Kathryn Bigelow and Mary Bronstein Pick Movies Every Director Should Watch

Film

‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950), directed by Billy Wilder

“What I love about this movie,” says Bronstein, “is Gloria Swanson,” who plays Norma Desmond in Wilder’s tragic portrait of a former silent-film star desperate to make a return to the screen. Bronstein, 46, who directed last year’s maternal psychological thriller “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” thinks filmmakers can learn a lot about working with actors by watching “Sunset Boulevard.” What Swanson does with her face is “so extraordinary,” she says, and “it would stretch me [as a filmmaker] to know how to direct an actor to do those things.”

‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (1959), directed by Alain Resnais

Resnais’s cult classic, written by the novelist Marguerite Duras, about an intense affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect in postwar Hiroshima, heralded the French New Wave and features a notable use of flashbacks. Bigelow, 74, the Academy Award-winning director of “The Hurt Locker” (2009), recommends it because it “intertwines memory, desire and trauma against the aftermath of nuclear devastation.”

‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’ (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich

In Aldrich’s psychological drama, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford play sisters and former Hollywood stars caught in an abusive codependent relationship. Isolated in a mansion, Jane and Blanche realize that they “hate and need each other in equal measure,” says Bronstein. When she first saw the film, she loved that the focus wasn’t on a man, and that the film didn’t sexualize these women either. “These are characters that I hadn’t seen on film before,” she says. “I was like, ‘You can do that?’”

‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Bigelow calls Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” a “masterwork of sustained tension.” The film follows four European men in South America who are hired by an oil company to transport explosive cargo across a dangerous route without adequate protections. Clouzot was known for making skillful thrillers, and the film, she says, “transforms physical danger into existential dread, building suspense with precision and restraint.”

‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

Considered by many filmmakers to be one of the greatest movies ever made, Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” is a chronicle of the guerrilla movement in Algeria, and France’s violent attempts to quell it. The film, which focuses on Ali la Pointe, a revolutionary fighter with the National Liberation Front, is “urgent and wonderfully immersive,” says Bigelow, examining “insurgency and counterinsurgency through a docu-style realism that remains unsettlingly contemporary.”

‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ (1966), directed by Mike Nichols

Bronstein anticipates that people may question her inclusion of Nichols’s directorial debut, which she saw when she was growing up outside New York City. “What is a suburban teenager connecting to in this movie about this alcoholic, middle-aged academic woman on a college campus?” she says. But the adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 play taught Bronstein, among many other things, about the power of close-ups. Elizabeth Taylor is “giving a performance that the screen almost can’t contain,” she says. “It’s so raw. It’s so visceral.”

‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968), directed by George A. Romero

When Bronstein first discovered Romero’s zombie horror film, she “found it terrifying.” Of course, when you break down components of the movie — especially the visual effects — this story about a group of people trapped in rural Pennsylvania with flesh-eating corpses is much less scary. But what impresses her still is Romero’s intimate, almost Method-like style of building his characters. The line “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” — said mockingly by the brother of one of the lead characters, just before he’s gruesomely killed — still “brings a shiver up my spine,” she says.

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ (2023), directed by Justine Triet

The French director Triet’s legal drama, “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, stars Sandra Hüller as a novelist trying to prove her innocence after her husband suffers a fatal fall from a window in their house. Bigelow describes it as “a tangle of perspective, language and motive” and a “rigorous study of the instability of truth.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

See the rest of the issue