Paul Dano

“I want this. I've never seen this, excuse me, I've never seen this and I'm just gonna read what the special features are here while we're looking at it. Yeah, I just feel like this needs to be seen.”

“And really one of my favorite films ever made is A Brighter Summer Day, which is in here somewhere. And so much so that I reached out to Criterion and asked for, I said, "Can you please spare me a poster of A Brighter Summer Day so I can put it in my home?" And they kindly did. It's the only movie poster up in our apartment.”

“One filmmaker that really kind of changed how I thought about film is Ozu. And I just don't think I knew you could make films like he does, that you could just put the camera somewhere and rely on the composition, and you've just sort of like the image and the cut and the sort of rhythm of it. His storytelling sort of ends up transcending itself by the end, and he's sort of somehow doing melodrama, but completely undercutting it by his pace, and like skipping like the big event in the film, which in an American film normally you would like show the wedding or you'd show the big thing. And he really changed who I am, I think. I think he's one of like the great artists of the 20th century.”

“God, I love this film, Make Way for Tomorrow. Such a beautiful American melodrama, and the film that inspired Tokyo Story, I believe.”

“Oh, I want this, This Sporting Life. This is just an incredible performance. I saw it a long time ago, and I feel like again, like when you get to see acting like that, that's really just sort of so raw and it feels unstudied. And I just remember thinking in the past few years, I've got to see This Sporting Life again.”

“This filmmaker is super important to me, Edward Yang, and Yi Yi is an incredible film.”

“So I just wanted to give a shout out to My Own Private Idaho. We saw this film projected about a month ago, and I had never seen River Phoenix on the big screen. And there are some scenes in this film, it's the first time I've really been excited by acting in like a few months or something. There was just like the scene by the fire when they're on the road, and he kind of confesses to Keanu's character that he feels something for him. You know, he says something so honestly and vulnerably, a woman in the audience gasped in the theater. And the scene after that, when they're visiting his brother's house, there was something so intimate, it was like we shouldn't be watching this.”

“I'm gonna take this Jacques Demy box set. Or I mean, I can also just take these guys, but I think, thank you, this would be nice to share with my daughter.”