, but it's it's really good and almost better than what it was supposed to be, so you just kind of roll with it. But I've never seen that with like a camera before. And but that sequence, I think that's what's so kind of magical about it is in any other film you would bump on that, and instead of bumping it kind of just like elevates the sequence even more. Nature, it feels imperfection of it is, yeah, and the unexpected. I don't know, I feel like so that was a really difficult shoot. Apparently they actually like made the journey themselves across Iceland that the characters make in the movie. They shot with all natural light except for like two scenes that were just candlelight. I mean it's it's like literally about nature overtaking man and then I feel like actually you feel that it's happening with the filmmaking too.”

“Design for Living. I'm obsessed with this movie. I have a poster of this movie in my study. Well, this is like from 1933. This is like immediately pre-Code. It wouldn't even be made now because it's like so ambiguous, ambiguous, but also like incredibly blatant. Like I think what's so, she's in love with two men, they're kind of in love with her, I mean they're in totally in love with her, she's in love with them. The end of the movie she's like making out with both of them in the back of a car. So this was based on a Noël Coward play, but apparently the first scene of this movie, which is one of my favorite scenes, was not in the Noël Coward play, where she's like in the train car and they're sleeping and they haven't seen her yet and she's drawing them, right? And Fredric March and Gary Cooper are so incredible and beautiful and like hilarious and vulnerable and doofy, and Miriam Hopkins is like such a specific person and she's also into her work. And there's something about the movie that I find so life-affirming about like work and desire.”

“Oh yeah, well I do, it's always, I feel like we're just talking about, it's like talking about Varda and Bresson and Pialat. Whoa, this is so good, there's so much good stuff. Do you have this? I don't think I do. You should take it, you should take it. I'm going to totally butcher this, this, but Daguerréotypes is my favorite of all the films in this collection. I think the reason I like it so much is because I find it very difficult to talk about film editing, even as an editor. It just, of all the film crafts, it's kind of the impossible one to actually talk about well. I think it, a lot of people like to talk about pace or things like that, but that's just one really, really little thing. It's it's very difficult to actually talk about film editing, but in this film there's a sequence in one of the local cafes where a magician is putting on his act. And during that sequence she's showing you how she's kind of making the associations while she's making them. She's kind of showing you the manipulation of the work, and it's very self-conscious, but it's not academic, there's nothing like didactic about the way she's showing it to you. It's very, very playful and there's, it's just kind of, it feels almost like a precursor to some something like what to like maybe what like John Wilson is doing now. It's some of the best editing I've ever seen and you can see it, because most of the time you can't see editing, but in this film you can see it and that makes me really, you watch it.”