"Next to The Wizard of Oz, it’s my favorite movie of all time. The most honest on-screen depiction of mental illness ever. Cassavetes perfectly nails the heartbreak and frustration that eclipses a family when a loved one’s sanity slips away. It’s at times both gut-wrenching and oddly hilarious, and Cassavetes manages to make gorgeous cinema with colors and composition. Besides the impeccable, monumental performances of Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, the supporting cast is flawless, including both Cassavetes’s and Rowlands’s own real-life mothers, Katherine and Lady, and in particular George Dunn in his role as Mabel’s one-night stand Garson Cross. In any other film the character would be played as a cad the audience would be rooting against. Not so in a Cassavetes film, where the roles of hero and villain shift moment to moment."

"If I put Casablanca on I’ll sound like AFI, right? [laughs] Here’s the thing: there are all the choices you can make that you know sound really good and then there’re the ones that you really watch, like a hundred times. Like Paulie, the film with the parrot — but if I put that on my list I’m gonna look like an idiot. [laughs] You must see Paulie! I know you think I’m crazy. I love Paulie. I have these films that my younger brother’s like, “Amy, you’re gonna love this — you have to watch this film.” He introduced me to Paulie. There’s a whole bunch of people in Paulie: there’s Gena Rowlands, Jay Mohr, Cheech; the guy from Monk, Tony Shalhoub, who’s one of my favorites. It’s such a touching story. I hope I haven’t built it up too much. [laughs]"

"Choosing a Cassavetes film was the hardest part of making this list. All his films have continued to inspire me—every aspect of them. He’s one of the only filmmakers where I will put on the DVD just to listen to his commentary. His ideals, his pursuit of the road less traveled—and traveled in a way that is curious, thought-provoking, and dangerous—have always excited me. I take his box set with me to every set. Each film has an incredible backstory, and leaves me thinking, How the hell did he pull that off?! Gena Rowlands is absolutely stunning in every way in this film. And I love watching her and John act together, especially with her drunk during an improvised play for hundreds of extras who showed up because John took an ad out in the paper."

"This includes all of the films in the box set John Cassavetes: Five Films. I’m always a little leery of the routine critical construction “Without X, there would be no Y.” Surely Y would have come along; his or her work might have been a bit different, but he or she would have come along. But in the case of Cassavetes, it is difficult not to think of a whole talkative, financially strapped mob of filmmakers, some brilliant, some not so much, who very well might not have come along if he hadn’t, you know, blazed the path. Still, you don’t watch a Cassavetes film for its historical significance. These films are alive. How very well I remember my first, A Woman Under the Influence. I probably went in because I was a Columbo fan. Not only was I enthralled by a whole new Peter Falk; Gena Rowlands simply blew . . . me . . . away."

"This is my favorite. It’s A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes. What I love about his movies — especially this film too — is just the performances are so brave. The characters are so unpredictable. They’re so full of life. Also, there’s such a social commentary in this movie about how society doesn’t allow people to be who they really are, and I just find that a great metaphor for so many things in one’s life. I thought, “Through this one relationship, I’m moved in such a deep way.” I also love how Cassavetes pushes the performances so far that it finds this kind of amazing poetry at a certain point. I particularly remember this scene where Gena Rowlands is basically just so misunderstood and so cut down and beaten down that she finds this physicality. It was almost like a moment of ballet. I just think there’s something very genius going on in that film and very brave and I love it. It’s a beautiful film."

"A lot of these are acting. A Woman under the Influence. I just think Gena Rowlands is absolutely incredible, and the sort of vibe of that movie. You can just feel the closeness of the actors and the crew and the people making the film. Again, it’s so incredibly alive and spontaneous, and that sort of weird, intimate, long-lens voyeuristic stuff and their fights, it’s just absolutely incredible. Also, just long takes of allowing actors to be, and to not cut out the white noise of superfluous action that doesn’t necessarily contribute to the plot. The purpose and the heart of the movie is stated over and over again in every tiny action, in every little thing they do, in every smile Peter Falk gives to her or look she gives to him. The messiness of it is just absolutely incredible, and that dinner scene with them all together is just stunning."

"And the rest of the films in John Cassavetes: Five Films. Not one film but five, which already takes me over my Ten Best quota. Pick any of these films and meditate on performance, what makes it and what sustains it. If there is a choice to make I would opt for Faces and for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Godard, who admired the latter, compared it to listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning, when the last patrons have left the nightclub and the waiters are stacking the chairs on the tables . . . Not a bad comparison, all in all). Looking at a Cassavetes movie should persuade any viewer that there are no bad actors but only bad directors, and that acting has more to do with the strategic setting of gestures in space than it has to do with a trip to the flea market of emotions. The miracle of Cassavetes’s craft lies in that he makes the emotion surge, while obstinately refusing to illustrate it. No wonder his actors look always as if they were documented. Look at the bodies of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, and Peter Falk: they are all avatars of Lillian Gish, the rightful inheritors of that magic moment in Broken Blossoms when with her fingers she creased a smile on her terrified face and invented film acting."

"The last film I would say — and I could pick many of his films, but I will choose Woman Under the Influence, by Cassavetes. I could also have said Faces, or I could have said The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, or Husbands, or Minnie and Moskowitz, or I could have said Love Streams, but — today it will be Woman Under the Influence. I love the structure of it; its two-part structure — it really feels like a film in two movements. Arguably the two greatest performances of all time, between Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands. You know, it’s a home movie, and everything I’ve been trying to make are home movies — movies that take place inside the house and the family. I love the spirit of Cassavetes’ films, in that he’s casting his wife and his best friend in the roles, and his mother and her mother are in it, and the kids. To me it’s a movie that changes, too, throughtout the course of my life. I know the movie isn’t changing, I’m changing; but when I watch it the movie seems to shape-shift. I remember the first time I ever saw it I thought she was crazy; I remember on the 50th time I watched it I thought she was the only sane person in the movie and everyone else was crazy. I love that about movies that are made with a certain openness — that the audience can kind of participate in the imagination of the characters, you know; of their lives and of the story."

"I would probably say A Woman Under the Influence [for my fifth movie], although it’s a deep, deep tie between that and the movie Opening Night. And A Woman Under the Influence was, I think, more celebrated, but Opening Night might resonate more with me. It is a story about an actress coming to terms with aging and her mortality. I think I’m also really drawn to the way those movies were made, and you can kind of feel the hammer and nail that was used to bring the whole thing together in this way that’s sort of extraordinary and that you can just almost feel the effort made by everyone involved – which is what happens when you make any movie. But sometimes [it affects you] when you know that everybody’s friends were there and they’re all making food for people to eat while they’re making this movie, to make this movie, to tell the story, not to serve any bottom line, or anything other than their creative interests. [In Opening Night, writer, director, and co-star John Cassavetes worked with Gena Rowlands, his then wife.] You don’t always have that luxury. And I just am always very moved by the way they made their movies and what a family they were and what places they could go because of it, because of that intimacy, because of that ease and that history between them. They were able to do things that I don’t know that you could achieve or accomplish in any other fashion, you know?"