It can be difficult to untangle all the influences that go into a single film. Often the filmmakers themselves don’t know, having distilled a lifetime’s worth of experience and inspiration into their work. But rarely does anything inspire artists as much as art itself. Asked to look back on their guiding lights for their new films, the filmmakers, actors, and craftspeople behind some of 2022’s best films pointed to a wide range of sources, from centuries-old paintings by great masters to ghost stories.

The Eternal Daughter

When Joanna Hogg paid a visit to Martin Scorsese’s house one evening, he sent her home with a movie and two books—the Jacques Tourneur film Night of the Demon, and two M.R. James volumes, including the book that inspired Night of the Demon. Hogg was considering making what she calls a “ghost film,” and when she was finally ready to get started, she knew whom to ask for guidance. “I remember texting you during the pandemic, ‘Do you have any ghost stories to recommend?’” Hogg told Scorsese in a recent conversation with Vanity Fair. He sent over a few, Hogg remembers, including, “crucially, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘They,’ the single greatest influence for The Eternal Daughter.” Hogg’s film, in which Tilda Swinton plays both a woman mourning her mother and the mother herself, is the kind of emotional ghost story Hogg didn’t know was possible before reading “They,” which she says moved her to tears. On his own role as a guide toward inspiration, Scorsese says, “My thing with Joanna is I tend to follow where her interest is. If she has an interest somewhere, she’ll tell me and I’ll say, ‘Just let me send this to her. See what happens.’” —Katey Rich

All Quiet on the Western Front

For his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel, director Edward Berger was inspired by Steve McQueen’s 2011 drama Shame. “This might seem like an unexpected choice, but in all of McQueen’s films I admire the precision,” says Berger. Set 100 years apart and in dramatically different circumstances, Berger’s war epic and McQueen’s drama about sex addiction keep a sharp focus on their protagonists above all else. “Each frame is incredibly considered, giving the audience the feeling of a razor that dissects whomever is onscreen until the blade cuts into their bones,” says Berger of Shame. “In each shot I feel the contribution of each department as they help the actors express the emotions their characters are actually trying to hide.” —Rebecca Ford

Living

Oliver Hermanus’s Living, a remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic Ikiru, starring Bill Nighy as a dying bureaucrat, opens with actual footage of 1950s London. So costume designer Sandy Powell was drawn to documentary photography of the period to make the transition into the world of the film as seamless as possible. In addition to the fashion photography of Cecil Beaton, who also captured the rubble of the Blitz, she asked her family members to dig through their own archives. “These photos of real working-class and lower-middle-class people were the most useful tools,” she explains. “Many of the background fittings were based on family photos.” Beaton himself inspired the look of Tom Burke’s character, Sutherland, a rougher character that Nighy’s Williams meets by the seaside. As for cinematic references, she turned to pictures made at London’s Ealing Studios during the period, like The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico, and The Ladykillers. But she was preeminently concerned with reality, unlike other 1950s period pieces she’s done, like Far from Heaven. “This film was very much about recreating something authentically,” she says. —Esther Zuckerman

Armageddon Time

Before they start any project, director James Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji head to the museum. Making their third film together in Gray’s hometown of New York, they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Gray remembers the Vermeer painting A Maid Asleep—depicting a woman nodding off at a table, her face turned away from the room’s key light—as “the thing to aim for” in their film’s look. But it’s the Rembrandt painting Supper at Emmaus that the cinematographer calls “a friendly ghost” of inspiration throughout the film. As he and Gray scouted locations in New York to film the 1980s-set family drama, which is heavily inspired by Gray’s own childhood, “this Rembrandt painting came back to me,” Khondji says. “This ghostly feeling of the character silhouetted with a light behind, these ochre tones, this feeling came back.” There’s no direct recreation of the painting in the film, but its essence—the shadows, the “elusiveness of the souls,” as Gray puts it—recur throughout the director’s quietly haunting film. —K.R.

Tár

In Tár, when conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) sits down with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik for an onstage interview, she refers to the groundbreaking 1930s female conductor Antonia Brico, who “was ghettoized into the nonglamorous status of guest conductor.” Brico’s story was also a strong influence for writer-director Todd Field, who cites the 1974 documentary Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman as a source of inspiration for Tár. Field, who hadn’t made a film in 16 years, particularly related to a moment in the documentary when Brico, who otherwise seems quite stoic, is asked what it was like to not be able to conduct when she had no orchestra to work with regularly. Says Field, “She answered, ‘I’m a musician, but I don’t have a piano and I don’t have a horn. I have human beings, and without them I’m silenced.’ That is the only time where you could see the pain in her face. She needed other people to be a musician.” —R.F. 

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

“What am I going to do?” was the first thought that went through Emma Thompson’s head when she realized she would have to be completely naked for a scene in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. “I thought, ‘How am I going to dissociate from myself and my own issues with my body that have always been there?’” she tells Vanity Fair. To do so, she looked back to “a more innocent time” as a part of her research, finding inspiration in a painting of Adam and Eve created by German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach. In it, Eve is standing with one knee bent, looking very relaxed. In the film, as a widow who’s had a sexual awakening with the help of a male escort, Thompson had to channel Eve’s ease with her nude body. “I realize that whenever I stood in front of a mirror, I was always holding something in or standing in a particular way just in order to make myself more acceptable to myself,” she says. Thompson not only borrowed the bent-knee stance from Eve, but learned to stand in front of a mirror without judgment. As she puts it, “That’s a tall, tall fucking order.” —R.F.