Jonathan Lethem is one of Brooklyn's favorite local authors and the 2006/2007 Friends of BAM Chair. His writing often reflects a deep love of popular culture, including music and movies. BAMcinématek asked him to select some of his favorite films for Jonathan Lethem Selects (Oct 15—Nov 19). The films Lethem chose are: High and Low, This Sporting Life, La Collectionneuse, The Lineup, Murder by Contract, Ruggles of Red Gap, Straight Time, Love Streams, and Shame. Questions for Jonathan Lethem from Matthew Buchholz, BAMcinématek.

Matthew Buchholz: Looking at the films you selected for the series here at BAM, is there any thread connecting all of them?

Jonathan Lethem: Well, at the risk of the tautology, "the thread in the Jonathan Lethem Selects films is that Jonathan Lethem selected them," when I glance at the list that resulted I can't keep from thinking that the only thing those films all have particularly in common—apart from the excellence which makes me confident of thrusting them on other viewers—is that they form a kind of descriptive outline (like the arctic explorers standing in an arc around the submerged frozen spaceship in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby version of The Thing) around my cinematic obsessions. And, by chance (this really wasn't planned, the list and its running order came about in a quite haphazard way, as titles were eliminated from a much longer preliminary list), the sequence could be seen as a kind of brief autobiographical sketch of my movie-going:

Kurosawa, Anderson, and Rohmer represent my teenaged preference, so directly inherited from my New York-bohemian-intellectual parents, for international art-house cinema, the kind of canonical European and Japanese directors who still seem to define a kind of "prestige" most cineastes can agree on (though, if I'd been more specifically making a autobiographical list of those enthusiasms, it should probably have been Truffaut or Godard instead of Rohmer, and Roeg instead of Anderson).

Next, in my college years and just after, I discovered what my art-house enthusiasm had overlooked—the splendor of classic Hollywood genre film (an epiphany I detailed in an essay called "Defending The Searchers"). The entry point of this obsession was film noir, and so The Lineup and Murder by Contract stand perfectly for this chapter in my roving interests. Next, following hard on noir's heels, was a time when all I could think about was the western. Ruggles of Red Gap can stand for that, however tangentially. More importantly, my interest in a director like McCarey comes completely out of my reading of "auteurist" film criticism in those days—the Cahiers critics and Andrew Sarris were my compasses as I explored the Hollywood catalogue.

That exploration, in turn, brought me back to the American films that had been playing in New York as I grew up, and which I'd mostly ignored while racing to the Thalia or New Yorker to see Godard and Truffaut: the "maverick" 70s, for which Straight Time can fairly stand (though Ulu Grosbard hardly went to UCLA film school!).

Most recently, I suppose I've come full circle to my old art-house interests, finding nourishment in self-conscious film artists like Bergman and Cassavetes—each, in their completely different ways, about as novelistic as film can get.

Buchholz: Film and popular culture informs a great deal of your writing; for instance you reference The Searchers, Star Wars, 2001, and the films of John Cassavettes in your book The Disappointment Artist. Are there other films that have inspired your work as a writer?

Lethem: Oh sure, loads. For me, film is as much an inspiration to making narrative as the novels and stories I read. I suppose the most foundational film influence that I haven't already extensively somewhere (having bragged, as you point out, about John Ford, Kubrick, Cassavetes, and film noir...) is Hitchcock—who for me is one of the towering narrative artists (or storytellers, if you want to get a little less pretentious) of the 20th century. He's right there with Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and Graham Greene at the heart of my urge to make my novels full of gripping characters and scenes, and also thrumming with subplot and theme, as well as a kind of confessional intensity just below the surface. I can hardly ever begin a novel without thinking "this time I want to do Notorious, or Vertigo, or Sabotage....

Buchholz: BAM is located near where you grew up, as described in The Fortress of Solitude. Have you been to many BAM theatrical shows, and if so, what was your favorite?

Lethem: So many over the years, and yet if I had to pick a favorite it would be the first I remember: The Paper Bag Players, which was where I went (or I suppose "was taken"), with a few friends, for my birthday party when I was five or six years old. Around that same time I went to BAM to see Pete Seeger, and yes, he played "Abiyoyo"—my first experience of going to a concert and hearing *that one song* I was hoping the band would play.