Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij

“Wow, look at this one, Klute. This is actually connected to what we, the story we just finished telling. You should tell them about it. You should tell them about it. I think it's Jane Fonda's best performance, she's so arresting in it. This was a really big inspiration in its lighting design for A Murder at the End of the World, which we just finished making for FX. I love Pakula so much because I feel like he's one of the few filmmakers that it doesn't, there's no ego. You can put it in the bag. Oh, I can take it? I'm going to take one too. No, no, say what you were saying about Pakula. Just that I admire him because he, I don't ever feel like his ego is involved in the filmmaking. I feel like he is using exactly the shots that need to be there to communicate the story correctly, and there's something very effortless about that.”

“Time Bandits. So I haven't seen this. Okay, well, this is an interesting film. When I was a kid, my grandmother had just died and my mom and dad were very sad. I was sad too, but I was doing what I did when I felt sad, which was I was watching a TV in the hotel, and this movie, you know, like when you're a kid and in the old days you would flip channels, and this movie showed up and it was three-quarters of the way in, and this movie blew my mind. What was it about it that moved you so much? The freedom in the story. It's not limited by anything. And of course, time travel. Okay, so I need one too. I need to catch up with your childhood.”

“Oh, what are you seeing? Blood Simple. Yeah, get it for you. Oh my god, Frances McDormand. If you've not seen this movie, her performance in this at like, how old was she when she did this? Like really exciting also to see something that's not made for an enormous budget, but feels big. One of the things that we always use this film as a reference for is there's a wall of photographs, yeah, in Blood Simple. And all the photographs are real 35 millimeter prints they must have taken. And so whenever we make a movie these days, we say we've got to take real 35mm photographs. We actually show the scene where the 35 millimeter photographs are on the wall to our collaborators, and we're like, it has to feel this real. Because there's something about when people are captured in film grain, and you took the time to shoot it in a real location and then develop it and then print, it's not photoshopped, and then put it on a wall, and then when the camera is passing over that, you completely believe in the history of the characters and the world that led up to this moment.”

“Oh, Brit. Double Life. Oh, wow. So my parents showed me, The Double Life, maybe I was 13, they showed me The Double Life and I was blown away. And I, you know, I was really drawn to a female lead, to the metaphysical aspects, but also the groundedness and the beauty. It's so beautiful. And then though we would write something and call Irène Jacob and be like, do you want to come play with us because we love Double Life of Véronique and Red so much? And she did. She was amazing, yeah. And you know what's interesting about Irène is that as I get older and we get more practice, you realize more things. You realize that like this film works because the actress, the actor at the center of this has such a purity in their soul. It's a film that captures soul, really, and it's her soul that you're watching and you're so moved by. She was my favorite actress growing up. I never thought that we would spend time with her that way, but spending time with her is like watching the movie. There's no gap.”

“Have you seen this film? After Life. Wait, yes, yes, I have seen this. Have you seen it? Yeah. Why have we never talked about this? Okay, yeah. So this is After Life, right? And I actually think this is very relevant for our work, which is funny that we haven't talked about it, because it's such an interesting way of talking about the metaphysical, right, without any, or science fiction without any bells or whistles. No, and like very grounded in the mundane, but not like in a quirky way. No, and using metaphor. Like sometimes I think maybe the afterlife really will be like a late-'90s version of some building, you know, like it, yeah, it was special. When did you see this? I just like saw it on the Criterion Channel, like at my house alone. I love discovering something that you can't believe you don't know. Yeah, that feeling of being like, I can't believe I didn't know this piece of art existed. It's such a delicious feeling.”

“Oh man. So Brit and I are working on a new project, a couple new projects in our garden of ideas, and Brit was like, oh, you have to watch Drive My Car. It left such an impression on me. I don't know what it is exactly. I don't know if it's that I love stories of unexpected friendships that are not love affairs, but these, like this relationship between this man and this girl who becomes his driver. They do something for each other that nobody else in their lives can do for them, and it happens out of this casual relationship of her just driving him around. Also, this movie is an amazing meditation on storytelling and the art of storytelling, because everyone in it is a storyteller. Wow. And they all like charm each other or open each other or move each other by virtue of orally telling each other stories. When there's that death 20 minutes in, oh, for two days I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I was like, oh, that's the power of cinema.”