"F for Fake," Les Films de L'Astrophore, 1975

February 25 & 26:
Orson Welles' "F for Fake" (1974) and Federico Fellini's "8 ½" (1963)

I'm going to sound like a broken record here saying these are two of my very favorite films, but I guess that's the reason I chose all of these. [laughs] I'd seen "F for Fake" in college, but [I don't think you can fully appreciate it] the first time you see the film. I've had a few friends who have seen it for the first time recently and I wouldn't tell you that they enjoyed it in the strictest sense of the word. It shellshocks you the first time you see it. You'd think that today, with our incredibly evolved ability that we've all gotten over the past few years to absorb large amounts of information very quickly through different media, that it would go down a lot easier, but it's still way ahead of the curve in that regard. It throws so much at you. With repeat viewings, there's a steep curve in terms of how quickly you start to see exactly how amazingly cohesive the whole thing is. I exponentially love it the more I see it. Once you start to be able to see the patterns of the film and what it's doing, you appreciate more exactly what Welles achieved with it. And with "8 ½," I...[pause] I'm at a loss for words, clearly. Words that will make me sound like an asshole. We'll leave it at that.

February 27 & 28:
Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve" (1941) and Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988)

You can't do a con man festival without having "The Lady Eve" in there. It's just the perfect bottle of champagne-type movie. It's hard to watch it without having a smile on your face the whole time. And "Baron Munchausen" is a movie that I saw in the theater when it was first put out in a dingy little Mission Viejo mall multiplex as a teenager and I love it. There was so much brouhaha over the circumstances of its release and it was concluded this big disaster, but if you just revisit the film itself outside of that context, it's absolutely beautiful, and not just visually. Thematically it really holds together. I also personally love it because it was one of those films that had the last generation of old school effects [in it] before everything went into computers -- it feels like an extension of a George Méliès movie for me. The fact that so many of the effects in it were physical and developed on film... it matters, I think, and it's got that special magic for me still.

TBA 2010?: If you were to plan a festival for your next film "Looper," what movies would be there?

[laughs] I was thinking about that. Right now, I'm up to my neck in writing it and a large part is having to do with how to handle the time travel aspect of it -- how to keep that simple and manageable. So all the movies I can think of right now would be time travel films: the first "Terminator," I think, is a pretty genius example of how to have time travel as part of the plot and yet keep it contained to where it doesn't swallow everything up. I think the first "Back to the Future" is a perfectly constructed script. I watch that and I'm just amazed at the economy of how they put out information and how the whole thing works like a big oiled clock tower. God, what else? I don't know, man. I'll make the movie and then I'll figure it out.

"The Festival of Fakery" runs from February 18 through February 28 at the New Beverly Cinema (7165 W. Beverly Blvd in Los Angeles). "The Brothers Bloom" opens in limited release on May 15 and will expand on May 29.

[Additional photos: "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," Orion Pictures, 1988; "House of Games," Orion Pictures, 1987; "The Sting," Universal Pictures, 1973; "The Lady Eve," Universal Pictures, 1941]

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