Colin Farrell names the awful 1980s movies he was raised on: “All sorts of crap things”
Growing up, films can be an incredibly important part of your childhood.
Because you’re likely to have watched movies long before you learn to read, they’re your first introduction to the magical world of storytelling and escapism, which is why it’s important when you have kids yourself to show them brilliant stuff, and not some of the things Colin Farrell watched when he was a lad.
Although actually, that’s a little unfair on Farrell’s parents, because along with some straight-to-video nasties, he was raised on some of the best films ever made as a child of the 1980s, a decade where blockbusters really took hold of Hollywood, where movie stars were made of muscle and when Steven Spielberg ruled the big screen.
And it was the film that many see as Spielberg’s finest cinematic achievement that had the greatest impression on Farrell during his childhood in Ireland, as he told Collider: “The first film experiences that I can remember are two things: ET and Rocky. They were two things that really moved me and stirred me at whatever age I was. I may have seen ET when I was seven or eight in a theatre, but I cried like a seven or eight-year-old. I just loved it. I was just taken away completely to another world.”
44 years after its release, it’s difficult to quantify the effect that ET the Extra-Terrestrial had, and is still having, on the movie landscape, and while Spielberg was already a hugely successful director thanks to Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the heartwarming 1982 alien tale put him in an entirely different stratosphere.
The story of Elliot (note the letters that begin and end his name) and his adopted alien buddy became the highest-grossing movie in history, a record that stood for 11 years until Spielberg broke it again with Jurassic Park, and has gone down as one of the landmark sci-fi movies of all time.
Not all of Farrell’s formative movie experiences were quite so dramatic however, or any good for that matter. He added, “My dad used to have a candy store and above the candy store, there was a video store. So we used to go up, I remember Zombie Flesh Eaters and all sorts of crap things like American Ninja, Coming Home, and all of Arnie’s [Schwarzenegger] films were big staples of our diet growing up, like Red Heat with [James] Belushi.”
It was ET that led Farrell to know that he wanted to be an actor, even at that early stage. It took him until he was 23 to manifest being in his own movie, 1999’s The War Zone, but only a couple of years later, he was one of Hollywood’s hottest young talents, now no stranger to blockbusters himself, having appeared in franchises like The Batman reboot and Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
But it was in 2001 that his dreams really came to fruition, when Spielberg himself cast him opposite Tom Cruise in Minority Report, the stylish, futuristic thriller about criminals being apprehended for things they had only been thinking about doing. It was a typically sizable hit for Spielberg, and Farrell received considerable praise for his performance.
