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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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]

Next: Sasha Grey talks shooting fast in New York, future roles, and dishes the dirt on film critic Glenn Kenny.