The “disturbing” movies that defined Sam Rockwell’s childhood: “They stick in your mind”
Movies can be incredibly powerful things. They can stick in the mind like a childhood memory; they can upset you, bring you immense joy or change the way you view the world. It’s something that Moon star Sam Rockwell has quite some authority to talk about, given he has been in some movies that, for this author at least, have done exactly that.
For one, he had a major role in the fantastic Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was written and directed by Frances McDormand, and is one of the finest movies of this century that picked up countless awards and gained seven Oscar nominations.
And secondly, he was brilliant in the truly magical Frank Darabont film The Green Mile, the Tom Hanks-starring Stephen King adaptation that rivals The Shawshank Redemption when it comes to King’s books brought to the big screen.
That 1999 film won’t be forgotten by anyone who saw it, and although it had its critics, it is now considered a true classic. It’s the kind of film that you might catch during its first 30 minutes and then find yourself in tears two and a half hours later, having sat down to watch the whole thing.
Californian Rockwell played ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton in the movie, a deranged prisoner who brings a black-hearted, chaotic element to the film and saves it from being overly nostalgic. In doing so, he frames the lead character, John Coffey, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, and becomes his nemesis, going down as one of the most hated figures in film history.
In choosing his favourite movies, Rockwell speaks about cinema’s ability to genuinely affect the audience, picking an unforgettable war movie starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken as an example. He told Rotten Tomatoes, “The Deer Hunter is something I saw when I was very young. There were a lot of movies that probably kids shouldn’t go to. And it just blew the top of my hair off, you know? The Russian roulette scene, those scenes, they stick in your mind and, yeah, it changed you. I think they kind of change you. Maybe Deer Hunter changed me. It was about friendship. It was about war, but it was also about friendship.”
Upon its release in 1978, The Deer Hunter was touted, and still is, a highly controversial film. Incredibly dark, it was a gritty, violent statement about the Vietnam War and the devastating effect it had not just on soldiers during the conflict but after they returned home. Now rightly seen as one of the finest movies of all time, director Michael Cimino contrasted the toil of working in a downtrodden ‘70s steel mining town with the alternate hell of being captured and tortured by the Vietcong in an epic three-hour narrative that was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five.
Elsewhere in his selections, Rockwell mentions another all-time great in the form of Back to the Future, the time-travel comedy that still feels as fresh as it did on release some 40 years ago. As Rockwell states: “It’s just a perfect movie, you know? Everything about it, you just can’t… It’s just perfect. You can watch it over and over again.”
He also picked Bill Murray’s 1981 comedy Stripes, and another life-changing film in the form of Jack Nicholson’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—the majestic mental-asylum dark comedy-drama that is one of only three films to win all five major Oscar categories at once for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Screenplay’.
Of that film, Rockwell noted, “That’s just one of the great… That and Chinatown are probably—and maybe Five Easy Pieces—I mean, those were the big Nicholson performances. But McMurphy’s kind of the quintessential Nicholson performance. It’s kind of everything about Nicholson that’s great.”
Rockwell has several projects on the way, including a biopic about American singer Merle Haggard, a time-travelling movie with Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple titled Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and the zombie outbreak film Hellhound.
