• Chronicle of the Year of Embers

  Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratories. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 42413e

  This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

• 100 Horsemen

  Restored by Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Com Film at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

• The Woman with the Knife

  Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

  This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

• Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia
• $500 Reward

  Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Additional preservation work made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, Celeste Bartos, and the Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation.

• 1970 Gay Pride March
• 23 Paces to Baker Street

  Restored by 20th Century Fox in association with The Film Foundation.

• 24 Frames Per Second
• A Dam Rib Bed

  Preserved by Film-Maker's Cooperative through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

• abda/Rebirth

...plus 884 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• East of Eden
• High and Low
• Last Year at Marienbad
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Lola Montès
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• The Round-Up
• Some Came Running
• Zulu

I love the idea of putting different films together into one program. I grew up seeing double features, programs in repertory houses, evenings of avant-garde films in storefront theatres. You always learn something, see something in a new light, because every movie is in conversation with every other movie. The greater the difference between the pictures, the better.

Over the years, I’ve been asked to pair my own pictures with older films by other people that have inspired them. The request has come from film festivals, which present the pairings as a program. The “inspiration” and “influence” aren’t completely accurate. I think of them as companion films. Sometimes the relationship is based on inspiration. Sometimes it’s the relationships between the characters. Sometimes it’s the spirit of the picture. Sometimes it’s far more mysterious than that.

Here is a list of my own films and their companions in cinema history.

• The Heiress

  Companion to Killers of the Flower Moon

  Each one of these pictures was so important to me as I was preparing Killers of the Flower Moon: The Heiress for the relationship between Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, which was a reference point for Leo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and myself; Last of the Line, which I saw for the first time when I was young, for the presence of real Lakota Natives in many key roles, and for the unusual point of view, which truly expresses the tragedy of Native experience; Lady of the Dug-Out for its authentic portrait of outlaw life, the reality of the settings; Blood on the Moon, a noir Western, for the friendship between Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston, which goes wrong in a way that was close to Leo and Bob De Niro in Killers, and also for the way the actors look in the frame, and the clumsy, grungy, seemingly unchoreographed fight in a low-ceilinged dark cantina, which has always stayed in my mind; Red River because it gave me another angle on the relationship between Leo and Bob; Wild River for the extraordinary look of the picture, and for the key moment where Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick are kissing ionately in the car with the reflection of the tree on the windshield.

  The Heiress is also a companion film to The Age of Innocence

  How do you film the American past—in this case, the world of Old New York? In our story, as in Wyler’s classic, all that wealth, all those fine possessions and exquisite manners, become a prison house. The characters are trapped in all that material wealth. In that sense, Visconti’s masterpiece was a direct inspiration.

  But we also looked to The Heiress, the absolute emotional brutality of the picture. For the Ralph Richardson character of the father, it doesn’t really matter at all who is in love with whom, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the society. It’s more about keeping the society and the bloodline clean, not to have interlopers like Morris, played by Montgomery Clift, come in and try to marry his daughter Catherine, played by Olivia de Havilland.

• The Last of the Line

  Companion to Killers of the Flower Moon

  See the description in The Heiress.

• The Lady of the Dugout

  Companion for Killers of the Flower Moon

  See the description in The Heiress.

• Blood on the Moon

  Companion to Killers of the Flower Moon

  See the description in The Heiress.

• Red River

  Companion to Killers of the Flower Moon

  See the description in The Heiress.

• Wild River

  Companion to Killers of the Flower Moon

  See the description in The Heiress.

• Moulin Rouge

  Companion to Personality Crisis: One Night Only

  When David Tedeschi and I started thinking about how to approach David Johansen’s cabaret performances at the Café Carlyle, we went back to the years before cinema, Paris in the 19th century, Aristide Bruant at Le Chat Noir, the tradition of the “chanson réaliste”. It’s connected with a particular visual style, especially the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted Bruant and who lived in that world. So of course we looked to Moulin Rouge, John Huston’s film about Lautrec. Huston told his DP, Oswald Morris, that he wanted the picture to look “like Toulouse-Lautrec had directed it: vivid but subdued, with a smoky hue”. That’s the feeling we were going for. Ellen Kuras handled it beautifully.

  I also thought about the New York Underground world, the world that David Johansen had come out of: the beautiful, crazy, exciting experimental pictures made by Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, and the Godfather of it all, Jonas Mekas. Jonas made moves straight from his heart. He brought people together under the umbrella of avant-garde cinema, and he created a big beautiful family of filmmakers. After I showed Mean Streets at The New York Film Festival, there was a knock on my hotel room door. It was Jonas and his brother Adolfas, and they came with peaches and champagne, to welcome me into the family. I’ll never forget it.

• The Day of the Jackal

  Companion to The Irishman

  The Irishman was of a piece with GoodFellas and Casino in one sense, a very different picture in another sense. It was all about the emotions of the characters, the friendships, the betrayals. It was about the gradual, inevitable unfolding. The three pictures chosen for The Irishman involve very carefully, painstakingly planned criminal enterprises, two heists and an attempted assassination, and in each one everything is very cool, deliberate, quiet throughout: even the violence and the betrayals happen quietly. I actually used a piece of the music from Grisbi for the score.

• Touchez Pas au Grisbi

  Companion to The Irishman

  See the description in The Day of the Jackal.

• Rififi

  Companion to The Irishman

  See the description in The Day of the Jackal.

...plus 49 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.