Derek Cianfrance

“First one I’ll take here is Short Cuts, Robert Altman. This isn’t streaming anywhere, so this is like some gold right now. When I think of this movie, the first thing that comes to mind is this scene at the end of the movie with Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin laughing as an earthquake is happening, and singing. Very special.”

“Oh, okay. To Sleep with Anger. The opening of this movie has this Sister Rosetta Tharpe song as Paul Butler, his shoes start to catch on fire, and then the still life of the fruit starts to catch on fire. And Danny Glover’s pretty amazing, kind of playing the devil in this movie. Charles Burnett, to me, is just… I love his movies so much because he makes movies about family, and this is just one of his masterpieces.”

“Okay, so I should do my close-my-eyes one? What I get here? Certified Copy. All right, great. Kiarostami. I’ll take that. I haven’t seen this one. Where Is the Friend’s House? Is one of my number-one movies, so I’m very excited to see this.”

“Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers: Freaks, The Unknown, and The Mystic. I haven’t seen The Unknown or The Mystic, but Freaks is a movie I try to watch maybe once a year. You hear about coming in the Closet and what do you do? You pick all the movies you’ve already seen before, but this is so exciting because I have two movies I haven’t seen here.”

“Nine films of Pasolini, Pasolini 101. This has a couple of my favorite movies of his on here: Accattone and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, especially The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. I grew up Catholic and going to church every Sunday and catechism once a week. But I never paid attention. I, like, daydreamed the whole time. Then when I was in my early 20s, they were playing The Gospel According to Saint Matthew at my… at a film program at my film school. And I was late to the show, so I ran to the movie theater, I sat down, I ran about a mile to get to it, I sat down about ten minutes into the film. I was out of breath, I was sweating. And all of the images on the screen and all the stories on the screen, somehow I knew what was going to happen because I had heard those stories and through, like, osmosis, they sunk in, and, as the movie played, my heartbeat didn’t stop… didn’t settle down, and there was a moment where there’s this disfigured man who’s walking towards camera, and the camera pulls back with him, and then it cuts to– He stops and he comes face to face with Jesus and Jesus tells him, basically, if you believe in me, you’ll be… you’ll be all right. And there’s this cut. It’s a straight cut. To me, it’s the most powerful cut in movie history. Pasolini just cuts back to the guy no longer disfigured, and the score kicks in. I felt, like, a shooting pain through my heart, and I thought I was having a heart attack. I was just having a panic attack. So I try to revisit that movie.”

“Brakhage Anthology: Volumes One and Two. So I studied at the University of Colorado. Stan Brakhage was one of my professors. The first movie I saw of his was Mothlight, which… Well, you just have to see it, but it’s a collection of… he emptied out a bunch of light fixtures in the ’60s and pasted them onto clear strips of celluloid and had that developed, and so what you see is a flutter of shadow and light. He was trying to create what your eyes see in film. He used to do a lot of crazy things. He was my film history teacher. He used to have the projectionist rack the projector out of focus so we could watch the movement of shadow and light in movies. So kind of deconstructing narrative. He also would sit in the front of the room, he would forget to turn off his microphone as we watched movies, and so I kind of learned how to watch movies from hearing his reaction to movies. I feel very, very fortunate to have spent some time with Stan.”