Anna Kendrick visits the Criterion closet

“I thought I would have a strategy,” said Anna Kendrick as she perused thousands of classic cinematic treasures. “And now that I’m here, no. But everything is fine. Sometimes great things happen when you don’t have a great plan.”

Thus begins Kendrick’s adventure in the beloved Criterion Closet. The Oscar-nominated actress and now director stopped by Criterion’s New York offices while promoting her newly released Netflix film, “Woman of the Hour,” and found herself throwing plans out the window, letting her experience be driven by chance. . . Having a musical background herself, Kendrick started with a classic of the genre, Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical “All That Jazz.”

“You always want to say you saw all these movies, like, at least a decade ago, right? But I saw it a few years ago,” Kendrick said. “’All that jazz.’ I had that feeling of ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?’ You know, when it’s like a movie was made for you and it feels like it’s been in your bones your whole life and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe I’m wandering the earth and none of my friends are good enough friends. to tell me to watch this movie?’ I’m sure yes.

After picking up Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid thriller “Klute” and sharing a story about how the film left her “irrationally disturbed” while filming one of the “Twilight” movies, Kendrick picked up Andrei’s “Stalker.” Tarkovsky, who she described as “beautiful, stunning, mesmerizing.” She then discussed Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and the special screening she once saw in Los Angeles.

“I will say that I think sometimes I fall victim to that thing where certain…silent film soundtracks just freak me out,” Kendrick said. “And I will say that one of the coolest movie experiences I had was they were showing a copy of this at The Silent Movie Theater in Fairfax. And there were two guys who did a modern experimental score for it. And I cried uncontrollably almost the entire time.”

When detailing his next choice, “Saint Omer,” Kendrick mentioned Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner “Anatomy of a Fall” and questioned the complexities of the French legal system that both films explore. For her latest selection, she chose the Ingmar Bergman boxset, recognizing how “Fanny and Alexander” was the first film of his she was introduced to and initially had difficulty accepting.

“I think when I was about 18, someone gave me the ‘Fanny and Alexander’ boxset. And it was one of those experiences where… sometimes you watch a movie and you immediately love it, like ‘All That Jazz,’ where you say, ‘It’s like someone’s looking inside my brain.’ And that wasn’t the experience,” Kendrick said. “But it was challenging. As if it were something that touched a part of me that was untouched or too sensitive to be touched. I even remember watching interviews with him where he talked – at the end of his life – about how he was still terrified of death and hadn’t resolved it. And especially for someone who was a teenager at the time, it was very upsetting to hear that, because you want to hear that people, as they get older, become okay and accept death. And even in his interviews and certainly in his art, it’s like he’s incapable of telling lies to keep himself comfortable and certainly to keep you comfortable. And that sent me on this journey. And now he’s one of, if not my, favorite director.”

Watch Kendrick’s full Criterion Closet tour below.