Christoph Waltz

“There is one movie by Béla Tarr, the great Béla Tarr, who unfortunately recently died. You see, Werckmeister Harmonies, and it’s a… a very eccentric individual who delivers newspapers in a Hungarian town and a crazy mob that rises in the town and makes development impossible, and the way the leading character in the movie resists, in a very personal and peaceful way, is a great inspiration, apart from the fact that Béla Tarr, of course, was one of the great directors of the medium.”

“Not everybody can master this peaceful, and, to a degree, very wise resistance. Some give into their more feral urges. But on an individual level, if committed by one of the most beautiful women that ever appeared on a screen, in this case, Catherine Deneuve, that’s Repulsion. It’s about a woman who can’t fend off the onslaught of sexual interest that she meets in everybody she encounters. It was a revolution in moviemaking and, to a degree, it still is.”

“Let’s stay with the female aspect of resistance and go back to the very peaceful yet strict resistance. There is a movie by Ozu and it’s called Late Spring. The main character resists the push from the outside to be married off. That told in the most delicate and sensitive details is a true… a true delight.”

“The 400 Blows. This is a kid who feels, like most kids do at that age, misplaced. He leads a life that doesn’t fit into the kids’ lives around him, it doesn’t fit into his parents’ lives, it doesn’t fit into the life in school, it doesn’t fit into the system that tries to press him into a decent citizen, so he escapes from the… I hesitate to say oppression because it’s not oppression, yet there are forces that are against the integrity and a life that we really… in which we can really gauge the relationship between us as an individual and the society as a whole.”

“And I start with Jacques Tati. Out of this complete collection, I would recommend Mon Oncle, because Mon Oncle shows the eccentric individual who clings a little bit to the past, without being obsessive about it, but he has difficulties coming to terms with what then made the modern world, and he does that by showing his nephew that there used to be another world that was more open to the childlike spirit. Yeah, so we’ll put that in the bag.”

“To get back a little bit on to the lighter side and, oddly, Ingmar Bergman, the majority of Bergman’s movies are really actually of lighter character. There is one that I specifically like, and it’s in this heavy and hefty collection: The Devil’s Eye. The devil has an eye infection and he always gets a stye if there is a… a virgin on Earth who shouldn’t be a virgin. So he employs Don Juan, who is in hell, and he says, “Go and seduce her.” The way this woman or this girl, rather, played by Bibi Andersson, resists Don Juan’s approaches and resists Don Juan’s seduction is extraordinary, because she does it out of conviction, out of joy. So Don Juan is actually completely desperate because it’s the first failure that he had to suffer through. And so I recommend it for the joyful private resistance of the leading lady.”