1. Austin City Lights and Brookline Is My Lady (Public-access TV shows)
Public access is always the
best thing on TV. It’s the last stand of the avant-garde. Austin City Lights
was this stunning show with a cast of eccentrics, including a strange woman
named “Flash” Jordan Thomas and her mother, Lady B. I have a strong memory of
them standing around singing a song they seemed to be making up on the spot.
Brookline Is My Lady was a variety show from Boston in the nineties.
Sketch-comedy stuff that you wouldn’t find in a more professional production.
2. Elvis Costello, Get Happy!!
I’d happily trade whatever
filmmaking ability I have for a fraction of his musical talent. Get Happy!! is
my favorite Elvis album, but everything from the first ten years of his career
is unbelievably good. After that, you get the sense that there’s less misery
and terror fueling the work, and sometimes you miss that misery and terror, but
the talent remains stunning.
3. Jimmy Carter
His
skills were huge and specific, but he just didn’t connect with people on a mass
scale. He had a knack for being incredibly detail-oriented, at the expense of
the big picture, but I don’t think anyone would question his virtue or
diligence. I relate to that managerial style. I’m not as smart or virtuous as
Jimmy Carter, but if I had to be any American president, I would probably fail
in the same ways he did—not to call him a failure!
4. Broadcast News
Casting William Hurt as a guy
who’s not that smart was a stroke of genius. He’s a pretty smart dude, and it’s
really hard to play a not-that-smart guy, but he’s so brilliant in that role.
As a kid, it was probably a bad thing that I identified so much with Albert
Brooks’s character. He’s a terrible model for adulthood. I’ve certainly gotten
more sympathetic toward William Hurt’s character as I’ve grown older, maybe
because I’ve become dumber.
5. Love Streams
Love Streams has so many crazy,
formal flourishes that aren’t what people associate with John Cassavetes, but
it’s every inch a Cassavetes movie. It takes these incredible risks, yet they
work, and it has the single most surreal moment in any movie in the bit near
the end. I could not begin to explain to you what it is, but it’s stunningly
resonant. It’s something I really admired and would love to be able to pull
off.
6. William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton
It’s something Eggleston shot
in the seventies but wasn’t released until 2005. It was shot on the Sony
Portapak [camera] when that came out. There was also a documentary called
William Eggleston in the Real World, which had some clips of this Portapak
footage of Eggleston hanging out with his kooky, drug-addled friends in
Memphis, and it’s fucking riveting! But I fell in love with the camera. I
thought, What movie could I make in the language that this camera represents?
There would be no Computer Chess without that camera.
7. Vampir-Cuadecuc
This experimental filmmaker
named Pere Portabella was on the set of Count Dracula with Christopher Lee, and
the whole movie is just black-and-white 16-mm. footage of him hanging out.
They’re shooting the movie and he’s off in a corner somewhere, filming them
film the movie. I’d put it on my list of all-time best vampire movies. The
opening is music and cars pulling into the parking lot, and we have that in the
beginning of Computer Chess, and that was me trying to steal that mojo, even
though it’s completely different in our movie. The vampire spirit can be
anywhere.
8. New England Mobile Book Fair
It’s a bookstore in Newton
Highlands, Massachusetts, near my hometown. It’s not mobile—it’s a warehouse.
It’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from Barnes & Noble, which smells
like coffee and is nice to customers. Paperbacks were organized by publisher,
then alphabetically by title, which made it impossible to find anything. You
could only explore. I bought a $2 book of chess trivia ten years ago. That was
what first sparked the notion of a computer-chess movie for me.
9. Joni Mitchell’s eighties albums
I’ll be the jerk that argues
with you that her eighties albums deserve another listen. They say her concerns
had become more strident and impersonal and the records didn’t sound good, but
I think that’s unfair. She was still the same stunningly brilliant melodist.
Even in her most politically aggressive lyrics, I’m still onboard, whether or
not I agree with what she’s saying.
10. The Rocky series
I’m
not being facetious when I say that it’s the closest thing to an American
analogue for Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel movies—you really get to spend time with
somebody. Rocky is less explicitly about the passage of time, but when you
watch all of them, you can really feel it. There’s no actor in the world that I
would rather work with than Stallone. That’s a long-standing fantasy for me.
[One should “bend over”, and regard it as taste personal aesthetic.]
11. Paul McCartney, Silly Love Songs
You’re supposed to like John
the most, but I love all four Beatles—I’ll stand up for a couple Ringo records
if you put a few drinks in me. But McCartney was the most fascinating
personality. He’s never going out of his way to look cool: “You’d think that
people would have had enough of silly love songs.” I have a similar feeling
about that. As a filmmaker, I don’t mind putting something pleasant out into
the world. I have a pitch for a McCartney musical. I haven’t quite worked the
whole thing out, but he’s welcome to call me.
12. Kate Dollenmayer, Justin Rice, Tilly and Maggie Hatcher, and
Patrick Riester
The stars of my movies. For the
first three, before I knew anything about them, I knew I wanted to write
something for Kate [Funny Ha Ha], Justin [Mutual Appreciation], and for the
Hatchers [Beeswax]. If Kate had woken up and thought, I’m not going to do this,
then that project would have been over. It seemed a shortcut to guarantee a
vital performance. With Patrick, I didn’t do that. We met a couple weeks before
I started shooting Computer Chess. In retrospect, I can’t believe I didn’t have
him there in mind, because he had that uncanny ability.
13. Eddie Murphy
He was 19 when he started on
Saturday Night Live and 23 when he did Beverly Hills Cop. You don’t think of
Axel Foley as that young. But it works, because he was so confident. He’s
hilarious, but he’s also an amazingly good actor. I have a pitch for him too.
He’s a huge Elvis fan, and I have this fantasy of a movie where Eddie plays
Elvis on the last day of his life. Elvis dies on the toilet and has a fever
dream that he’s Eddie Murphy. I haven’t cracked that one yet.
14. Chantal Akerman (Harvard’s department of Visual and Environmental
Studies)
I studied film as an undergrad
at Harvard, and she was my thesis adviser. She gave me two pieces of advice,
which I haven’t taken yet. She told me girls wouldn’t like me until I stopped
dressing like a 14-year-old, and that I should stop being pretentious and just
make comedies. I think of Computer Chess as a comedy, but it probably behooves
me to go out and make a real one sometime.
15. Brian De Palma
De Palma will spend an hour of
the movie whipping you into a frenzy, building the house of cards, and then end
the movie gleefully knocking it down in a way that infuriates half the audience
but is still commercially viable. And Lord knows I love his split screens. And
I finally got to do them in Computer Chess, to put a few split screens in the
movie. Not with the level of invention or meticulousness that he brings, but it
was fun to pretend that I was De Palma for five minutes.
16. Game Theory, Real Nighttime
The lead singer, Scott Miller,
died recently, which really shook me. He had this complex relationship with his
lack of fame, but somehow the fact that his bands never made it big seemed like
part of why they stayed great. They just did great work for twenty-some years.
Lolita Nation is probably their most beloved album, but song for song, I’ll
take Real Nighttime over it. He was always bursting with ideas as a songwriter,
and it feels absolutely effortless on this record.
17. Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset
The crazier Heinlein’s books
were, the more invested I was. He was the most sex-obsessed of sci-fi writers,
which might be why he appealed to my adolescent self. In his last several
books, there was this weird wish-fulfillment fantasy about incest—the rosiest
view of incest I’ve ever read! To Sail Beyond the Sunset is pretty nuts and has
the sexy cover. At the end, a woman falls in love with her father. There seems
to be a hidden agenda there—he’s got some things he’s working on.
18. 16-mm.
I don’t think there’s ever been
a moment when I’m watching 16-mm. on a screen where I didn’t feel really happy.
It’s hard for me to say how much of it is sentimental, because I worked with it
in school. But when I think that maybe I should go out and get the RED camera,
for me the trick of it is, how do you bring back the organic feel of the image,
besides pressing the organic-filter button in Final Cut Pro? The simulacra get
more and more convincing, but like Marvin Gaye sang, “Ain’t nothing like the
real thing.”
19. Twin Peaks
Everybody says it’s the golden
age of TV now, but Twin Peaks is still the king in my book. These days, quality
control has gotten stricter, because they don’t want a show as nuts as Twin
Peaks. But I like when a show is unpredictable and goes off the rails. It’s one
thing I’ve really enjoyed about Girls: You can have a goofy episode followed by
something intense and dramatic. I don’t need to know where we’re headed every
week.
20. “Filmed plays”
This used to be a put-down:
“That was just a filmed play. That wasn’t cinematic.” It could be referring to
something that was adapted from a play or just a particularly talky movie, and
it always made me sad, because I really liked those. The good ones are as
cinematic as anything. It’s insane to look at a movie adaptation of Glengarry
Glen Ross and say it’s not cinematic just because it has roots in another
medium. It completely succeeds as cinema, as far as I’m concerned.
21. France
I have
an outdated fantasy that I become my generation’s Jerry Lewis and get adopted
by France. That hasn’t happened yet. I was in France for about 24 hours. I’d
taken French from seventh to eleventh grade, and I tried to bust it out, but
they were not impressed. I had one very successful errand—I needed to get some
pages Xeroxed, it was a lot to try to get right, but they didn’t bat an eye at
me. But from there it was all downhill. The dream was over.
* This article originally appeared in the July 22, 2013 issue of New
York Magazine.
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