In 2008, James Marsh joined a rarified field of filmmakers, when he became an Oscar winner for his documentary Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s magical walk between the Twin Towers. Now, when Marsh makes a documentary, it’s our job to pay attention. Hence, Project Nim, a film (out today) that explores the troubled life of Nim Chimsky, a chimpanzee raised since infancy as a human in order to better understand primate language acquisition and test the nature vs. nurture debate. We recently sat down with the filmmaker—who’s also no stranger to dramas—and got him to tell us his own favorite documentary filmmakers.

The odd man out lets us in

At first glance, one might expect Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson to be another in an assembly line of violent British crime capers full of cockney thugs and punchy one-liners. But it’s far from that. Bronson is a stark and surreal adventure into the mind of someone who exists in his own reality. It is meticulously staged, colored, and costumed, and it's scored with one of the eeriest and most effective soundtracks in a long time -- full of new wave anthems, heavy dark electro scores, and opera music. Bronson is based on the life of the infamous British inmate Michael Peterson (played by an unrecognizable Tom Hardy), dubbed “Britain’s most violent prisoner,” who spent 35 of his 57 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. Refn’s film avoids typical biopic styling in favor of a picaresque character study on Peterson’s self-inflicted transformation into Charlie Bronson. Successfully merging popular genre-movies with theater traditions and performance art, Refn has created and unsettling portrait of self-mythologizing man.