Will Oldham

"Another movie my dad took me to see. Why? I don’t remember him asking me if I wanted to go to the movies, necessarily, nor if he explained what we were going to see, and I’m sure I don’t remember him talking to me after the fact about what we had seen. I went because it was my dad + the movies. How did he choose? ’Round Midnight, Pumping Iron . . . Walkabout. I remember seeing Walkabout (I was very young, a preteen), and for a long time I remembered much about it. When I saw it as an adult I saw so much that I had not remembered but must still have been there inside of me. Scary. And great, I guess? Walkabout helped begin an awareness of significant otherliness, and maybe helped reinforce the idea that otherliness is not really sanctioned."

"There are three movies the witnessings of which have been the most traumatic in my moviegoing times. Viridiana was one, seen in a London cinema, maybe up between Hampstead and Highgate Tubes, in 1990 or so. Another was Straw Dogs (also available as a Criterion release). The third was The Elephant Man, one of the few movies to which I remember my mother taking me. A commonality in all three (the commonality from which I recoiled) is the cruelty of the mob, which remains one of my biggest fears. I put these two movies in this list because I can’t help but value what they did to me, what they allowed me to comprehend about my relationship to the crowd."

"Thank you, Scorsese and Criterion, for this world cinema collection. On the headstock of my guitar is the name of the band Nass El Ghiwane. I have heard about Trances for years, and finally now I have been able to see it . . . and snuck into the experience was The Housekeeper, which helped me grasp the manipulations of individuals in my tangible life, creeping me the fuck out."

"Necessity is the mother of invention, and music is one of necessity’s prime agents. Music makes shit happen. Music made this movie happen, and it made Apple become so fucking powerful, and it made my life happen. Johnny, you’re too bad. Whoa whoa whoa."

"Why not check out a double-cassette VHS of a Russian sci-fi movie from the library in Bloomington, Indiana, in the summer of 1992? Had never heard of it, nor of Tarkovsky. I was checking out a movie every day, based on what narrow selection the library had on her shelves. I was not prepared for how bent my mind became through the experience of watching this movie. That summer, in addition to watching a movie every evening, I was working on the construction of songs with regularity for the first time in my life. Solaris restructured my consciousness for a moment and helped lead me to believe that the past = the present = the future. I’ve never seen the American remake, and, even though Soderbergh is so good, I think I never will."

"Another moviegoing experience with my dad. Being with my dad and watching Naked made me feel utterly paranoid and worthless, frightened to the bone. At the same time, I knew that the movie was self-contained and rewatchable, that it could operate as a vaccine if I thought about it enough, and that that vaccine could help to purge some of the demons then attempting to make a permanent host of my self."

"I had heard about Cassavetes, and when I started to see his movies I realized that I knew his face from childhood favorites Rosemary’s Baby and The Dirty Dozen. I loved The Dirty Dozen because of The Team. I still have an eight-by-ten publicity still from that movie. Which Cassavetes movie did I see first? I can’t remember. I know we watched Minnie and Moskowitz many times before a tour around the year 2000 and quoted it often, and I still offer Minnie’s toast to Zelmo in most instances when I am in the position to offer a toast: “To you and your happiness.” I know at some point I saw I’m Almost Not Crazy . . . before I saw Love Streams itself. Love Streams is, to me, Cassavetes’s version of Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or Russ Meyer’s Supervixens: a summing-up and distillation of ideas, theories, characters, plot devices; making a statement by improving upon many earlier acts and creating something that absolutely could not have been made without specific lives behind it, celebrating those lives and the shared history of creator and audience. I’ve never seen Love Streams projected; first I owned a VHS copy and later a copy of the European DVD whose release was sponsored by Agnès B. Love Streams also reminds me of my favorite movie, The Misfits, in the way that life on-screen and off- is a crucial collaborator in the ultimate full effect of the movie."

"This was the movie, when I was a kid. This and Bugsy Malone. I know all of the dialogue in these two movies from repeated viewings at the movie theater. The Vogue and the Alpha 3 theaters in Louisville. And Ruth Gordon gave me a gateway to Hollywood screenwriting history, and Cat Stevens a gateway to transformation through music. Harold took life’s lemons and made a black psychedelic monolithic lemonade. I learned to do that too. Comedy in death, comedy in failure, comedy in being mystified by societal expectations. I was very fond of MGM musicals during my childhood, and Harold and Maude felt like the closest thing to a modern-day evolution of one of those."