Jeff Bridges names the favourite scene of his career
Crazy Heart, Starman, Hell or High Water, Tron, The Fisher King, Iron Man, The Big Lebowski, and True Grit are just a handful of fabulous Jeff Bridges credits, but somewhat surprisingly, none of those eight harbours the actor’s favourite scene.
Instead, that honour falls to one of the lesser-known entries in the veteran’s esteemed and eclectic filmography, a drama that failed to recoup its budget at the box office and ended up being swiftly swept under the rug and largely forgotten.
Nobody would call it one of Bridges’ finest, but writer and director Tod Williams’ little-seen film The Door in the Floor does at least contain a particularly memorable sequence that the Academy Award-winning legend fondly remembers as one of the best scenes he’s ever performed.
It even placed him into the orbit of a familiar co-star, with Bridges and Kim Basinger reuniting for the first time since 1987’s crime comedy Nadine. That one bombed, too, with the pair clearly not cut out for making hits together. On the plus side, they do at least seem to enjoy each other’s company.
The story follows the star-powered pair couple, Ted and Marion Cole, who are plunged into tragedy when their sons die in a car accident. She becomes increasingly withdrawn from her husband and their youngest daughter while he hires an assistant who looks awfully familiar to one of their recently deceased children.
When the trauma becomes too much, the Coles go their separate ways, only for Marion to embark on an affair with her spouse’s much younger assistant, while Ted gets close with the neighbour next door. Reflecting on what it takes to make a great scene, Bridges explained that sometimes dialogue isn’t even necessary.
“A lot of it depends on the play,” he told Pop Entertainment. “The story, what the lines are. Not even the lines, just the relationships. I think one of my favourite moments was with Kim in The Door in the Floor, just saying goodbye. I don’t think we even said any words. We just looked at each other. That’s just kind of the story you’re telling.”
If 100 people were asked to name their ten favourite movies starring Bridges, then it’s debatable whether The Door in the Floor would make the cut in 99 cases. It clearly made a huge impression on him, though, with the star recalling it fondly years after he’d done nothing more than exchange glances with Basinger to try and further the narrative through nothing more than expression and body language.
During his decades in the spotlight, he’s been in plenty of unforgettable scenes, but sometimes, it can be the most unassuming that lingers longest in the memory, as his appreciation for The Door in the Floor demonstrates.
