Hollywood filmmaker Wes Anderson has named Satyajit Ray’s Charulata among his road-trip film picks, revealing in a recent Criterion Collection video that the Bengali filmmaker’s work influenced scenes in his 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom.

Speaking on Criterion Collection’s Mobile Closet Picks! series, Anderson was asked to select some of his favourite films from the collection for a cinephile to watch. With a family road trip across America ahead and no access to his collection at home, he stopped by the mobile unit to choose films for the journey.

Picking up a copy of Ray’s Charulata, also known in English as The Lonely Wife, Anderson described it as one of the legendary filmmaker’s best works and acknowledged borrowing from it for his own films.

“I stole many things for my own movies from Ray, and from this one, Charulata. The protagonist spends much of her time looking out from the rooms in her house with binoculars. And in my film Moonrise Kingdom, we have a lot of binocular shots, only because of Satyajit Ray, one of my favourite great masters of cinema,” Anderson said.

Alongside Charulata, Anderson selected Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait and Design for Living, Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, John Ford’s Stagecoach, and Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow.

This is not the first time Anderson has spoken about Ray’s influence on his work. In earlier interviews, he acknowledged drawing heavily from the famous memory game sequence in Ray’s 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri for his 2023 film Asteroid City.

A longtime admirer of Ray, Anderson also dedicated The Darjeeling Limited to the Indian filmmaker and has frequently used his music in his work.