"The next one would be La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz’s movie. I remember seeing that for the first time and being absolutely blown away by it. Not just on a technical level, but I’m always a fan of debut films that don’t just announce a director talent, but when the director talent is so confident and so self-assured that it feels like it’s their 10th or 15th movie already. That film just screamed that. It was filled with so many ideas and so much rage and anger. Again, it was an important movie, and I might be misremembering something now, but I’m pretty sure that the effect of the film was such that the president of France at the time forced his members of Parliament to go watch the film in order to understand the plight that people were living in the projects of France, of Paris, at the time. I’m sure I remember reading something like that. [Editor’s note: It was then Prime Minister Alain Juppé, who held a mandatory screening for his cabinet members.] It was such a powerful film and such a powerful story that’s told so unflinchingly. That film has always stuck with me and has been something I’ve owned in every possible format I could own it in. That’s definitely high on the list."

"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."