"Another one of my five favorite films would be Gimme Shelter, by the Maysles brothers. I spent many years making documentary films between my first film and my second film, Blue Valentine, and I learned to really embrace, and be humbled by life, and by telling a story where you’re telling someone else’s story. And there’s something about the Maysles brothers, and especially that movie, where they were able to witness these moments. Especially with Gimme Shelter, you know, these moments of American history — this concert at Altamont that turned into kind of the bad trip of Woodstock. And I love how they frame it with the band, the Stones, watching the footage, watching their memories; this document, this witness to this incredible time in American life — and this crime, this real crime in America. Also, for nothing else than the moment where Mick Jagger has to watch Tina Turner. Again, like watching the Scorsese movie — and the Pasolini movie — their use of music, you know, is to watch a real rock and roll movie in the theater, with that sound. It’s great."

"Janet Malcolm is such an intellectual badass. This book was an extension of her piece of journalism in the New Yorker, where Malcolm has been a contributor for decades. It’s the fascinating story of a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, in which a young physician is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, a respected orthodontist. Malcolm uses the case as a way to examine how a murder trial is conducted, and to look at the American judicial system as a whole. It was the book that first sparked my interest in true crime."

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."