Kahlil Joseph

“Days of Heaven, ladies and gentlemen. Days of Heaven. Days of Heaven might be the unanimous… one of the most unanimous films that all filmmakers love, enjoy, and respect and admire. Terrence Malick is also one of my mentors, I'm deeply honored to say. The one thing about DVDs versus streaming, for those who don't know, is the supplemental features. I grew up– I'm old enough to predate streaming and most of my film school is the supplemental materials, as much as the films themselves. There's a lot to learn, there's a lot to understand, a lot I didn't know, obviously. I'm still learning, and it's the supplemental features that I am excited about. Days of Heaven, because I've seen this movie about a thousand times.”

“Color of Pomegranates. So, this… Onye Anyanwu, who's my wife and producer, master producer, she's requesting this. This… was a formative film for her and I when we first started dating. I'll never forget, she turned to me one night and said… I was half asleep, and she said, "I need a movie with great cinematography, great visuals," and I, half-asleep, said, "Color of Pomegranates." She had never heard of it, and she watched it and she instantly fell in love with me. So this now will be passed on to our daughter.”

“Yi Yi. A One and a Two. This movie also was formative in my… my film education. It's a very slow– Edward Yang's work in general is… it's not very flashy. It's very understated, but somehow so powerful, and Yi Yi in particular. I would love to make a movie like this one day. His magic is invisible, though, so it takes a long time to understand what he's doing, and, again, special features hopefully can help us unlock some of that magic. Yi Yi, Edward Yang.”

“Tampopo is one of the movies that… well, for me shared the gift of cinema, in terms of what movies can do, what they can be. It's a food comedy, drama, love story, entrepreneurial journey. But this will make people fall in love who kind of don't know what cinema– or, you know, they might wonder what cinema is: is it stuffy, something stuffy? This is not stuffy. This is very exciting.”

“Oh, Tokyo Olympiad. Holy cow. Yeah. I didn't realize you guys reissued this. Oh, yeah, and Blu-ray, let's go. It's a feat of cinematography. I can't imagine how much footage they shot. Jesus. It's a slow burn. It's not, obviously– They make drama out of athletes throwing pole vaults in slow motion, amongst other things. There's an incredible sequence in here of a young African runner. I think it's the first time the country's ever been to the Olympics. There's this beautiful shot with a long lens across the field, just tracking, tracking the young runner, and I've referenced that shot in my head a lot. There's also some early photographic… I want to say experiments, but they do this kind of trail effect, which was very hard to do in the 1960s, and it's much easier to do now, but I've referenced this quite a bit.”