The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark
Thirty disparate directors discuss their transformative moviegoing experiences in this collection of revealing and entertaining interviews. The subjects cover the cinematic gamut, from mainstream veterans (Arthur Hiller, Bill Condon), art-house auteurs (Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan), and young turks (Jay Duplass, Richard Kelly) to cult figures (Kevin Smith, John Waters), documentarians (Alex Gibney, Steve James) and animators (Pete Docter, Chris Miller). Some watched their pivotal flick as children—John Landis saw the fantasy epic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad at age eight and said, “Hey, I could do that”—while others were already committed to the medium and viewed their picks in film school. Many of the choices show an obvious influence—for instance, John Woo, renowned for his hard-boiled Hong Kong crime epics, cited Rebel without a Cause and Mean Streets—but others are genuinely surprising, such as horror auteur George Romero’s picking Michael Powell’s opera adaptation The Tales of Hoffmann. The discussions provide insight not only into the chosen films—most have been viewed repeatedly by the enthusiastic interviewees—but also into the directors’ own works. Their heartfelt and passionate tributes are cinephilia made concrete. --Gordon Flagg