Must See Films for Filmmakers
Everyone has their reasons – some of us love ‘Star Wars’ because it reminds us of childhood, others are Kieslowski purists because sometimes only a Polish film about mystic coincidences will do, still others feel that cinema history began with ‘Pulp Fiction’. 
That would be a shame – because there are filmic riches just waiting to be discovered, but might look like they’re hiding. If you want to be a good writer, then read a lot, so goes the accepted wisdom. It stands to reason that if you want to be a good film-maker, you need to watch a lot of films.
Here are five different selections that might inspire, influence, confound, or challenge as you make your own movies:
There are obvious ones whose style, structure and passion brought something new out of a camera – like ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Seven Samurai’, ‘2001’, and so on.
There are films that remind us how pacing doesn’t have to be rapid like Tarantino, or linear like the average rom-com; films that aren’t afraid to take their time to get where they’re going – ‘The Shining’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ spring ever so slowly to mind.
There are movies that show us how to tell stories – films populated with characters who look real human beings, and have a beginning, middle, and an end after which you believe the characters you’ve just watched are still alive, still experiencing their own journeys.
Take your pick from this classic handful: ‘Field of Dreams’ (I mean it – no one who has actually sat through it could consider it worthy of its ‘cheesy’ reputation), ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘Secrets and Lies’,
There are works of humanity that understand how art is not just there to excite us or show us new ways to crash cars or blow up buildings – you could do worse than spending a couple of days watching Michael Apted’s ‘Seven-Up’ documentary series, an astonishing record of how a few people have experienced life since the 1960s, which also serves as a mini-history of how documentary film-making has changed during that time. (The Maysles Brothers films are a genre all by themselves – take your time with them. Life will look different afterward.)
And there are films that break all the rules, that don’t care about convention, and whose makers realise that the desire to make a really good movie – well, there can be no shame in that. Try ‘Magnolia’, ‘Touki-Bouki’, ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, ‘Japon’, and ‘The Godfather Part II’ and see where they take you.
Gareth Higgins is the author of How ‘ Movies Helped Save My Soul‘ available on Amazon and runs the excellent TheFilmTalk Blog and Podcast site.
Related Links:
www.thefilmtalk.com
www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com
Great post!!!