Jason Bateman names his favourite films of all time
Perhaps actor Jason Bateman is best known for his role as Michael Bluth in the sitcom Arrested Development. However, he also came up in the 1980s as a child actor before going on to perform in several prominent roles, including Dodgeball, Paul, Game Night and Juno.
Bateman is also a director and made his debut with the 2013 comedy Bad Words before going to take the lead on The Family Fang and some episodes of Ozark, in which he stars. So Bateman is certainly a big name in the film and TV world, but how about the films that he admires the most? Well, fortunately, the actor and director once ran through his favourites with Letterboxd.
First up for Bateman is arguably the single greatest science fiction movie ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. It tells of the evolution of humankind from prehistoric apes to space travel via technological innovation, all the while being mysteriously aided by a space-faring monolith.
There’s room for one of the greatest war movies ever made, too, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, the epic war drama stars Martin Sheen as a United States Army Captain who takes a team of soldiers into the jungle to locate and assassinate a suspected defective Colonel.
The director Alan J. Pakula looks to be one of Bateman’s biggest cinematic loves too, and he picks out two of the American filmmaker’s works for inclusion on his list of favourites. The first is the biographical movie All The President’s Men, which tells of the Watergate scandal, and the second is 1971’s Klute, the neo-noir crime thriller starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
Bateman includes the comedy dramas of both The Coen Brothers and Martin Scorsese. For the Coen Brothers, Bateman picks out their 1996 crime comedy-drama Fargo, starring Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi and William H. Macy in a tale of a quiet North Dakota town and its residents becoming embroiled in a serious crime.
For Scorsese, Bateman chooses The King of Comedy, which saw Robert De Niro star in his fifth film with the director as Rupert Pupkin, a maniacal and aspiring stand-up comic with an obsession with a talk show host Jerry Langford, played by Jerry Lewis. Bateman then rounds of his list with Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir classic Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.
Jason Bateman’s favourite films of all time:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982)
- Fargo (The Coen Brothers, 1996)
- Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
- Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
- All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
- Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)
