Christo­pher Nolan has by now inspired at least a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions of young view­ers to dream of becom­ing film­mak­ers. For my own age cohort, the touch­stone work was his break­out pic­ture Memen­to, with its reverse-ordered sto­ry fea­tur­ing a pro­tag­o­nist unable to cre­ate new mem­o­ries. Oth­ers may have felt a greater impact from the real­i­ty-bend­ing Incep­tion or the dystopi­an sci-fi vision of Inter­stel­lar (to say noth­ing of all those Bat­man movies). But whether at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um or today, with Nolan’s lat­est fea­ture Oppen­heimer rid­ing high at the box office, the best advice for such aspi­rants is the same: watch as many movies as pos­si­ble.

‘The prob­lem with Chris,” says Oppen­heimer star Cil­lian Mur­phy in the video above, “is that he’s seen every film ever made.” “Not every film,” Nolan replies, a hand-wav­ing denial that only bol­sters the accu­sa­tion. This takes place amid the shelves of JM Vidéo, one of the last two video stores still stand­ing in the cinephile cap­i­tal of Paris.

Nolan and Mur­phy paid a vis­it there to shoot an episode of Kon­bi­ni Video Club, a Youtube series that has also brought on such auteurs as Wes Ander­son, David Cro­nen­berg, and Ter­ry Gilliam. JM Vidéo feels like an espe­cial­ly suit­able space for Nolan, giv­en his advo­ca­cy of phys­i­cal media. On the defin­i­tive Blu-Ray and 4k ver­sions of his films, he explains, “there’s much less com­pres­sion,” and “we con­trol the col­or and the pic­ture and the bright­ness,” where­as stream­ing is “like broad­cast­ing a film: we don’t have much con­trol over how it goes out.”

Nolan pulls off the shelves There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love, the work of his con­tem­po­rary Paul Thomas Ander­son, as well as clas­sics that shaped his own direc­to­r­i­al choic­es: Cit­i­zen Kane, For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent, Lawrence of Ara­bia, Dr. Strangelove. That last was for­bid­den view­ing dur­ing the devel­op­ment of Oppen­heimer: “I’m a big fan of Strangelove, but I stopped watch­ing it for a cou­ple of years while we were mak­ing the film, because it’s too daunt­ing” — and because its black­ly satir­i­cal take on how the men in con­trol of the bomb decide the fate of the world could­n’t pos­si­bly have been improved upon. “I’m glad you did­n’t men­tion it,” adds Mur­phy, who may not have seen as many movies as Nolan, but whose range of ref­er­ence nev­er­the­less demon­strates his own cinephile cre­den­tials. “No fight­ing in the war room.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Films of Christo­pher Nolan Explored in a Sweep­ing 4‑Hour Video Essay: Memen­to, The Dark Knight, Inter­stel­lar & More

Wes Ander­son Vis­its a Paris Video Store and High­lights the Films He Loves: Kuro­sawa, Truf­faut, Buñuel & More

David Cro­nen­berg Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Ter­ry Gilliam Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies and Actors

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Wes Ander­son­’s lat­est pic­ture Aster­oid City is named for the small Ari­zona town (pop­u­la­tion: 87) in which its cen­tral sto­ry takes place. That town, in turn, is named for the inci­dent that made it (mod­est­ly) famous: the impact of an aster­oid that left behind a large crater. That crater was one of the fea­tures that Ander­son and his pro­duc­tion design­ers had to make for the shoot — but then, so was every­thing else in Aster­oid City, which had to be raised whole in an out-of-the-way area of Spain. Unlike­ly though it may sound in itself, the cin­e­mat­ic project of re-cre­at­ing the Amer­i­can West in south­ern Europe isn’t with­out prece­dent: the “Spaghet­ti West­erns” of the nine­teen-six­ties and sev­en­ties also relied on the Span­ish desert to pro­vide the right atmos­phere of sub­lime des­o­la­tion.

Just as movies like A Fist­ful of Dol­lars or Djan­go are root­ed in a cer­tain con­cep­tion of the sec­ond half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, so Aster­oid City is root­ed in a cer­tain con­cep­tion of the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth. This comes through most clear­ly in the archi­tec­ture of their sets.

“The thing was to try to make build­ings that were as evoca­tive of the time as we pos­si­bly could,” Ander­son says in the short mak­ing-of video above. But this thor­ough­ly mid­cen­tu­ry-provin­cial set­ting also need­ed its mys­te­ri­ous ele­ments: the crater, of course, but also the obser­va­to­ry and “the free­way on-ramp there that goes to nowhere.” The ful­ly assem­bled Aster­oid City felt like not just a set, but some­thing approach­ing an actu­al place: “Once it was built, we could be a tiny group in this what seemed like an aban­doned town.”

Any­one who’s spent enough time road-trip­ping across the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca will rec­og­nize that, con­ti­nen­tal loca­tion notwith­stand­ing, Aster­oid City cap­tures some­thing essen­tial about that coun­try’s more remote set­tle­ments, inhab­it­ed or not, locat­ed in arid regions or oth­er­wise. This required the fab­ri­ca­tion of not just build­ings but the flo­ra, fau­na, and geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions of an entire land­scape, prac­ti­cal­ly all of it adher­ent to Ander­son­’s sig­na­ture hand­made aes­thet­ic scheme, which some­how con­vinces through arti­fi­cial­i­ty. Even detrac­tors of Ander­son­’s work sure­ly derive plea­sure from the result­ing qual­i­ty of sheer phys­i­cal­i­ty, some of which also owes to his still shoot­ing on good old 35-mil­lime­ter film — as this video’s pub­lish­er, Kodak, does­n’t hes­i­tate to remind us.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Wes Ander­son Uses Minia­tures to Cre­ate His Aes­thet­ic: A Primer from His Mod­el Mak­er & Prop Painter

Wes Ander­son Movie Sets Recre­at­ed in Cute, Minia­ture Dio­ra­mas

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Revis­its Aban­doned Movie Sets for Star Wars and Oth­er Clas­sic Films in North Africa

A Star Wars Film Made in a Wes Ander­son Aes­thet­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Wes Ander­son lives at least part-time in Paris, a sit­u­a­tion whose advan­tages include the abil­i­ty to fre­quent JM Vidéo, one of the very few cinephile-ori­ent­ed video-rental shops still in busi­ness. His apart­ment is on rue Daguerre, which would make it a bit of a trek — across the Seine and then some — to get there. Still, he made it out to JM to shoot the video above, the lat­est install­ment of a series from French Youtube chan­nel Kon­bi­ni in which famous auteurs (here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured episodes star­ing David Cro­nen­berg and Ter­ry Gilliam) pick their favorites off the shelves. Any­one who’s seen Ander­son­’s work will have a sense of his love of movies, but sel­dom have we had the chance to see him speak so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly about them.

Ander­son­’s JM jour­ney begins and ends in Japan. He calls Shōhei Ima­mu­ra’s Vengeance Is Mine “a great, very long, sort of ser­i­al killer movie” and names Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Drunk­en Angel as one source of music for his own ani­mat­ed film Isle of Dogs. There fol­low works from Luis Buñuel, Rouben Mamou­lian (who seems to have been a par­tic­u­lar­ly pow­er­ful fount of inspi­ra­tion), musi­cals like The Paja­ma Game and Meet Me in St. Louis, and John Sturges’ West­ern Bad Day at Black Rock (whose title sequence he lift­ed for his lat­est pic­ture, Aster­oid City).

He also pulls out a series of French films: The Fire With­in by Louis Malle, The Big Risk by Claude Sautet, Play­time by Jacques Tati, Vagabond by Agnès Var­da (her­self a one­time rue Daguerre res­i­dent), The Crime of Mon­sieur Lange by Jean Renoir, and The Man Who Loved Women by François Truf­faut.

Oth­er of Ander­son­’s selec­tions involve his col­lab­o­ra­tors: his pro­duc­tion design­er Adam Stock­hausen worked on Steven Spiel­berg’s Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies, his direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Robert Yeo­man worked on Gus Van San­t’s Drug­store Cow­boy. Find­ing Mel Stu­ar­t’s Willy Won­ka and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry prompts him to dis­cuss his own upcom­ing Roald Dahl adap­ta­tion, a short film for Net­flix (cur­rent own­er of Dahl’s work) called The Won­der­ful Sto­ry of Hen­ry Sug­ar. Not long there­after he comes around to the ani­me sec­tion, where he express­es his appre­ci­a­tion for Isao Taka­hata’s fea­ture Only Yes­ter­day and Hidea­ki Anno’s series Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion. He imag­ines the pos­si­bil­i­ty of “some­one becom­ing a Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion fanat­ic and mak­ing it their reli­gion”; the fact that he has­n’t seen the actu­al­i­ty sug­gests that, how­ev­er inter­na­tion­al his life and work have become, he has yet to spend time in Mex­i­co.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s Favorite Films

David Cro­nen­berg Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Wes Ander­son Names 12 of His Favorite Art Films

Ter­ry Gilliam Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies and Actors

Books in the Films of Wes Ander­son: A Super­cut for Bib­lio­philes

Steal Like Wes Ander­son: A New Video Essay Explores How Wes Ander­son Pays Art­ful Trib­ute to Alfred Hitch­cock, Ing­mar Bergman & Oth­er Direc­tors in His Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.