The best director Liam Neeson ever worked with: “He’s still the bar by which I judge”
Even though he’s spent almost two decades as a fixture of the action genre, Liam Neeson used to be an actor who’d go out of his way to work with the finest directors. While he hasn’t abandoned those intentions entirely, they’ve definitely been waylaid in favour of snapping necks and cashing cheques.
In the early years of his career, Neeson worked under John Boorman, Roger Donaldson, Neil Jordan, and Roland Joffé, planting himself firmly in the middle ground as a talented and dependable character actor who could comfortably step up to the leading man level when required.
These days, though, he’s more likely to be found in generic thrillers with forgettable one-word titles like Memory, Blacklight, and Absolution. He occasionally returns to his roots and partners up with an auteur renowned as one of the best in the business, but it’s been a while since he did after the one-two punch of Martin Scorsese’s Silence and Steve McQueen’s Widows in 2017 and 2018.
That said, he’s earned the right to do as he sees fit. Neeson has been working solidly for more than 40 years, and what veteran in their right mind would turn down repeated multi-million dollar offers to take part in a succession of high-paying genre films that give audiences exactly what they want to see? Based on how many elder statesmen tried and failed to replicate the formula, it’s clear he mastered it.
Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Kathryn Bigelow, Sam Raimi, and Michael Apted are just some of the other big-name filmmakers Neeson has starred for over the decades, but none of them are the measuring stick. Since they worked together, the Irishman has held one icon on a pedestal they occupy alone, and it’s probably not surprising that honour falls to the one responsible for his greatest performance.
Neeson’s solitary Academy Award nomination came when Steven Spielberg steered him towards a ‘Best Actor’ nod in the critically acclaimed, commercially successful, and awards-laden masterpiece Schindler’s List. If anything, the actor calling him “extremely special” is selling him short when he’s the highest-grossing director in history and has reinvented the medium several times over.
The downside is that whether they like it or not, anyone Neeson has been directed by in the 30+ years since has been compared to Spielberg. “He’s still the bar by which I judge,” he admitted to Cigar Aficionado, which is fair enough, really.
If anyone gets close to Spielberg, in Neeson’s estimation, then they’re someone he’d happily work with again. Strangely, though, he isn’t one of them: Schindler’s List remains the one and only picture they made together, even if they could have added a second were Neeson not so adamant he needed to be replaced as Abraham Lincoln in the filmmaker’s biopic, which ended up winning Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
