Five Favorite Films with Adult Film Star Sasha Grey
The Girlfriend Experience star opens up on her cinematic tastes.
Filmmaker
Steven Soderbergh made waves when he premiered his latest film,
The
Girlfriend Experience, at this year's Sundance Film Festival -- not so much due
to its subject, a high class call girl, but rather thanks to who plays her:
adult film actress
Sasha Grey, the 21-year-old award-winning star of countless
films we can't mention here. An avowed cinephile and French New Wave enthusiast
who once considered taking the stage name
Anna Karina (and has been known as a
Godard devotee ever since), Grey shared her Five Favorite Films with Rotten
Tomatoes, revealing a penchant for intense character dramas that dare to be
honest and open -- much like Grey herself. Read on for more about Sasha Grey's
Five Favorite Films, her improvised central performance in The Girlfriend
Experience, what it was like to share the screen with film critic
Glenn Kenny
(who appears in a cameo role), and more.
Stroszek
by Werner
Herzog. It's such a hard movie not to like. You have this character who has
these hopes and dreams, he wants to come to America and he's a struggling,
failed musician but he also really cares about everybody else around him, and he
doesn't judge the people around him, no matter what their faults may be. I like
the characters and just the story itself.Pierrot le Fou (1965, 76% Tomatometer)
To
me, it's just a very romantic story. It's the ultimate, "let's just drop
everything and run away together" movie; the way the story was told was so
unique. There's one scene in particular where
Anna Karina
is on the beach, and she rolls over and she just says, "F--- me." To put that in
a film in that time period -- you just didn't expect that to come out of her
mouth. It's titillating, I guess you could say.Fat Girl (2001, 72% Tomatometer)
I
don't really know how to go into detail about it; the story is so intense, and
you're not made to feel a certain way towards these characters. You see this mom
who's kind of a b---- and doesn't really care about her youngest daughter, and
you see this older sister who's a b----... especially at the end, you don't really
feel sorry for these people.I had a list of films that my theater teacher gave me, when I was about 14 or 15. One of the things he always told the class was you should be watching one film per week, to study other actors and study the language of film. Fat Girl just happened to be one of the films on the list.
A Woman Under the Influence (1973, 91% Tomatometer)
I
think there's something about all of these films that resonate with me -- they're
all stories and situations between characters that you couldn't make with an
American studio today. A Woman Under the Influence is so raw, it's so
wrong... it's like, you knew those neighbors. It's a really emotional film, and I
think for
John Cassavetes to have his
own wife
play that character, it was even more challenging and even more of a risk.Escape From New York (1981, 81% Tomatometer)
It's
John
Carpenter! I mean, come on. John Carpenter,
Kurt Russell
as f---in' Snake Plisskin -- it doesn't really get any better than that.Was that on your theater teacher's list?
It was not. [Laughs]
Can't get enough Sasha Grey? Check out her Five Favorites in video form when she sat down with our friends at Current
Next: Sasha Grey talks shooting fast in New York, future roles, and dishes the dirt on film critic Glenn Kenny.
Bigbrother on 05-21-2009 05:37 PM
French New Wave and Snake Pliskin, I like it. I'd be interested to know if she thinks GFE is going to be the start of a mainstream career or if she's going back to porn.