Cillian Murphy’s favourite Martin Scorsese movie
Cillian Murphy might be Christopher Nolan’s cinematic darling, starring in several of his renowned films, but that doesn’t stop the Irish actor from paying his respects to the other directorial greats. While they might be rivals during the current award season with Killers Of The Flower Moon and Oppenheimer going head to head, Murphy still shared his favourite Martin Scorsese movie.
While Nolan and Scorsese might be rivals for the Oscars ‘Best Picture’ crown, Cillian Murphy served up a peace treaty when he selected his five favourite films of all time. Across his choices, the actor takes the world on a tour of the movies that made him first fall in love with cinema and the flicks that made him strive to improve.
In the early days, Al Pacino’s performance in The Scarecrow made Murphy first want to step onto screens, as he stated, “It pretty much made me want to be an actor”. Elsewhere, Murphy credits the darkness of La Haine as a major inspiration, adding that it is a “film I revisit very often”. The Irishman also gives a shout-out to his motherland by selecting the Irish film The Butcher Boy.
But among it all, Muprhy discusses his love for Martin Scorsese when selecting Mean Streets, the 1973 crime drama. The film was a major landmark moment for Scorsese as it was his first collaboration with Robert De Niro. The actor plays the leading role of John ‘Johnny Boy’ Civello and impressed the director so much that they have since made ten films together.
While Scorsese is now one of the most powerful names in Hollywood, back in 1973, he was still a start-up. So much of his success can be traced back to Mean Streets, which received overwhelming acclaim and suddenly made the world wake up to the director’s blossoming talent. From then on, his decades-long run of movies included hit after hit, writing himself into the cinematic history books.
Murphy would agree with that as he considers Mean Streets an important movie not only for the director but for his own career as well. “Another very early formative film for me,” he says of his selection.
It’s easy to see how the Scorsese crime drama would be so influential to Murphy. His role as Tommy Shelby, the Peaky Blinders’ crime boss, undoubtedly took notes from the film. Similarly, his regularly tense characters, like the role of a terrorist in Red Eye or even the quiet, introspective suspense held in Oppenheimer, could easily have taken inspiration from Scorsese’s approach to criminality here.
He praised everything from the cast to the director as he concluded, “Extraordinary energy and performances from De Niro and Keitel, with Scorsese beginning to cast a spell over filmmaking in the 1970s.”
