Fun Fridays – Director’s Favourite Films – Richard Linklater

Hello Film Doctor friends

How was your week?

This week’s Fun Friday comes with the release of  “Boyhood” – a 12-years-in-the-making tale of growing up,  Richard Linklater‘s latest project.

So we turn to Mr. Linklater (“Before Sunrise”, “Before Sunset”, “Before Midnight“, “Dazed and Confused”, “Bernie”) for a list of cinema favourites (as previously selected for Time Out: Director’s Choice, Sight & Sound and Criterion)

•  “Some Came Running” (dir. Vincente Minnelli) – Apparently, quoted in an interview with Hermione Hoby as the film that changed his life:  “I was 23 and I was really starting to dig into film’s history. I’d just moved to Austin, Texas, and I was voracious – I was watching maybe 600 films a year. And then I came across a campus screening of Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running. I didn’t take it on as a “Oh here’s a great film you have to see” – it’s just something I wandered into.  It really resonated with me. It’s about the prodigal son come back to his home town and it’s about art and sex and who you want to be – all those important things. It’s a Sinatra vehicle but I love it because it’s about an artist who’s flopped, and that’s hard to depict. There’s the person Sinatra’s character, Dave Hirsh, kind of aspires to be – he had the chance to be the very greatest, but then he’s this boozing, gambler guy too, and Dean Martin, playing Bama Dillert, represents that world.  I have different feelings about those guys every time I watch it. It’s like Citizen Kane – every time you see it it’s a different movie.” (R. Linklater for The Guardian, 11 April 2010)

• “Andrei Rublev” (1966, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

• “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966, dir. Robert Bresson)

• “The Flowers of St. Francis” (1950, dir. Roberto Rossellini)

• “Day of Wrath” (1943, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer)

• “Tokyo Story” (1953, dir. Yasujiro Ozu)

• “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988,  dir. Martin Scorsese)

• “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948, dir. Preston Sturges)

• “Fanny and Alexander” (1982, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

• “Pickpocket” (1959, dir. Robert Bresson)

• “I Know Where I’m Going!” (1945, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

• “Barry Lyndon” (1975, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

• “In a Year With 13 Moons” (1978, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

• “The Crowd” (1928, dir. King Vidor)

• “They Were Expendable” (1945, dir. John Ford, Robert Montgomery)

• “Bigger Than Life” (1956, dir. Nicholas Ray)

• “New York, New York” (1977, dir. Martin Scorsese)

• “O Lucky Man!” (1973, dir. Lindsay Anderson) 

• “El” (1953, dir. Luis Bunuel)

• “The Mother and the Whore” (1973, dir. Jean Eustache)

• “Goodfellas” (1990, dir. Martin Scorsese) 

“Boyhood” opens in the UK cinemas nationwide this Friday, 11th July.