Vincent D’Onofrio

“I’m looking for The Ruling Class. It’s Peter O’Toole, doing what I think is probably the best performance any British actor has ever done in anything. He’s amazing and way ahead of his time. To me, he was a premier actor.”

“Midnight Cowboy. Just what I consider a perfect film. There are no flaws in this movie. This movie has incredible performances from everybody, especially Voight and Hoffman. But more than that, it’s full of incredible characters. It’s a very New York movie, which is weird because it was shot by an Englishman. The editing, the cinematography, and the performances are so raw and real. It’s amazing.”

“Man Bites Dog. So this is a film… The reason why I’m picking this is because it starts as a documentary and unfolds into a brutal movie about a serial killer. It shocked me when I first saw it. I’m curious to see if it still holds up, but I imagine it does, because I imagine that… All I know is that I’ve seen a lot of these types of movies, with this kind of genre. The best bits of those movies, I’m reminded of what this film did first.”

“Divorce Italian Style. I’m a huge Marcello Mastroianni fan. He was way ahead of his time as well. I remember seeing him in a movie for the first time when I was very young, and I could follow his thinking just through his eyes, and nobody has done it better than him, even to this day, I think, where sometimes there’s no dialogue and you’re just watching him think and he’s sort of acting and not acting simultaneously, and it’s just beautiful.”

“This speaks for itself. It’s Cassavetes. It’s just a great movie. It’s so raw. It’s so emotional. The idea that… that they were actually able to get away with this film is just… If you like to watch raw films where you can hardly tell if they’re acting, this is the beginning of something here, and only Cassavetes could have pulled it off.”

“Okay, I have this on laserdisc: Down by Law. I remember seeing this with my friends, and I was in LA doing a movie at the time. I remember three of us watching this film together and just thinking, “What is this? Is this… what we can do? Are we allowed to do now? Can I be in a movie like this?” we were all thinking. And then, not long after that, I met Jarmusch, just hung out with him one evening at the Viper club, Depp’s club that he used to have, in the office in the back, got to hang out with Jim Jarmusch. It was pretty awesome.”

“So I was handed this just now because I came in and very selfishly asked if I could have a box set of all of Bergman’s classics. Almost all of them, I hear. Almost all of them. But my first love, from afar, was Liv Ullmann. And so she, in a way, turned me on to… indirectly turned me on to Ingmar Bergman’s films. I’ve… I will never forget seeing her act for the first time, and I remember thinking, “I wonder if I could ever get away with the kind of acting that she’s getting away with,” in these films, being directed by Bergman. That led me to the rest of his movies, which I’m sure you all know out there. They’re incredible. So, this is now mine. Thank you very much.”