The 14 classic movies Bill Hader wants you to see: “It didn’t make a lick of sense but I enjoyed it”
The saying has been around for so long that nobody really judges a book by its cover anymore, but there’s still a massive discrepancy between the types of movies Bill Hader makes and the characters he plays in them, compared to his studious and surprisingly encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema history.
The actor, comedian, and man of a thousand voices followed the tried-and-trusted path of cutting his teeth as a Saturday Night Live cast member before embarking on a career in big-screen comedy, regularly stealing scenes away from the stars in the likes of Hot Rod, Superbad, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Hader’s spindly frame, malleable face, and penchant for twisting his vocal cords in a ridiculous number of directions made him an integral supporting player in Judd Apatow’s ‘Frat Pack’, which belied his nature as a dedicated cinephile who grew up engrossed by films from Yasujiro Ozu, Max Ophuls, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Billy Wilder.
Of course, performers aren’t obligated to appear in the type of films they enjoy watching in their spare time, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a jarring disconnect between the guy who does incredible impersonations of everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Al Pacino on-camera but calls Stephen Frears’ The Hit one of his all-time favourite features.
With that in mind, when Hader achieved a long-held dream by becoming a guest programmer for Turner Classic Movies, he rattled off a lengthy list of classics he couldn’t do without. “I remember The Wild Bunch and A Clockwork Orange,” he said. “I had never seen anything like Clockwork Orange before.”
“I remember being in fifth grade and watching Taxi Driver at night, and it totally changing my world,” he recalled of his number one favourite. “Just going, ‘What is this?'” Gary Cooper’s seminal western, High Noon, and the Charles Laughton-led version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame were added to the list, and the hits kept on coming.
Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud were included, even if Quentin Tarantino would strongly disagree on the latter. Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, Clarence Brown’s The Yearling, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, and Shirley Temple’s The Little Princess rounded out Hader’s selection. Well, almost.
There was still time for one out-of-the-box choice, and it was Don Knotts’ bizarre hybrid of live-action and animation, The Incredible Mr Limpet. “The producer was like, ‘You want to do this movie?'” Hader laughed. “It didn’t make a lick of sense, but I totally enjoyed it.”
The movies Bill Hader wants everyone to see:
- The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
- A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
- Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
- High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939)
- Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943)
- Rahomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
- Brewster McCloud (Robert Altman, 1970)
- Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
- The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946)
- Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944)
- Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954)
- The Little Princess (Walter Lang, 1939)
- The Incredible Mr Limpet (Arthur Lubin, 1964)
