The Miracle Woman and Baby Face are interesting in that both have these huge fires. Whether it’s Capra, who directed The Miracle Woman, or Nietzsche, who gets referenced frequently in Baby Face, it’s trial by fire for Stanwyck. There’s a special-effects element at play, but it’s the monologues she gives that are the real pyrotechnics. When you first see Barbara in The Miracle Woman, she’s spitting vitriol at this pile of hypocrites, giving this speech about blasphemers, liars, adulterers. It’s so dynamic, and you actually believe she thinks she’s hearing the voice of God. I really enjoy a speech like that. I like it when people start screaming. It reminds me of Network: a speech about the human condition being totally rotten.

The Miracle Woman is also interesting because I can believe that she’s in the grips of this awful manager and is someone who can’t figure out how to get herself out of a sticky situation. But at the same time I also completely believe her when she moves so quickly from being kind to being someone who can orchestrate deceit and navigate the chess moves in human relationships.

In Baby Face, there’s this combination of Nietzschean philosophy with a screwball nightmare about sleeping your way to the top—and that’s why I love movies of this era. That would never make it through a studio today. You can tell they had to churn these movies out so quickly that they were just going with the first idea they had.

In that movie, her father is essentially pimping her out at first, but by the time you get to the speech in the back half of the movie where she tells the banker she loves that she cannot go back to what she was, you believe her. Her trick is to be completely nihilistic or she’s doomed—that’s what life has taught her. You believe her speech so purely, and I forgive her in that moment. Usually in the movies, when you see a woman trading sex for something, there’s a pimp figure, but here she’s doing it for herself, and at every twist and turn I want to see her come out on top because she’s had it so bad. And that is actually the stuff you can’t teach. Barbara Stanwyck has this underlying quality that makes us believe she’s lived it and seen it all. There’s something about survival in her performances.