Rian Johnson

“I’m going to start with one of my dearest friends, Karyn Kusama, and her brilliant movie Girlfight. One of my favorite directors. She’s also one of my favorite people. And the auteur theory gets knocked a bit, probably rightly so, because it sometimes implies the director does everything and they don’t, but I do fundamentally believe that a movie ends up reflecting, almost unintentionally, the spirit of the director. And I believe that with Karyn’s work absolutely. I feel like if you watch something like Jennifer’s Body and that wicked sense of humor, that’s in Karyn. You watch something like Destroyer and kind of the depths of the layers of Nicole Kidman’s character, that’s in Karyn too. And you watch Girlfight and it feels punk rock and it feels, at the same time, deeply, deeply human. Karyn is also one of the… one of the best cooks that I know, and I feel like that ties into… her movie is just this kind of… this beautiful manipulation of craft in order to have this emotional effect on the people that she’s serving it up to. And she served this one up. Girlfight.”

“I want to talk about one other friend. I want to talk about Gina, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Love & Basketball. She’s not, like, boisterous. She’s not a in-your-face kind of energy at all. In fact, she’s always a little bit kind of sitting back and a little bit quiet sometimes. But then you get to know her and you realize she’s got an athlete’s– she started as an athlete, she’s got an athlete’s confidence. And this first movie is a fantastic romantic exploration of that. It makes all the sense to me that she’s now making some of the most human, kick-ass, huge action movies that Hollywood is kicking out right now, with, like, The Woman King. Gina, I love you. And I Love & Basketball.”

“So we can talk about Mike Leigh all day long. And there’s a couple other movies of his in the Collection. I think– I mean, it’s a controversial statement, but I think my favorite Mike Leigh movie is actually Topsy-Turvy. Period piece about Gilbert and Sullivan who created these wonderful little operetta soufflés, Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. This is about the making of The Mikado. It’s about the creative process and it’s about us doing what we do, making these things, even when the thing itself is this Topsy-Turvy, beautiful little confection. Just the blood, sweat, and tears that go into it. Jim Broadbent is absolutely fabulous in it. Also, this disc includes A Sense of History, which is a short that Broadbent wrote that he did with Mike Leigh. And it’s actually one of my favorite Mike Leigh movies also. It’s, like, a 20-minute short. It is also on the Criterion Channel right now. So, stop this video, hit stop or hit pause and then come back to it, I guess, but go right now and watch A Sense of History. And watch it to the end, because, I promise you, it’s a journey. It goes someplace by the end of it.”

“Hell’s Angels. Okay, so I’m actually picking this– Really my wife, Karina Longworth, is the one who should be here right now talking about this movie. I’m picking it because I want to reacquaint myself with it. I want to rewatch it. And also how amazing is the artwork? Anyway, my wife, Karina, wrote a book about Howard Hughes, which was called Seduction, and this was a movie that Howard Hughes made and famously spent so long making it, spent so much money, remade it. I believe they started making it in the silent era and then basically reshot it for sound and it kept… It was the Apocalypse Now of its day. I can’t wait to watch this beautiful restoration. Sorry, I just got lost reading the back of it. Going in the bag.”