Jake Paltrow’s Top 10 directors
Here, Paltrow’s list of the late auteurs he wishes they’d had a chance to interview, along with his favorite of their movies. Cue the Netflix.
Last June moviemakers Jake Paltrow and Noah Baumbach began interviewing influential directors from all over the world for a series of documentaries about their work. The first installment—the pair aren’t ready to announce the subject—will debut this fall. “If we have it our way, we’ll be doing interviews over the next few decades, amassing what will eventually be a first-person encyclopedic collection of testimonials,” says Paltrow, 35, who is best known for his 2007 film The Good Night, starring his older sister, Gwyneth. Here, Paltrow’s list of the late auteurs he wishes they’d had a chance to interview, along with his favorite of their movies. Cue the Netflix.
1. MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI “La Notte is my favorite of the Antonioni pictures and my favorite work of the master cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo, who also shot 8 1/2 for Fellini.”
2. CLAUDE CHABROL “I was halfway through Innocents With Dirty Hands the day he died last September. Jean Rochefort as the lawyer, Maître Légal, is one of my all-time favorite supporting performances.”
3. INGMAR BERGMAN “Bergman made countless masterpieces, but for one reason or another Winter Light stays closest to my heart.”
4. MAURICE PIALAT “All of his movies are perfect, and no one east of Cassavetes got more natural performances out of his actors. His tale of the horrors of youth, L’Enfance Nue (Naked Childhood), is probably the only film about a kid that can give Truffaut’s The 400 Blows a run for its money. If I had to choose between the two, I’d take Pialat.”
5. GEORGE ROY HILL “He’s most famous for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—a movie people always feel they have seen more times than they actually have.”
6. ERIC ROHMER “For city dwellers like me who don’t get to vacation in the summer, no filmmaker can so effectively make you feel like you went to France for August, fell in love, got hurt, broke up, grew up, and figured some things out—all in 90 minutes or so. My favorite of Rohmer’s cinematic escapes is La Collectionneuse.”
7. SYDNEY POLLACK “I first saw They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? when I was very young. Its transporting qualities were so strong that I felt like I had lived it. Only recently, with adult eyes, was I able to metabolize how tragic a tale it really is. He was one of the great modern American filmmakers and a terrific actor.”
8. CLAUDE SAUTET “He was not a part of the New Wave group of directors, but he made most of his films during their heyday. César and Rosalie, one of many he made with Romy Schneider, presents the most delightfully painful adult love triangle.”
9. ELEM KLIMOV “Come and See is, in my opinion, the best war movie ever made, and is a close second to Inglourious Basterds for its treatment of a retributive Hitler assassination fantasy.”
10. DINO RISI “His films are very hard to find in the United States. If you can get it, I recommend starting with Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life).”
