Josh Brolin

“Man, dude. Cassavetes and Peter Falk. This is Mikey and Nicky. This is a film by Elaine May. It’s a film that I love. I’ve seen many times. And there’s something about Cassavetes’s performance. Cassavetes as a great filmmaker. A Woman Under the Influence, and all his other films, Shadows, Faces, Gloria, I’m a big fan of. And Peter Falk is just flawless.”

“Traffic. My dad’s in Traffic. My dad has one scene in Traffic and my dad was complaining that he only had one scene in a movie. And I saw this movie, and I called him and I said, “Do you know how lucky you are to be in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic?” A non-linear style, I don’t know, there’s something about the anecdotes of looking back and connecting different points in your life and seeing where they intersect, and creating a whole narrative out of that. And Traffic is brilliantly done.”

“Lost Highway. Now it’s getting fun. I mean, all kind of strange, absurd movies, but David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Patricia Arquette, who, when I saw True Romance for the first time, I was so blown away by what she did and how raw she was. Lost Highway’s another movie that turned me on to David Lynch and where I ultimately saw The Elephant Man, which I think is close to, at least for me, the perfect film.”

“Repo Man. I mean, Alex Cox. With… God, who’s in it? Was it Emilio Estevez? Harry Dean Stanton? Yeah.”

“Another film by Alex Cox, which is Sid & Nancy. Both performances were incredible, but this is Roger Deakins, who I ended up working with five times and has become a close friend, and this was the beginning for him. And I remember there was a great sequence of the trash falling down in this alleyway, this slow-motion sequence, and it’s never left me since the first time I saw it. And I saw it fairly early on. I might have even seen it when it came out. I don’t know, what year was it? I was 18, 1986. It’s movies like this that made me want to be involved in the movie industry. And it’s movies like this that remind me what we put ourselves through to be good actors.”

“Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant, who I ended up doing Milk with. But Drugstore Cowboy, Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch. Again, just pared down something that, when you’re this idea of a writer or a poet, or you want to perceive yourself as that, you see movies like this because you’re like, “This is visual poetry. This is the poetry of filmmaking that I want to be associated with.””

“I did see a movie down here that I haven’t watched for a while, but I think is a very solid film, and that’s the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, because we had fun. I don’t know if Javier had fun. I had fun. And I made Javier have fun. And it started my friendships with both Joel and Ethan Coen, and, making the movie, I think we thought that, “Oh, this is fun. A few people will see this movie. It’s a little movie.” And… And then when I saw the movie, and I remember I was with my son Trevor when I saw the movie and we didn’t talk for 20 minutes after the movie, which I don’t know if that’s happened before or since. Objectively saying that’s how you want to be affected by a film. You want to be slapped quiet. And that’s what No Country for Old Men did for me, as a film lover.”