Elijah Wood picks his five favourite movies
Of course, Elijah Wood is best known for his excellent portrayal of Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, the famous hobbit had starred in a number of films prior to playing the classic Tolkien character, including several as a child actor, such as Avalon, Paradise and The Adventures of Huck Finn and many more as a teenager, including North and Deep Impact.
Following the success of The Lord of the Rings, Wood went on to appear in several great movies throughout the 2000s, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City and Green Street, as well as portraying the character Ryan Newman in the FX series Wilfred. Wood, something of a cinephile in his personal life, once named his five favourite films for Rotten Tomatoes.
First, Wood takes us right back to 1950 with his first selection, Henry Koster’s comedy-drama Harvey, based on Mary Chase’s 1944 play of the same name, which tells of a man who has an invisible rabbit as a best friend. “You could say he’s a man who has given up on reality and, therefore, he’s happier, and Harvey is a manifestation of that,” Wood said. “It’s such a beautiful film, and there’s such humanity in the film, and there’s something so enlightened about him.”
Next for Wood is the 1991 film Delicatessen, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. The post-apocalyptic black comedy stars Dominique Pinon and Marie-Laure Dougnac. Wood said of the film, “There’s a great amount of comedy to it; the characters are so bizarre and so well-drawn. The world is so strange; it’s not totally relatable. It’s very funny. It’s very dark.”
Another movie that is a favourite of Woods is the 1994 action-thriller Leon: The Profession, starring Jean Reno and a young Natalie Portman in her film debut. Reno plays a hitman who takes in Portman’s character as his protegee after her family is murdered. “The movie goes into a really dark and awfully sort of tragic place, you know, and it’s really about a man whose sole purpose in life is to be cold and calculated, but it’s all about this girl finding his humanity,” Wood said. “It’s just such a beautiful film.”
Wood then takes us back to the 1950s once again with Charles Laughton’s film noir classic The Night of the Hunter, which Wood says was recommended to him by Peter Jackson’s wife. He added: “The cinematography’s incredible; it’s just like all blacks and whites and hard shadows and lots of silhouettes along the river. It’s just a stunning, a stunning film! It’s really good.”
Elijah Wood’s five favourite movies:
- Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950)
- Delicatessen (Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, 1991)
- Leon: The Professional (Luc Besson, 1994)
- The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
- Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)
Finally, Wood rounds off the list of his favourite films with Kinji Fukusaku’s 2000 dystopian action-thriller Battle Royale, which sees a class of Japanese school students fight each other to the death on a remote island as part of a government programme designed to curb juvenile crime. “Fuck, man. It’s incredible,” Wood said, “It’s great. I dunno, it’s harrowing, and it’s also deeply funny, extremely entertaining.”
