Luca Guadagnino

“Then, more movies to recommend. Naked Kiss. I’m crazy, and when I was a kid, like, 20, I wrote a Naked Kiss script, a remake, which should stay unpublished and undone and unseen. But the level of influence that the work of Sam Fuller had on my work, on my mind, on my imaginary, is total. Naked Kiss, Sam Fuller, one of the greatest directors who ever lived.”

“This is one of my favorite movies ever: Fat Girl. By the sublime Catherine Breillat. This movie is devastating in every way you can think of because it brings you inside of the visceral relationship between growing up and not knowing what you’re going to become and the power of the impulses of sexuality over the body and the mind of a young girl and a few young girls. It also lands in a place of apocalyptic fury in depicting somehow the invisible hand of violence over women and it has one of the most striking, impossible terminal finale that I can think of in a movie, and it’s from one of the greatest directors alive.”

“And then the last recommendation before I basically bring everything home here, it’s, for me, probably with The Age of Innocence, my favorite movie by Martin Scorsese: The Last Temptation of Christ, from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. It shows the dream of Christ, of Jesus Christ, of being human, and the impossibility of being so. And the way in which Scorsese portrays the miracles in this movie, it’s so powerful because basically he works with his tools, which is filming and editing, and once at the end Christ transcends and goes into heaven, Martin Scorsese does one of the great miracles of his work as a filmmaker. One of the great movies, one of the great performances of Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, David Bowie, who plays Pontius Pilatus, Tomas Arana, who plays Lazarus. Masterpiece.”

“Now, let’s go and grab stuff. I mean, Cairo Station, Youssef Chahine. My mother is Algerian, I grew up in Ethiopia, and, for the… let’s say, Maghreb, and for all that part of sub-Saharan world of Africa, Chahine was like a legend and it was engraved in the imagery. But also he was one of the great auteurs, and this movie is just sublime.”

“And this is one of the best titles of the Criterion Collection: Sorcerer by Bill Friedkin. This is the movie that almost stopped his career after the triumphs of The French Connection and The Exorcist, so many nominations at the Oscars, winning himself the Oscar and having engraved himself into the public consciousness, went completely opposite direction, counterintuitive, and made the movie that is obsessive as much as the characters in the movie are obsessive and actually created for himself the journey that the people in the movie go through, in order to create one of the most hallucinating representations of slow time, let’s say. It’s one of the movie about slow time that I can think of, one of the great ones. Sorcerer, Bill Friedkin.”

“And let’s pick out a last one, because I feel embarrassed to grab so many things. Because this is the year in which the great Gene Hackman left us, I think I end here with Arthur Penn, Night Moves. The kernel of cinema that I grew up with, that I think of all the time, that I take the inspiration for, and that I try to think in the way they thought, comes from the period of time where this movie comes from. So, this one.”

“The first thing is a classic, a modern classic. We never make a mistake in recommending the box set of Wong Kar Wai. In the Mood for Love is a transformative movie. I know that it can be sounding like trite because this is just such a great movie, but in its beautiful directness the movie has so many secrets. The final scene, when finally the lover releases himself and tells his truth in the rocks in Cambodia, it’s one of the great moments of cinema, of modern cinema, contemporary cinema, that I can think of, that influenced me all the time, that not only influenced me as a filmmaker, but as a person. And so I salute the boxset for Wong Kar Wai.”