17 Artists Share the Films That Influenced Them

“This is a wonderfully terrible movie that introduced me to my favorite genre of cinema: the unbridled follow-up film, a genre exclusively populated by men,” says Evans, whose own eclectic work has dabbled with artificial intelligence, dance performances modeled on those of North Korean performers, and a digital reanimation of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. “A director follows up on their first wildly successful film—which in Vinterberg’s case was Festen—and is suddenly gifted with budget, actors, an army of visual effects, and unrelenting support to live their genius.

“In It’s All About Love, the result is unsettling and unhinged. The film is set in the future, where Claire Danes is a Polish figure skater who is divorcing Joaquin Phoenix. She wants to retire but suspects she is being cloned, and needs Joaquin’s help. Adding to their sense of urgency, people keep dropping dead from ‘not enough love,’ and Joaquin’s brother, played by Sean Penn, has escaped to an airplane that is permanently in flight, where everyone seems to have eschewed the smoking ban.

“As a sidebar, the whole country of Uganda seems to be losing gravity, its people saying self-conscious things like ‘We’re not angels. We’re ordinary people.’ That’s just the set up. At some point in production, Vinterberg called Ingmar Bergman and asked him to help finish the film. He declined. The studio tried to bill it as sci-fi apocalyptic but Vinterberg insisted that it’s merely ‘a dream.’ It was an utter flop, and one of the best worst films about the human condition. It’s changed the way I approach my own projects and I sometimes re-watch it when I’m nervous about an idea.”

Those curious about the influence of this big-budget disaster on Evans’s own work can find her this fall at the Ural Industrial Biennal; the 7th Moscow Biennale; or the Museum Leuven, where she has a solo up through November 19th.