Charlie Day

“I'm gonna begin with Mr. François Truffaut and The 400 Blows, which I won't attempt the French pronunciation of that. The title sequence of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is us just riding around the city, just shooting the city of Philadelphia with a very handheld loose camera, and the opening sequence of 400 Blows, you're just riding around Paris with just a very loose handheld camera. It doesn't seem overly thought out, it just seems just very alive and almost matter-of-fact. And I was watching, re-watching this movie and then it all clicked to me that we must have inadvertently taken that from the best. In the bag you go.”

“We're gonna talk with Robert Altman's The Player, which starts with that amazing wander through the film studio and works its way, I think, all the way into the building where we meet Tim Robbins. But I highly recommend if you like movies about Hollywood, which I do.”

“So I, in my mind, I wanted to take a movie about the industry of making movies and combine it with satire, and I borrowed and stole very obviously, not even subtly, from one of the greatest satires ever made, and that's Hal Ashby's Being There. This movie is edited and co-written by, although famously he did not get credit for the writing, Lesley Jones's father. Lesley Jones cut my film and cut some of the other films in this as well, Punch-Drunk Love being one I'm gonna grab soon.”

“Punch-Drunk Love, and who doesn't love Paul Thomas Anderson? I think one of our finest American filmmakers. A really sort of simple and sweet and poetic movie, and one of the things that makes the movie so great is the score of this film, and which was done by Jon Brion, who's a real artist. He also did the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a brilliant composer who I also got to collaborate on with this film.”

“I gotta go on Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee. Just the use of color, the framing, the way he would frame subjects. I'm thinking of certain low shots where he had the camera way down and shooting up against this sort of midnight blue sky. The way he took an absolutely, what to me at the time was a revolutionary and unique aesthetic, and he mixed that with the social point of view that was educational, I think, for me. I really think this is one of our finest films.”

“All right, talk about how to light a movie and the different ways to do it, Barry Lyndon. Stanley Kubrick directs with patience. He is forcing you as the viewer to lean into the screen. It's not thrown in your face, and sometimes there's long pauses between lines of dialogue. So, you know, a character will say something and the other character will reply, and the space in between forces you to kind of lean into the films. I was late to seeing Barry Lyndon. I actually saw this last year for the first time, and it was the only Kubrick film I hadn't seen.”

“And then I think the finest film of all time, and if you haven't seen it, you should see Tokyo Story. This is one that just sort of found its way directly into my soul, and it's to me an important, important movie.”

“And John Cassavetes, which I have shamefully only seen maybe one or two of his movies, and they were all when I was starting out in acting and trying to get more serious about what good acting is and trying to seek it out. And as the years of doing It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have transitioned me more into loving the work behind the camera just as much as in front, I think I need to revisit and do my homework on how this guy did that.”

“And another person I need to do my homework on, and my wife and I were just saying how and where do we find her films, is Agnès Varda, whose birthday is coming up. And we've been talking about wanting to see these films and trying to find them, and now I have them all.”