Jill Sprecher

It was released or was completed in 1997, not released in the U.S. until 1998.

Written and directed by Jill Sprecher and starring...

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alana Ubach in a very memorably, not surreal, but kind of edging on that in its tone depiction of temps at a kind of imprecise credit agency.

Imprecise,

It's just interesting that this has a tone that exists elsewhere and I think can draw a certain type of viewer attention.

And I think it's interesting that it appears so singularly here.

I say that not having seen the other Jill Sprecher films.

They may have a similar vibe, but I just think there is a singularity about Clock Watchers that I find very compelling.

Mm-hmm, I remember this

... and I was like, "Can we do Clockwatchers?" Because I happened to know at the time that from Jill Sprecher, the director, who I have, I hunted down and forced her into f- friendship, um, I knew that she had lost her print because she gave it to a festival in, like, 2010.

They never sent it back.

[laughs] And, um, and so I was like, "We have to find this print." It was, like, also COVID mania.

We gotta do this.

Like, um, and they helped me track it down, or they helped, the Academy made a, a print of it from the negatives, whatever.

Anyway, and then when we screened it, Criterion reached out to Metrograph and was like, "Can you send, uh, can you co- uh, put us in touch with Jill Sprecher? We wanna put this on the Criterion Channel."

[laughs]