Michelle Rodriguez’s five favourite films
Michelle Rodriguez is no stranger to the big-budget blockbuster. With her iconic role in the Fast and Furious franchise and her appearances in films like Avatar and Dungeons and Dragons, very few actors of her time can boast such a strong lineup of action movies. For all of the impressive action scenes she has had to film over the years, Rodriguez has always remained a filmmaking student.
Despite her penchant for action thrill ride films, Rodriguez’s favourite films ran various genres, starting with Stanly Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. When discussing the irreverent classic, the actor explained just how visceral an experience Kubrick could create. She told Rotten Tomatoes, “Whatever he’s doing metaphorically with a concept, he can transfer that to all the senses. I feel he does the same tone visually that he’s doing phonetically — that you can hear. With Clockwork, he just went to town.”
It’s easy to sense that from Kubrick’s take on the classic novel. As the audience follows the tale of Alex, there’s an almost-slimy demeanour that coats the movie, as if the viewer has come across a deeply disturbing impressionist painting.
Rodriguez also admires that same type of complexity in the modern era, singling out Christopher Nolan’s work on Interstellar. While taking the concept of a man losing most of his life when lost in space, she marvelled at the scope of Nolan’s work, commending the director for taking “such a hard stance to take something complex, turn it into a metaphor, and translate it with light and sound in two hours.”
That’s not to say that Rodriguez only pays attention to the more complex styles of movies when watching for fun. Aside from the head trips, she also included classics such as West Side Story among her favourites, loving how the musical “danced with sound, danced with music, danced with the metaphors of the theme of the movie”.
One of the common threads among Rodriguez’s favourite films is how they play around with the concept of traditional storytelling, including Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece Pulp Fiction for how outlandish the concept eventually became. Since the film is told somewhat out of order, she talked about the thrill of piecing the film together once the credits rolled.
Although none of her favourites gravitated towards the traditional movie tropes, Rodriguez was a sucker for how they twisted the general narratives of the usual Hollywood stories. When talking about the live-action remake of Disney’s Maleficent, the actor liked the idea of seeing the vulnerable side of the Sleeping Beauty villain, explaining, “I thought that was powerful for Disney to do that. It’s like taking an old metaphor that’s been repeated for so many years and putting it on its head.”
Then again, Rodriguez has always thrived by going against the grain of traditional female roles as well. In her performance as Letti in every Fast and Furious film, she’s always had the reputation of not being the traditional female character, always willing to put anyone in their place, gender be damned. Though most Hollywood movies get bogged down to the basic tropes people have seen repeatedly, she prefers movies with characters that don’t fit into the same set formula.
Michelle Rodriguez’s favourite movies:
- A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
- Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)
- West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961)
- Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
- Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014)
