‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Director Rian Johnson Shares His Top 10 Documentaries

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Rian Johnson is a filmmaker best known for his fiction features Looper, Brick and The Brothers Bloom. He also helmed two of the best episodes of Breaking Bad — “The Fly” and the DGA Award-winning “Fifty-One” — as well as the upcoming episode “Ozymandias” (airing Sept. 15). While he hasn’t (yet) directed any nonfiction films, he is a professed huge fan of documentaries, and so he was kind enough to share a list of his 10 favorites in no particular order, plus an additional pick that he elaborates on.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (Erroll Morris, 1999)

The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)

Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)

F For Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)

Salesman (Albert and David Maysles, 1968)

Hollywood (Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, 1980)

Catching Hell (Alex Gibney, 2011)

Missile (Frederick Wiseman, 1987)

Original Cast Album: Company (D.A. Pennebaker, 1970)

Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982)

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967)

Putting this one separate because it provoked such a profound reaction of horror in me that I couldn’t finish watching it. That sounds like something Herzog would say, but it’s the truth. I’ve never reacted to a film that way, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to revisit it.

(Editor in Chief)

Christopher Campbell is the founding editor of Nonfics.