The Ninth Gate

Director: Roman Polanski

1999 / 133min / 35mm

Hired by a wealthy collector to authenticate a rarer-than-rare copy of Aristide Torchia’s 17th-century tome The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, purported to allow its owner to summon the Devil, New York–based antiquarian book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) sets off for Europe—and soon finds himself contending with cutthroat cults, suspicious suicides, and a most beguiling Emmanuelle Seigner. “[Polanski] represents the essence of cinematic genius for me… [On The Ninth Gate] I learned how to appreciate the distance between the camera and the actor, and also how to move the camera—or not—at a certain point in the story. I also learned to have a strong sense of the set and its design—that the set can be an actor itself, that it can be filmed like another character in the movie. And I learned the incredible accuracy you can have when cutting from one shot to another.” —Darius Khondji

Distributor: Lionsgate