Joel Potrykus

“This one is just staring at me. Right when I walked in I saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and… I saw this way too young. And I’m probably going to push it on my son way too young. But this… Spicoli is as good as it gets, man.”

“Equinox. This is another one that maybe I’ll show my son solo someday, because he’s talking about movies and how movies are made and we talk about magic a lot. And this is some homemade magic right here. Maybe his next birthday I’ll give it to him.”

“I see you have Scorsese Shorts here. Big Shave, amazing. You don’t really need a traditional narrative to send a message. Martin Scorsese learned that early on, and we’re all still trying to catch up and figure that out, too.”

“Trainspotting. It’s energy, that’s all it is. It’s just energy for an hour and a half or two hours. And Danny Boyle’s one of these great filmmakers who… I love filmmakers that have a style or a signature. But Danny Boyle kind of doesn’t do that. He’s like the Ween of filmmakers. He just explores different genres and different styles whenever he wants.”

“Okay. Last one, last one. This is a big one. If.... By Lindsay Anderson. I found this on VHS at Kurvan’s Video in Alpena, Michigan when I was 18. And it was for sale. It was in the big bin where they don’t even line them up, they just throw them in a pile in, like, a garbage can, and it was the guy from A Clockwork Orange. It was Malcolm McDowell. And so I got it and it blew my mind because it was, like, angry but also kind of artsy in its own way. And it was one of the first, like, almost borderline experimental narrative films I’d seen. And it really stuck with me. It’s a film I try to talk about with my students, but it’s actually kind of heavy duty, because the end of this film is more relevant today than it probably was in 1969, I believe. Okay, I’m going to take this last one.”

“This is amazing. Three Films by Luis Buñuel. For me, the reason that Buñuel’s films work so effectively is that they don’t look weird. They don’t have that kind of Lynchian, dreamlike cinematography. They look very straightforward, which makes it so much stranger when a family sits around on toilets, talking about politics and things like that, and when they go to the bathroom to eat their dinner. Phantom of Liberty and Discreet Charm, two of my absolute favorite movies ever.”