Making movies is a hard business, but it’s much easier when you’re doing it with someone you value and respect. It seems the same can be said of picking movies, as collaborators Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste joined forces once again to take on the Criterion Closet. The two are currently promoting their most recent film together, “Hard Truths,” which is garnering Jean-Baptiste tremendous awards buzz, including recognition from the NYFCC, the LAFCA, and the BIFAs this past weekend. She was previously nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Leigh’s 1996 Palme d’Or winner, “Secrets & Lies,” a film the pair look back on with fondness in the video below.
“Here’s a film you’re really going to like,” Leigh said, reaching for the film, to which Jean-Baptiste jokingly responded, “What’s that one about?”
After they both grabbed Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep with Anger,” as well Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” and Ken Loach’s “Kes,” Leigh also decided to expand his Japanese film collection, taking home Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Life of Oharu.”
“These Japanese films,” said Leigh, “Ozu, Mizoguchi, and the early Kurosawa, are really…they’re great. They do a lot for me.”
Jean-Baptiste decided to get in on the fun as well, putting a set that features Akira Kurasawa’s first films in her bag to take home, while Leigh took a shining to the Ranown Westerns from director Bud Boetticher and actor Randolph Scott. Picking up the collection, which features five films from the actor/director pair, Leigh recalled being exposed to a great deal of westerns in his youth, with world cinema not really coming to him until he attended university.
“When I was growing up in Manchester, I went to the movies all the time. The pictures, right? I never saw a film that wasn’t in English,” he said. “All I saw was Hollywood and British movies. And of course we saw loads and loads of westerns. When I went to London to be a student, I discovered world cinema. But these kind of westerns…Of course, we just used to love them really. I’m going to take this. Bit of nostalgia.”
Watch Leigh and Jean-Baptiste’s full Criterion Closet visit below.
