Mary Harron

“And I'm picking out Naked City. It sort of relates to stuff that I love like Sam Fuller and kind of really great B-movie stuff of the, you know, 40s, 50s, and 60s. Okay, I'm gonna put this in for now. I said I would take a lot and then maybe select, sort of like when you're shopping you do triage.”

“My favorite John Cassavetes film is Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I look at it over and over for the way he filmed this. It's so present and real, and there's an amazing scene in a back room of a restaurant where something bad is about to happen, and the way it's filmed is incredible.”

“Sid and Nancy. I knew Nancy, not well, but I knew her a little bit, and I knew Alex Cox because we were at college together. This is a great movie.”

“Mala Noche. I think Gus Van Sant's work, in the 80s had a big effect on me. It was when I was working in television in Britain and I was, I think I had started to write scripts and I was trying to get to direct film, TV. At that point I was a researcher, and I think this and then seeing Drugstore Cowboy, just told me that there was a different way to make films, you know, that outside of Hollywood and outside of the classic films that I loved and or the kind of experimental European, you know, art house European films that I sort of also grew up on. But this was like, oh, this was happening now, and it was really unsentimental and quite harsh, and it was a different way of making a movie.”

“This is a really underrated movie, Lost Highway. It's got a lot of sort of 40s noir femme fatale sort of mythology in it, but it also has this crazy like metal soundtrack. And I really like the way David Lynch kind of counteracts his, and I wouldn't ever call his filmmaking nostalgic, but it's steeped in certain images of the past, but then he'll combine it with this really like jarring modern thing. And it is like your craziest dream. It's funny, I just had a dream last night where I was walking down a road through the woods and I realized that I'd been in a car with my mother, who actually died not long ago, and I couldn't, and I didn't know how I got out of the car, and I was like, I've got to call her, and I realized I didn't know her number. And I was thinking after, I thought, oh, David Lynch movie. You know, and I was thinking about him this morning about how well he captures that, you know, the world of dreams, the complete disorientation of suddenly you're in one place and the other. And I think with Lost Highway people minded the way it jumped around and people changed identity, but you know, that's the life that you have and I have every night in dreams when we can remember them.”

“It's funny, I'm sort of focusing a lot on old movies. I was brought up on a lot of old movies. This is My Man Godfrey. It's the wonderful Carole Lombard and it's set in the Depression and it opens, under the Brooklyn Bridge, but there's just a lot of fantastic, rapid-fire 30s comedy. And a lot of the time when I'm trying to direct people, the main piece of direction I give usually is "do it faster." And sometimes I say "do it like 30s comedy, just rapid-fire," because you know, comedy is pace, and you know, they knew that. And some of them came from theater and they couldn't mess around and they couldn't do a lot of takes and they couldn't, you know, do a lot of coverage. So it's like get it right, you know, in one, you know, shot. It's bang, bang, and I just love that.”