“I thought I would have a strategy,” said Anna Kendrick as she peered around thousands of classic cinematic treasures. “And now that I’m here, I don’t. But that’s okay. Sometimes great things happen when you don’t have a great plan.”
So begins Kendrick’s venture into the beloved Criterion Closet. The Academy-Award nominated actress and now director took a stop by Criterion’s offices in New York while promoting her recently released Netflix film, “Woman of the Hour,” and found herself throwing plans out the window, instead letting her experience be driven by chance. Having a musical background herself, Kendrick started with a classic in the genre, Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical “All That Jazz.”
“You always want to say that you saw all these movies, like, at least a decade ago, right? But I just saw this a few years ago,” said Kendrick. “‘All That Jazz.’ I had that feeling of, like, ‘Why did no one tell me about this?’ You know, when it’s like a movie was made for you and it feels like it’s been in your bones your whole life and you’re just like, ‘I can’t believe I’ve just been wandering the earth and none of my friends are good enough friends to have told me to watch this movie?’ I’m sure they did.”
After grabbing Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid thriller “Klute” and sharing a story about how the film caused her to be “irrationally unhinged” while shooting one of the “Twilight” movies, Kendrick picked up Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” which she described as “beautiful, stunning, hypnotizing.” She then went on to discuss Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and special screening of it she once saw in Los Angeles.
“I will say I think that sometimes I fall victim to that thing where certain…scores for silent films take me out of it,” Kendrick said. “And I will say, like, one of the cooler, cinematic-going experiences I’ve had is they were showing a print of this at The Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. And there were these two guys who did a modern experimental score to this. And I was weeping uncontrollably almost the entire time.”
In breaking down her next choice, “Saint Omer,” Kendrick brought up Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall” and questioned the intricacies of the French legal system both films explore. For her last selection, she went with the Ingmar Bergman boxset, acknowledging how “Fanny and Alexander” was the first film of his she was introduced to and initially struggled to take it in.
“I think when I was like, maybe 18, somebody gifted me the ‘Fanny and Alexander’ boxset. And it was one of those experiences where…sometimes you watch a movie and you immediately love it, like ‘All That Jazz,’ where you go, ‘This is like someone’s looking inside my brain.’ And that was not that experience,” said Kendrick. “But it was something challenging. Like it was something that touched a part of me that was untouched or that was too sensitive to touch. I remember even watching interviews with him where he would talk about — late in his life — talk about how he still was terrified of death and had not resolved that. And particularly as someone who was, like, a teenager at the time, that was very unsettling to hear cause you want to hear that people, as they get older, become okay and accepting of death. And it’s even in his interviews and certainly in his art, it’s like he’s incapable of telling lies to keep himself comfortable and certainly to keep you comfortable. And it sent me down this journey. And now he is one of, if not my favorite directors.”
Watch Kendrick’s full Criterion Closet visit below.
