Yesterday marked the beginning of the Berlin Film Festival. For the next two-ish weeks, Berlin is the place to go to find some of the world’s best cinema, and a fair amount of stars looking to grab distribution for their latest projects. Casey Affleck is there to promote his latest film, “Light of My Life,” in which he wrote, directed, and starred in. And in a new interview with Deadline, the Oscar winner discusses his filmmaking influences for his post-apocalyptic father-daughter film, as well as debuting a brand-new clip.
“I also love sci-fiction,” explained Affleck. “Like I said, I love apocalyptic movies – like ‘World War Z,’ ‘La Jetée,’ ‘Mad Max,’ ‘Children of Men.’ Those are all much, much better science fiction than this is, but I wanted to emulate some of the realism in how those movies look at a world after some global devastation. I mean this movie is a lot of things: This is a father and daughter story, a post-pandemic story, a human versus nature story, a home invasion story, a coming of age story, and a fairytale. But most of all this is a story of parental love.”
Later on in the interview, the actor-turned-filmmaker also talked about some more specific instances of films influencing his filmmaking style. And Affleck pulls out his cinephile card when name-dropping these films.
“A movie called ‘Jeanne Dielman,’ creates great tension with a static camera and sustained shots,” he said. “‘Ida’ (the film from Pawel Pawlikowski which won Best Foreign Film from the Academy in 2015) was another inspiration for this, the way it was shot. There are lots of movies that have done this. It’s almost classical. But it was the choice that seemed to fit this story. It’s both rigid and dispassionate and makes the audience a little tense.”
Towards the end of the interview, Affleck decides to just list off some of the biggest films of his childhood that influenced his love of filmmaking. While some of them may surprise you (“Elephant Man,” “The Harder They Come,” and “Burn!”), there are definitely some obvious choices (“2001” & “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly”), as well as some ‘80s comedy classics (“Teen Wolf,” “Breakfast Club,” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”).
You can watch the first clip from “Light of My Life” below:
LIGHT OF MY LIFE – “How Much Do You Love Me” from Black Bear Pictures on Vimeo.