Cillian Murphy picks his 10 favourite movies
Actor Cillian Murphy is one of the most sought-after stars of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The Irishman first garnered mainstream attention after starring in films from the 2000s, such as Red Eye, 28 Days Later, and Sunshine and later gained higher levels of notoriety after collaborating with Christopher Nolan in several of his movies.
Amongst Murphy’s Nolan films are The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception and Dunkirk, and he also plays the lead role in Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, making him a clear favourite of the British-American director. In a feature with TimeOut, Murphy once listed his favourite films of all time, so let’s take a closer look at them to better understand the man himself.
Murphy looks to be a big fan of the films of Hal Ashby, selecting two of his works among his top ten picks. The first is the black comedy Harold and Maude, which documents the unlikely relationship between a death-obsessed boy and a vibrant elderly lady. The other is 1979’s Being There, a satire based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel of the same name.
Elsewhere, we find mentions of some of the greatest directors of all time; Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. Murphy admires Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining, which was adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name. For Scorsese, he picks out 1973’s Mean Streets, starring Scorsese’s frequent collaborator Robert De Niro.
It’s not just American directors that take Murphy’s fancy, though. He selects a true British classic in the form of Ken Loach’s widely-admired coming-of-age film Kes, released in 1969 and also gives the nod to a more contemporary British director with genuine talent, Ben Wheatley and his 2011 action-horror Kill List.
Murphy also chooses the 1973 American road movie Scarecrow, directed by Jerry Schatzberg and starring Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. It tells of the relationship between two men that travel from California to Pittsburgh with dreams of becoming rich through a hopeful car-washing business.
The oldest film on Murphy’s list is The Night of the Hunter, the 1955 film noir thriller directed by Charles Laughton. It starred Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters in a screen adaptation of David Grubb’s 1953 novel of the same name, focusing on a serial killer posing as a preacher while trying to swindle a widow out of her husband’s fortune.
Cillian Murphy’s 10 favourite movies:
- Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzburg, 1973)
- The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)
- Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
- Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993)
- Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
- Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)
- Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
- The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
- Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)
- The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
