Mitski

“The first movie I’m going to bring up is… It’s right in front of me: Daisies. So my family moved around a lot, but in seventh grade, for one year, we lived in a place where I could walk to a video-rental store. They had Daisies, and I knew nothing about this movie. I just watched it as a seventh-grade girl and it blew my mind. I was like, “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen.” I felt so much freedom. I felt so absurd in the best way. I watched it over and over and over. So Daisies was my very first experience of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and after that I had to watch everything I could get my hands on. It was the best experience. I feel like I watched most of the weird movies in my life from that video-rental store with no consciousness of, “This is actually really special that I’m getting to watch this.” It was run by… a bunch of dudes in, I think, their 20s, who all had too-long hair, bangs over their eyes, very pale, and they… It turned out it was a very formative year for me, so thank you to the nerds.”

“Moonstruck. I mean, this is one of the greatest films of all time. But for me, it’s significant because it was the movie that started my journey of Nicolas Cage fandom. When I first saw him on screen in Moonstruck, I was like, “Is this a god? Who is this? This man is so… looks unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen. So magnetic.” I still believe that he’s someone who is meant to be on screen. There is no other profession for him. He can do other things that he likes, but he needed to be on screen. He has described his acting style as nouveau shamanism. I think of it as dream acting. I know realism and realistic acting has been very popular for a long time and that works in some contexts, but sometimes what I really want to see from an actor and a character is their inner world and how they feel, not just how they would react in the real world. And he does this beautifully. That’s my first access to Nicolas Cage, and I’ve been in love ever since.”

“For millennials and older, a big experience in the household was that you had a certain amount of videos and you just watched those over and over and over and over again. So, Breakfast Club was one of those videos, and I first watched it before first grade, way too early. I didn’t understand most of it. I didn’t know what a hot beef injection was, but I could recite it over and over. So, thank you to The Breakfast Club for creating a part of my mind.”

“Next one is The Piano Teacher. I can’t do every Haneke movie, but this one was right in my Q zone. This one, I watched it during a formative time when I was a teenager and it hit me right when I was in my phase of… cold, repressed sexuality. I don’t know if any other woman has gone through that. I hate to admit this, but I remember walking down the streets of New York with “Well-Tempered Clavier” by J. S. Bach in my ears and walking very severely down the street thinking of The Piano Teacher. Many will disagree, but I think Bach wrote the “Well-Tempered Clavier” hundreds of years ago just so it could be in this film. This film has one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard. The use of music is so perfect in this, the Chopin, the Schubert, everything. And Isabelle Huppert is one of the best actresses, if not the best. The scene where she’s like, “If you want to hit me, hit me.” But in French, obviously. And in that scene, her face is so open and vulnerable, and you can tell, when she says, “If you want to hit me, hit me,” it’s what she really wants, and then he doesn’t give it to her and her face is just so perfect. So, anyway, this is a beautiful, beautiful film by Haneke.”

“My Own Private Idaho. I think, again, I watched a lot of art films way too young, and this is definitely not for children, but I remember– I think it was one of my first experiences of unconventional directing and acting. I still remember the scene where the actors are staying still. And it opened my mind to so many different possibilities. I thought movies were one thing, and then I watched this and I was like, “Movies are a lot of different things that I don’t know if I’m comfortable with yet, but… but this is going to stay in my mind.” And this was one of those. And it didn’t hurt that it was full of beautiful people.”