Brad Bird Guest Curator for the 2020 edition of TCM’s “The Essentials” – Variety

Brad Bird knows his classics, and he will be sharing 20 of his favorite movies this season on “The Essentials” of Turner Classic Movies with Ben Mankiewicz, host of TCM Primetime. Bird – known for films like “The Iron Giant”, “Ratatouille”, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” and “The Incredibles” – organized the selection for this season, which will air on TCM on Saturday at 8 p.m. from May 2.

“Brad’s special artistic sense permeates all of the conversations we have had,” says Mankiewicz. “He sees so many stories through the eyes of an animator, offering a rare perspective on the films we think we know well, such as” Casablanca “,” Dr. Strangelove “and” The Searchers “. And his childish enthusiasm for movies, animated films and shows, is unprecedented and contagious. “

This enthusiasm made it difficult to narrow the list down to just 20, Bird admits, and that was after deciding to focus on films made until 1968.

“For every film we’ve made, there are five films we haven’t made,” says Bird. The most recent film is “2001: A Space Odyssey” from 1968 and the oldest is “The General” from 1926.

The list is full of titles recognizable by all moviegoers (“The Maltese Falcon”, “An American in Paris”, “Lawrence of Arabia”), but there are also some lesser-known classics, such as the film by Billy Wilder by 1951 “Ace in the Hole”, which stars Kirk Douglas as a dishonored journalist looking for his next big story. It is not one of Wilder’s most famous films.

“I understand the reason,” says Bird. “It’s a very dark film about the worst aspects of what it means to be human, and it’s also the dark side of journalism, the downside of the power of journalism, but it’s a very good film and not a lot of people have seen it. “

Another little-known film Bird wants to present to viewers is the 1946 British fantasy novel “A Matter of Life and Death”, starring David Niven.

“It’s an incredible film, and I discovered it by chance,” he says. “I was going around the chains late at night when I was single, and I thought,” Oh, again around the canals before I go to bed. “It was 2 am when I came across the opening of this film, which hooks you completely completely immediately, and I ended up staying until 4 am to watch it, because I got so into it involved. “

But one of the most surprising things on the list is that there are no animated films on it. The reason, says Bird, is that “my top five animated films are all Disney, Walt-era films,” and their rights weren’t available. But TCM has more than enough movies to choose from. “There are a lot of classic movies here, and TCM has the rights because they not only have the Warner Bros. library, they own the MGM library, so they have easy access to a number of classic movies. You can get “Lawrence” and you can get a lot of Columbia movies, so it’s a pretty large selection, “he says.

What surprised Mankiewicz was “that he chose six musicals”. The film that launched the series was “Singin ‘in the Rain” from 1955. Could his interest in musicals be piqued at the moment because he is working with composer Michael Giacchino? “Well, I think they’re one in the same. They’re both the result of my love of musicals when they’re good,” says Bird. “It’s really hard to make a good one, so there are only a handful of great musicals.

“I think one of the requirements of my book for a great musical is that every song has to be good,” he says. “And that doesn’t mean every song has to be a hit that people whistle on the way home, but every song has to be memorable and stay with you. And many musicals die with this requirement alone. Many well-known songs have only one or two songs that no one remembers. I will not name names. When you enter “Guys and Dolls” or “The Sound of Music” or “West Side Story” or “Wizard of Oz”, it’s as if each song is completely memorable. “Mary Poppins”, “Singin” in the rain “, these are for me great. “The Music Man”, “Fiddler on the Roof”. In these musicals, each song is memorable. “

It’s a challenge he’s ready to take on, even if he’s intimidating. “Yeah, it’s completely scary. And I think the fact that it’s so hard and the minefield is littered with bodies of people who have tried musicals and, in my book, it didn’t work , it gets attractive just because it’s so hard to make a good one. It’s like climbing Mount Everest, you know? “

But while he’s taking his time with this project, he’s more than happy to talk about everything that’s going on with Mankiewicz on “The Essentials”, which was shot in early December.

“This kind of thing is a joy to do because you are talking about an art form that is simply beautiful,” says Bird. He knows that many young viewers may be discouraged by the fact that some of these films may not have sound or that they are in black and white, “When in fact, that’s not what’s great about these The great thing about them is that they transcend time and speak in a language that is still in many ways common, and so I am a very happy missionary for the beauty of the film. “

The complete list of films broadcast on “The Essentials” for 2020:

Sing in the rain (1952) – Co-directors of the musical Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen on the Hollywood stars adapting to the arrival of the sound

Ace in the hole (1951) – Kirk Douglas plays the role of a small town reporter milking a local disaster to bring it back in time

The General (1926) – Buster Keaton writes, performs and co-directs this silent film in which a Confederate engineer fights to save his train and his girlfriend from the Union army

Casablanca (1942) – this classic, in which an American salon owner in North Africa is drawn into the Second World War when his lost love is revealed, has the distinction of being the most played film on TCM

The red shoes (1948) – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger interpret the fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen of a young ballerina torn between her art and her romance with a young composer

Laurent of Arabia (1962) – the radical epic story of T.E. Lawrence who enlisted the Arabs for the desert war during the First World War. Bird gets the distinction of being the only person on TCM to speak about this film who also directed Peter O’Toole in a film (Ratatouille 2007)

Gunga Din (1939) – one of the two films of Cary Grant presented in The Essentials, three British soldiers seek a treasure during an uprising in India

A matter of life and death (1947) – Another film by Powell and Pressburger in which an injured aviator pleads before the celestial court for the chance to continue living

A hard day (1964) – a typical day in the Beatles’ life turns into a musical

The Man of Music (1962) – Robert Preston plays a crook hawking musical instruments and group uniforms in a small town in America

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) – Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, in which Peter Sellers plays three roles, including a mad American general who orders an air strike against Russia

The Maltese Falcon (1941) – the first of two Essential Black films, the hull detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) finds himself caught in the murderous search for a priceless statue

2001: A space odyssey (1968) – Kubrick’s classic science fiction epic on a mysterious monolith that seems to play a key role in human evolution

Fireball (1941) – Howard Hawks leads a group of teachers (led by Gary Cooper) who take a nightclub singer (Barbara Stanwyck) to hide from the law to protect her gangster boyfriend

City lights (1931) – Charlie Chaplin writes, directs and plays in this later silent film in which the little vagabond tries to help a blind flower merchant to see again

An American in Paris (1951) – Vincente Minnelli directs Gene Kelly as an American artist who finds love with Leslie Caron in Paris but almost loses him to conflicting loyalties

Researchers (1956) – a western by John Ford and John Wayne in which a veteran of the civil war hating the Indians tracks the tribe which killed his family and kidnapped his niece

North by north-west (1959) – Alfred Hitchcock’s latest film with Cary Grant, who plays a publicity man mistaken for a spy, setting off a murderous pursuit across the country

Guys and Dolls (1955) – Frank Sinatra bet on Marlon Brando that he cannot seduce a Jean Simmons missionary in this musical

Out of the past (1947) – one of Robert Mitchum’s many noir films, it depicts a private eye that becomes the dupe of a homicidal soft