One of the most intriguing (and unexpected) pop culture discoveries of the last week was this post from Studio 360, which revealed that they had acquired Steven Soderbergh’s “cultural diet” for the past year — a detailed, day-by-day account of the films, television, and books that the Oscar-winning filmmaker ingested from last April to this March. It’s full of interesting nuggets: his almost-obsessive viewing of The Social Network (four times), his appreciation for low culture (hello, The Room), his AMC fandom (both Mad Men and Breaking Bad pop up frequently), his programmer’s sense of pairing (he apparently prepared for the Coen Brothers’ True Grit remake by revisiting Miller’s Crossing), and his apparent speed-reading skills (dude’s knocking out dense books in a day or two). Also worth noting are his three Christmas week viewings of Raiders of the Lost Ark — each, he takes pains to note, in black and white (which we’re totally going to do now).
Soderbergh’s list got us wondering about the cultural appetites of some of his fellow filmmakers. Some are fairly easy to pinpoint, via interviews and the like; others require a bit of creative guesswork. Both are after the jump.
Quentin Tarantino
CONFIRMED: Few filmmakers have tastes more transparent than QT — and not just from the countless homages and influences clear in his own work. He programs an annual festival at the New Beverly Theater (which he now owns), and this year’s program included a Paul Mazursky double feature, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, and the Johnny Cash vehicle Five Minutes to Live. He also frequently releases lists of his favorite films of the year; last year’s included not only expected choices like Toy Story 3 (his number one), The Social Network, True Grit, and The King’s Speech, but popcorn movies like Knight and Day and Tangled. And around the time of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino made the above video, listing his favorite films since 1992 (the year he started making movies).
SUSPECTED: Tarantino may never quite have owned up to how much he liked the 1987 Hong Kong action movie City on Fire .
Comments (10)
Oh my god he talks so much.
YES. QT appreciates Supercop.
Amazingly lame ending to this otherwise great feature.
The Woody Allen entry on this feature uses his Watching Movies With… piece from the New York Times. Bay was also a subject of one of these pieces. I know that the writer is attempting to do what we call ‘a joke’ with the whole “Michael Bay is, like, totally insane” idea, but it is spectacularly weak and has been done a thousand times already. How much more interesting would it have been to point out that the guy was inspired, as the NYT piece suggests, by West Side Story?
What? One out of ten lady directors..?! That’s a pretty narrow little snapshot. What about Jane Campion?
Or Sofia Coppola?
But anyway, I liked the Michael Bay part. It was appropriately lazy. Boom indeed.
[...] Bailey collects clips of some of your favorite filmmakers discussing their favorite films for Flavorwire (no relation). He assembled YouTube interviews that show directors like Quentin [...]
what about jane campion, indeed. check out ‘In the Cut’, starring meg ryan and mark ruffalo. the last scene, with meg walking the long way home, is priceless, a classic movie moment that i only wish could have been longer. it said so much to me. jane can be seen in a bar scene when dancing is going on. she is seated on a stool, a blonde sipping a drink.
[...] few weeks back, we mentioned that list of Steven Soderbergh’s “cultural diet” (films viewed and books read and TV watched [...]
[...] by Stephen Soderbergh’s apparent love of watching Raiders of the Lost Ark in black and white (three times in one week), Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey has put together a list of ten modern [...]
[...] Tarantino may be a genius, but the dude’s got weird taste; witness, for example, his video list of the best films of the 1990s, which included the Woody Allen/Jason Biggs movie Anything Else (a flick that even Woody’s [...]
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