Three Films I Keep Returning To

There are a handful of films I’ve watched, conservatively, more than thirty times each. I don’t say this as a flex. I mean that for whatever reason, three films in particular have become reference texts for me — the ones I quietly cue up while traveling, or rewatch in the editing bay between cuts, or argue about with friends at dinners that go too late.

Network (1976), Almost Famous (2000), and Barry Lyndon (1975).

They couldn’t be more different on the surface. But underneath, they’re asking versions of the same question — which is, I think, why they keep pulling me back.

Network is the film I cite most often in interviews

And I’ve never gotten tired of citing it.

Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky understood, half a century before the rest of us caught up, that American discourse would eventually be compressed into spectacle. And that the people running the spectacle wouldn’t be villains exactly — they’d be smart, articulate, well-tailored adults who had simply learned to optimize for the wrong things.

The scene I think about most isn’t Howard Beale’s monologue, though that one earns its reputation. It’s the scene where Faye Dunaway pitches her programming slate to the boardroom. The way she moves through the room. The way the room receives her. The way nobody flinches at what’s being proposed, because they’ve already decided that what’s being proposed is the future.

The horror of Network isn’t that Beale loses his mind on television. It’s that everyone around him is so much more comfortable with that fact than they ought to be.

Almost Famous belongs in a totally different register

And that’s what makes the rhyme so unexpected.

I first saw it when I was 16, which is also the age William Miller is in the film. I recognized something in his predicament that took me another decade to name.

The film is about a young person trying to do work that requires getting close to adults who are simultaneously generous and self-destructive — and trying to hold onto something honest in himself while being absorbed by their world.

The scene I rewatch most isn’t Tiny Dancer on the bus, though obviously. It’s the diner scene between William and Lester Bangs — Philip Seymour Hoffman in maybe the warmest performance of his career — where Lester tells him, almost casually, that being uncool is the only honest place to write from.

I’ve thought about that line on roughly half the film sets I’ve worked on since.

Barry Lyndon is the outlier of the three

And the one I find hardest to write about. Which is probably why I keep coming back to it.

Stanley Kubrick made a three-hour 18th-century period film about an Irish opportunist nobody asked for, shot most of it in available light, used candle-flame-rated lenses originally designed by NASA, and broke the rules of close-quarters interior cinematography in the process.

None of that is the reason I rewatch it.

I rewatch it because almost every frame is a working master class in the four disciplines a director is supposed to be in command of and almost none of us actually are — framing, lighting, pacing, and performance. There’s a long zoom-out from a duel in the Irish countryside that I’ve studied for hours. There’s a card-table scene scored to Schubert that has changed the way I block my own interiors.

And there’s a final title card — the only one I’ll ever quote in a journal entry — that reads:

It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.

I think about that card more often than I care to admit.

The film’s ostensible subject is one man’s social climb. Its actual subject is the cosmic indifference of time.

Both are useful frames for a working director to hold in mind, especially in an industry that mistakes ascent for arrival.

What connects the three is something I didn’t see at first

They’re all, in their own way, films about ambition inside a system that consumes it. Lumet’s news anchor is destroyed for telling a kind of truth. Crowe’s teenage journalist is tested on whether he’ll print one. Kubrick’s Redmond Barry is rewarded for his ambition and then quietly, mathematically, undone by it.

Three filmmakers. Three radically different surfaces. Same underlying anatomy.

A man enters a system. The system tests him. The system, eventually, wins. The interesting question is what kind of dignity, if any, the man retains on the way down.

The work I’ve been most proud of sits in the same lineage of question. The Sound of Identity asked whether the operatic system can make room for a body it wasn’t designed for. The American Question asked whether American discourse can still hold an honest voice across a partisan divide.

Even Desires of the Heart, the cross-cultural feature I made early in my career, was, at root, a film about whether two systems — Savannah and Rajasthan — can let one love story belong fully to both.

I don’t think the answer to any of these questions is settled.

I think the answer is still being filmed.

Network, Almost Famous, and Barry Lyndon told me, in three different keys, that the question is worth keeping open.

What films have you returned to over and over again? Let me know in the comments below.