Jeremy O. Harris

“I see another important one. Okay, so, I just made a documentary about, my play, a documentary about a play, but it was a process doc, and I kept telling everyone like, I want to make a movie that was like a '70s documentary. And everyone was like, what kind of documentaries are you talking about? And I was like talking about things like this, like Company: Original Cast Album by Pennebaker. One of the best documentaries ever made. It's like completely verité. You see some of the like richest, most dynamic performers of a generation having full-tilt mental breakdowns, like actual mental breakdowns about the fact that they cannot articulate the beautiful thing they did on stage every night in a cast recording. And I'm so happy because I've never owned it. I was only streaming it on Criterion Channel. Now I can stream it from my PS5.”

“Oh, well, this one, huge, huge moment for me. So, I haven't found any of the Lars von Trier, but Lars von Trier and Dogme 95 were very, very important to me, because I didn't know that someone could make rules around how to make a movie. I thought you just like made one. I didn't know that they, that you could create a system around the making, and Dogme 95 is like a very important system he sort of created. And the first film that was the Dogme 95 film approved film was The Celebration. Also, they have the full Dogme 95 thing in here. This is like, I could actually kind of cry. Like, this is actually crazy, so thank you.”

“Okay, this is important. I'm getting the box set, but I just had to shout this movie out anyway. Teorema. I realized this year, with the amount of people who told me how much they love Saltburn, that no one had seen in my friend group had seen Teorema. Watch Teorema, just do yourself a favor. I'm not putting it in my bag because I'm getting a box set, but because Pasolini is important. Again, there's a lot of required reading to be gay, in my opinion, and a lot of that reading is in movies, and a lot of those movies are weird and European, and, Pasolini, watch it all.”

“Like, I just saw up here another important movie for me, partially because I share a birthday with, the Marquis de Sade. Marquis de Sade, who wrote the book that Salò is based on. This movie was so, so important to me, and also in a time when I probably should have known better, while I was in grad school and I was showing my, cast of first-year students like what things inspired me to write this play where people were fucking on stage and yelling about how much they hated being at school and treating Yale School of Drama like a sort of, fashion prison. I decided to show them all, this movie, and I realized can't really do that in 2019. It's a harder thing to do, you know what I mean? But I'm telling you right now, I'm hoping you're consenting. If you watch this movie, you will, it'll change your life. You'll see a lot of bad stuff, there's a lot of yuck in it, but you'll get to a yum at the very end.”

“Okay, so I was actually going to name-check her anyway because Lena Dunham, who is one of the most, you know, one of the people who's, who changed my life the most with the work that she did both in Girls and in Tiny Furniture, because she's one of those people that like gave me permission, much like, you know, Melvin Van Peebles, to just like tell my story how I wanted to tell it. Anyway, Tiny Furniture is really good.”

“But there's another filmmaker here, a female filmmaker that I know about because she, it, she said it inspired her work, and another filmmaker friend of mine, Janicza Bravo, had a poster of it in the show that she was working on, and it was all cyclical. It's like a weird friend love affair. So actually, I'm going to ask for some help. Where could I find Claudia Weill, or Claudia Weill's Girlfriends? So this is Girlfriends, and it was an iconic movie from like, it was like so well received when it came out, and she was just forgotten. And I feel so lucky that two filmmakers that I love, who happen to be women, told me I needed to watch this movie. So I'm going to now, and now own it.”

“Okay, oh, back wall. Oh, oh my God, yay! Hey, okay, yay, All That Jazz! Okay, this is the best movie. No, okay, they, there's all these lists like best movie musical, blah, blah, blah. Destroy them. All That Jazz, best movie musical. No one knows how to shoot dance anymore, and that's, listen, there have been some big musicals that have come out recently by some big directors, people we know, people we love. They don't know how to shoot dance as well as this man did. None of them do. Fosse knows what movement looks like on camera because he is movement incarnate. This film is so honest and beautiful and rich. It is everything a film should be. I love it. Watch it.”

“Fassbinder is so important, and one of the things I love about Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is that it feels like something that like people will be afraid to write now, about like the very present like, like racism and, that lives inside of our bodies because of like society and like our families, etc. But how people have to navigate that through intimacies. It also is like just like sexy and funny and weird and unprecipitated masterpieces like this one. Sometimes they won't be, but you'll be making, and that's just one way to do it, and it's good to remind yourself that there's a lot of ways to do, to crack an egg.”

“Okay guys, I think I, I think I do just have to, I have to end it. I'm going to get Yi Yi, I'm going to get Yi Yi, because we love Yi Yi.”

“Oh, oh, and this is another one. I was going to get this one anyway, so I'm glad I saw it. Metropolitan. I used to tell people that I wanted to be like the Black, gay Whit Stillman. He's such a dandy and a fop, and like writes about people that like you don't see written about very often in like this type of way. So yeah.”

“Okay, I just saw the one I wanted first. Oh, okay, this is important. So I'm getting the Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films, mainly because Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is in it, but also Watermelon Man is in it, which is a very important movie to me. But Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was a movie that I used to use to woo boys in college. Like, I'd be like, hey, like, have you ever seen like a movie called Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song? And they were like, what, no. Like, but they like the title. Everyone likes that title. The title is so sexy and like alluring and like inviting. I got laid a lot in college because of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. So thank you, Melvin Van Peebles. He also, okay, people don't know this, but he's also a playwright. He wrote like one of the best musicals to ever be on Broadway, premiered in 1972. It's called Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, and it was like a sold-out smash hit. He like casually just wrote all the music, like has the first lesbian love song in a musical ever, first time rap is ever in a musical ever. This guy was like a fucking polyglot like of storytelling.”