The movie Bruce Willis watched every week
Everyone has that one movie they can watch over and over and never get bored of. To some, it’s a cosy, comfort film that provides a kind of cinematic warm hug in the form of light, predictable comedy. To others, it’s an action film or a horror flick that never, no matter how many times they see it, gets less entertaining. For Bruce Willis, he watched his favourite movie on repeat, partly as a vital lesson and partly as a nostalgic reminder of the glory days.
Before eventually becoming a key figure in the world of comedy-tinged action roles, Willis first broke through in a series of crime, drama, and horror flicks. He was in the crime series Miami Vice, an episode of the 1985 revival of the horror anthology The Twilight Zone, and had his first role in a feature film in The First Deadly Sin, a crime thriller starring Frank Sinatra.
Considering his entry into the industry, his favourite film makes a lot of sense. “I watch Goodfellas once a week on DVD,” he said once, never tiring of the 1990 crime drama from Martin Scorsese. He’s in a busy crowd of people who would consider it one of their all-time top movies. The film is a classic, routinely referenced by directors old and new as a gold standard in the genre. It’s also a key flick mentioned by actors, given that Robert De Niro delivers an absolute masterclass of a dramatic performance that people have been taking tips from ever since.
For Willis, that was always part of it. But mostly, the film was nostalgic to him. Sure, it’s a celebration of cinema history. But as he sat at home watching a burnt-out DVD of the epic, he always wished he could be in the cinema.
“I watch old movies and new movies, and that’s how people are seeing them now,” he once said of his at-home film-watching habits. Another flick he had on repeat is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. As with all of Kubrick’s movies, it’s an incredible stylistic picture made for a big screen, so watching it at home on a TV or even a laptop feels blasphemous.
“I can’t go out and see Dr Strangelove in any movie theatre,” Willis said, mourning the days when classic pictures were routinely put back on at cinemas. “In New York, they used to have great revival houses,” he continued, touching on the city’s rich history with places like Bleeker Street Cinema or 8th Street Playhouse, which would dig into the cinematic archive and pull some old movies out.
In the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, especially, the city boomed with revival picture houses, providing a place for cinephiles to gather. There were new cinemas showing fresh box office releases, but these were places where old classics could still be seen as they were attended, on big screens with a rustling of popcorn and a respectful, hushed crowd sharing in the experience together.
“They don’t have that now, so you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to watch them on DVDs,” Willis mourned. As those institutions shut their doors amidst broad underfunding of the arts, Willis, like all other movie fans, was resigned to at-home film nights, old physical copies or streaming platforms.
