Jamie Lee Curtis

“Oh. Uncut Gems just popped out. I am not someone who loves a lot of chaos. I’m a very controlled person. And yet I immersed myself in the chaos of this movie in a way that I was really not expecting to. And Adam is just a spectacular actor.”

“Okay. WALL·E. WALL·E was a prophecy of the future, and we all were like, “No, it’s not going to be like that. Oh, come on.” Do you know what I’m saying? This is a beautiful love story. Gorgeous, but really a cautionary tale.”

““Life is pain, Highness, and anyone who says differently is selling something” is going to be on my tombstone. William Goldman wrote a perfect screenplay. Wrote a perfect book and then a perfect screenplay. And my friend Rob Reiner made this movie. My husband’s in it. He plays the six-fingered man. One of the great movies of all time. I love this movie. I know my husband had a great time making it.”

“And… Raging Bull, I mean… Cinema. Moving pictures. Storytelling. Characters. Light. Lighting. Great, great actors. I mean, come on. Right? I mean, it’s just… Forget it. Forget it!”

“Danton. So… Verisimilitude, time and place. Movies take you to another time, another world, another country, another language. Danton was one of those movies for me. It’s a harrowing time in history, and this put me there in a way that I still remember, the way that movies can put you in a place in time that you’ll never go, ever, in your life.”

“Monsoon Wedding. Okay. Talk about going into a world I’ve never been. Immersed me in a culture, time and place, people, color. Seeing it on the big screen was just breathtaking. Monsoon Wedding. So fabulous.”

“What’s this one? Okay. Downhill Racer. Really exciting movie to watch. Robert Redford plays a ski racer. You would be surprised how it holds up. You know, in today’s world where the technology of filmmaking is so elastic and expansive and people do so many crazy things with the cameras, back in the day, they were limited by what was available to them and yet filmmakers put you right in the heart of something. You feel his heartbeat this entire movie. It’s really exciting, Downhill Racer. I loved it. Very good choice on my part.”

“Paper Moon. Madeline Kahn, Madeline Kahn. Madeline Kahn, come on. Madeline Kahn, Madeline Kahn, Madeline Kahn. What a G.”

“But there are many Tony Curtis movies. And I think The Sweet Smell of Success, another black-and-white… You can tell I’m going to lean toward beautiful cinematography, but this is a masterpiece. It’s a great part, Tony Curtis’s best part. I’ll tell you, nobody knows this, when Tony Curtis died, his wife put a memorial thing together for the service and she put the quote from Sweet Smell on it, “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.””

“Although I said that I was surprised that you didn’t have Psycho, both of the films that I’ve spoken about here gave my parents a gravitas within the industry that had eluded them both. So The Manchurian Candidate was a film – my mother plays the girlfriend of Frank Sinatra. It’s a really quiet performance. It’s a beautiful performance. Very serious performance. Very sexy. And I’m… you know, saying that about my mother. But apparently Tony Curtis served her divorce papers. What my mother told me is that she was served divorce papers and then went and did the train scene with Frank Sinatra in the little vestibule. Whenever I see this movie, I think about that moment for this woman, an actress, mother of two, who had been left by her husband. I think about that, and it’s sort of an amazing performance. It is an amazing– it’s not sort of. It is fully an amazing performance.”

“I’ve had a beautiful moment as a performer myself that has given me some gravitas, that has shown that I’m an artist and not just cute in my underwear. The show is called The Bear, and I play a character named Donna Berzatto, and she is, you know, on the edge, as we would say. And so many people have compared Donna with this movie. Now, there’s nothing like Gena Rowlands. There’s just nothing, and it makes me really proud to think that something that I did as an artist would be in the sphere of the work of Gena Rowlands, and it’s been a life-changing experience for me personally.”

“My husband, Mr. Christopher Guest, is going to be very jealous because the first movie I am picking is This Is Spinal Tap. This is the movie that changed my life because a) it’s hilair, and super, super funny and great. But it was Christopher promoting this movie which put them in Rolling Stone magazine, where I saw his picture and said to my girlfriend Debra Hill, who wrote and produced this movie, Halloween. Debra Hill, right there. I was sitting next to her when I saw a picture of Mr. Guest from This Is Spinal Tap and said to her, “I’m gonna marry him.” I called his agent, left my number. He never called me. Ran into him at a restaurant two months later. He went like this. I went like this. He called me the next day. We went out. We got married four months later, 41 years ago. So these two movies, very much in the Criterion world, changed my life. So I could leave now because basically those are my life-changing movies.”