Beetlejuice Ahead of Beetlejuice's Venice premiere, Winona Ryder took a quick detour to the Criterion Closet. Her selection included two films by Jim Jarmusch, five by John Cassavetes, and one by Gordon Parks. Of course, she spent some time waxing poetic about Gena Rowlands and her influence on Ryder's own career. Ryder's mother was a cinema projectionist, and as a child, she would sneak her daughter off to see some Cassavetes films. “I was too young to really understand what was going on,” she says. “But I remember watching Gena and wanting to do what she was doing.”
Her final choice was Hirokazu Koreeda's Afterlife, in which deceased people decide which memory of their lives they want to remain in forever. “I've never told anyone this, but the sounds that comforted me most as a child were the sound of my father's typewriter and my mother's footsteps,” she says. “I'm going to choose those sounds to live forever, because I felt my parents' presence in those moments. They're the people I love most in the world.”
