Breathless
Where the DNA of Breathless travels
Films that shaped it
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Godard is like a big mountain. For Breathless, he took the gangster films from the 1940s and '50s, the B-movies, and remade them into something completely new, fresh, and modern. That kind of spirit of taking genre films and twisting them, that's what inspires me.
Films it shaped
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There are so many great movies, but... there’s a director named Bernardo Bertolucci and I love his movies, and I loved Before the Revolution, and I guess that’s the one, maybe. And it’s not really a movie about journalism, but I just watched it and thought, 'This is where this movie came from.'
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The French New Wave was terribly important to me and to Warren Beatty, who was the driving energy of the picture, and we were terribly influenced by the French New Wave, by Truffaut and Godard. We were seeing films like Breathless, and it was revolutionary. It broke all the rules and conventions that were so prevalent in American filmmaking.
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Hopper and Fonda were steeped in the methods of the French New Wave, whose films they openly admired, drawing inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) (...) for Easy Rider's improvisational style, jump cuts, and vérité cinematography.
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I think what separates a cult movie is when you watch it, it makes you want to become a filmmaker. And that’s what Performance did to me, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Suspiria, and Taxi Driver. I mean, I’m a child of the ’70s, so that’s my upbringing.
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My first three films [Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf] were very much about love and very much about youth, and in a way I was trying to tell stories that didn’t exist in contemporary cinema... I was very inspired by silent cinema, by people like Murnau, and also by the French New Wave, Godard in particular. But it was more of an atmosphere, a certain freedom, a way of approaching filmmaking. It wasn’t about specific scenes or specific films.
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Ryan Coogler has said he spent months studying the work of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker who spent his career insisting African stories deserved their own visual language rather than a borrowed European one, before designing Wakanda's aesthetic. Sembène made his first film in 1963. He called himself the father of African cinema. Black Girl and Touki Bouki, Djibril Diop Mambéty's visionary 1973 film, are the real Wakanda.
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Chungking Express Atlas note
The way I feel about Wong Kar-wai and Chungking Express, is I’m always surprised by the things people say influenced Moonlight because I never thought of them. But I do think Chungking Express and Happy Together are two of the films I constantly rewatch and they just permeate my being, so it’s impossible for them not to show up in the work.
