Bill Pullman’s five favourite movies of all time
One of the most prolific actors of the 1990s, Bill Pullman has worked with likes of David Lynch and the late, great Nora Ephron, putting in over 25 movies during that decade alone and continuing to work across film, TV and theatre to this very day. Most audiences, however, will know him by his iconic role as the speech-giving President in Roland Emmerich’s delightfully over-the-top sci-fi movie Independence Day.
A prolific career has seen Pullman play every sort of role across every genre under the sun. Equally at home in hard-hitting psychological drama as he is in light-hearted comedies, the actor’s talents extended well beyond the presidential, giving us a professor haunted by friendly ghosts in Casper and a deeply troubled, schizophrenic father in 2002’s Igby Goes Down.
With such eclectic talents, it seems only fitting that Pullman’s taste in film mirrors the broad range of his acting abilities. Speaking to Rotten Tomatoes about his list, the actor explained how each film offers him something different. “There are some that I look to for interesting things, some that I look to for acting things, others that I watch again and again,” he said. From stone-cold classics of American cinema to critical and commercial flops, here are the five favourite films of Bill Pullman.
An undisputed treasure of film history, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia irrevocably changed the landscape of cinema and defined what a wide-screen epic should look like. So much so, in fact, that Pullman believes it’s used as a literal measure of the quality of a TV. “This is always the first choice when people say they have a new television set or home cinema system, and they want to watch a great visual movie,” the actor says, adding that “it has an incredible presence”.
Similar in its presentation of breathtaking sweeping vistas, Pullman likes John Ford’s The Searchers “for the same reason”. Following John Wayne as Ethan Edwards on the hunt for a missing girl who’s been taken by Native Americans, the film was one of the first to use VistaVision, a revolutionary technique which involved turning the film stock on its side to better capture wide images. The result is spectacular and, as Pullman puts it: “Without special effects or tweaked shots or CGI or whatever, you get this expansive feeling of being outdoors.”
Swapping the expansive for the intimate, another favourite on Pullman’s list is the 1973 romantic drama by Ingmar Bergman: Scenes From a Marriage. Bergman’s film is a theatrical distillation of his six-hour miniseries of the same name. For Pullman, it was revolutionary: “When I first saw that it changed my idea of acting,” he said. Showing the slow and painful breakdown between married couple Marianne and Johan, the film’s vivid depiction of a real relationship has influenced countless filmmakers and saw an American adaptation by HBO in 2021. “I go back to it sometimes just to put myself back in that place, where my discoveries about what was possible on a film really formed.”
Three years prior to Bergman’s film, director Michelangelo Antonioni released Zabriskie Point, an ambitious depiction of the hippie movement in 1960s America seen through the perspective of two young children. It opened to terrible reviews and was a commercial failure; however, for Pullman, it represents an important turning point in his attitude towards cinema. “Zabriskie Point was a time when I was in a lot of change and flux and these incredible visuals hit me like they had rearranged the organs in my body,” says the actor, recalling how, up until that point, he wasn’t particularly into films in a big way: “I hadn’t been interested in film before then. I really didn’t come out of that culture — I was pretty much a John Wayne fan and that was it.” The film and its final image ultimately made a life-changing impact on him, with Pullman explaining that “the ending burned itself in my consciousness”.
Bill Pullman’s five favourite films:
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
- Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
- Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)
- America America (Elia Kazan, 1963)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
- Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
- Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)
- America America (Elia Kazan, 1963)
Going back even further in film history, Pullman chooses an Elia Kazan film which, along with Martin Scorsese, he regards as one of the greatest films of all time. Adapted from his own novel, which in turn was inspired by the life of his uncle, America America details the life of a Greek man living under Turkish oppression, desperate to escape to the Land of the Free.
“It’s a little bit of a Slumdog movie in a way of somebody coming from incredibly unlikely beginnings, climbing through a lot of incredibly hard challenges to get somewhere,” Pullman explains. On the legacy of Kazan, who was unfortunately marred by his involvement in the 1952 Hollywood blacklisting, the actor has nothing but praise.
Concluding: “Kazan was really a guy who was condemned into not working, and looking to go deep into someplace and just live inside his art.”
