Keanu Reeves names four of his favourite cinema experiences of all time: “My mind was expanded”
In recent years, Letterboxd has become indispensable to modern cinephiles, as it allows movie nerds everywhere to (publicly) curate and display their film lives like never before. Many celebrities have gotten in on the act, too, such as the universally beloved Keanu Reeves, who was customarily enthusiastic when the outlet asked him to name four of his favourite cinema experiences.
First up for Reeves was one of his earliest brushes with a filmmaker who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s weirdest, most revered, and entirely singular auteurs. The future John Wick star was cycling around Toronto one fateful afternoon, and as he rode his bike past the Bloor Street Cinema, he noticed a screening of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Nothing to do and nowhere to go, he headed in, “I just chained the bike up, and I went in.” Then, with a huge grin, he added, “And my mind was expanded.”
Silent films have fallen out of fashion, even for the uber-intellectual, but the 1927 picture Napoléon still remains a classic for the star, despite the ass-numbing runtime. Reeves recalled that this venue’s showing was similar, but also included multiple screens, which must have made it a total feast for the senses.
For his next cinematic reverie, Reeves went back in time to his teenage years spent learning his craft at a repertory theatre company. One day, the company decided to screen Hal Ashby’s black comedy Harold and Maude, about a young man obsessed with death who begins a friendship – which later blossoms into romance – with a quirky 79-year-old woman who has a lust for life he’s never experienced. At one point in the deliciously twisted film, Harold is sent on a series of dates by his long-suffering mother, who wants him to meet someone and get the hell out of her house.
Instead of obeying his mother’s wishes, though, the nihilistic young misanthrope stages several hilarious fake suicides to terrify the prospective lovers, including one in which he supposedly chops his own arm off in a restaurant. When the young Reeves saw this happen, he had never witnessed anything like it in a movie, and it caused a reaction he distinctly remembers to this day. “That scene where he pulls out his arm,” Reeves recalled, a smile already creeping across his lips. “He’s on the date, and he takes the hatchet out and starts banging his arm off. I never laughed like that in a movie, ever. It was sublime!”
For Reeves’ fourth and final pick, he fudged the details somewhat, but Letterboxd let him away with it because they’re nice like that. But it wasn;t just a movie that could affect him, but a trailer too.
“I remember seeing the trailer for Star Wars at one of the largest cinemas in Toronto, called the University,” Reeves remembered wistfully. “I was only a little boy, and I saw the trailer for Star Wars, and I went, “What is thaaat?! What is that?” It’s at this point that you can see a heavily bearded and shaggy 61-year-old Reeves making lightsaber noises and waving his imaginary sci-fi weapon around. We’re all just big kids, really.
