The movie Chiwetel Ejiofor would watch forever: “That’s what I come back to”
Everyone’s got those actors that aren’t favourites, but they consistently appear in some of their favourite films, rarely top of the bill, playing small, but crucial roles in the narrative and elevating things beyond the norm, and making them, in my opinion, far more interesting than the marquee names, with one such name being Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Most people will know the British star from his Oscar-nominated performance in 12 Years a Slave, which brought him to international attention, but he’s been around for a long time before that, cast in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad just three months into his first acting course.
He’s also appeared in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, and Richard Curtis’ Love Actually, and looking at his stats, please don’t hold that last one against him.
Since Ejiofor has been in so many great films, it begs the question of what he likes to watch in his downtime, for which you can turn to his Letterboxd ‘Four Favourites’, but for a more fascinating answer, we pick up an interview he gave to the MetFilm school in Manchester, where when asked about his favourite film, he qualified his answer by saying that it changes all the time, yet expressing a deep appreciation for Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog.
“It’s a very beautiful piece of work centred around the Ten Commandments,” he explained, “It’s set in basically one location and was shot in the 1980s for television. I always look to Dekalog if I am wanting to think about things and get inspired about things like relationship dynamics in film, setting environments, and psychology, and how all that intersects with cinematography. So that’s what I come back to the most.”
By his own admission, Ejiofor technically cheated with this answer, as Dekalog isn’t one film, but ten, with Kieślowski creating this anthology of biblically-influenced tales to explore how the Ten Commandments apply to modern life in his native Poland.
Set in a housing complex in the 1980s, the films explore themes of sex, truth, faith, science, murder, and more, so if you’ve got a spare 572 minutes, you can get through every single instalment of this monumental effort. However, if you’re a normal person, you might just want to check out one of the extended editions Dekalogs Five and Six, which are called A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, respectively.
It might not be appropriate viewing for a cosy Sunday afternoon, but Dekalog is one of the most revered pieces of work in the entire history of film. Stanley Kubrick even wrote a foreword to a published version of the screenplay, describing it as the only “masterpiece” he could think of, while the great Roger Ebert was also a fan, and ‘Best Director’ winner for The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, described it as “Maybe the greatest achievement in the history of cinema”.
Dekalog is one of those films, or a series of films, if you want to get pedantic, that can be a daunting task for any wannabe cinephile, but based on the number of influential people who constantly sing its praises, it surely has to be worth it.
