Wes Anderson, who lives part-time in Paris, visited JM Video (one of the two remaining video stores in Paris) recently to film this segment where he discusses some of his favorite films. Open Culture explains:
Anderson's JM journey begins and ends in Japan. He calls Shōhei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine "a great, very long, sort of serial killer movie" and names Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel as one source of music for his own animated film Isle of Dogs. There follow works from Luis Buñuel, Rouben Mamoulian (who seems to have been a particularly powerful fount of inspiration), musicals like The Pajama Game and Meet Me in St. Louis, and John Sturges' Western Bad Day at Black Rock (whose title sequence he lifted for his latest picture, Asteroid City).
He also pulls out a series of French films: The Fire Within by Louis Malle, The Big Risk by Claude Sautet, Playtime by Jacques Tati, Vagabond by Agnès Varda (herself a onetime rue Daguerre resident), The Crime of Monsieur Lange by Jean Renoir, and The Man Who Loved Women by François Truffaut.
To see more of his recommendations, and to experience his infectious enthusiasm for and deep knowledge of—like, seriously, mind-blowing, impressively deep knowledge of–film and cinema, watch the video here. It's a delightful way to spend 20 minutes.
