The movie Saoirse Ronan thinks ticked every box: “Really wonderful”
Having started her career as a child, Saoirse Ronan has felt the early rumblings of success for a long time. One of her earliest roles saw her play the precocious little sister in Atonement who causes a chain of events that ruin several lives. The dramatic role earned her an Oscar nomination, making her one of the youngest-ever nominees.
As she got older, she began to land more roles in films like The Lovely Bones by Peter Jackson and Peter Weir’s The Way Back. She reunited with Atonement director Joe Wright for Hanna in 2011, which led her to receive critical acclaim, cementing her status as one of her generation’s finest new stars. She consistently starred in many great films over the course of the 2010s, from The Grand Budapest Hotel to Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and Little Women.
With her recent performance in The Outrun further proving Ronan’s genius – a film she also co-produced – it seems as though the actor is currently on top of her game. It is clear that Ronan loves cinema, starring in many complex roles that aren’t merely box-office fodder. Talking to Rotten Tomatoes in 2014, she once revealed some of her favourite movies which have inspired her over the years.
There is one title that she believes ticks every box for her, which she loves for its creativity and emotional pull. Taxi Driver is “a film that really kind of struck me on an emotional level and as somebody who works and can kind of appreciate how films are made,” she claimed.
“I remember when I saw Taxi Driver for the first time, and I saw the creativity and the imagination that went into the shots that Scorsese chose, and to really kind of capture a very particular kind of New York. I thought it was really wonderful.”
Ronan was actually born in New York to Irish parents, moving away to Ireland when she was three. While the actor probably doesn’t remember much of growing up in New York, it is a city that she likely finds interesting to see on screen. Taxi Driver is widely considered a definitive New York film, although it presents a very seedy and dirty version of the city, where underage prostitutes hang out on street corners and a sense of decay and corruption fills the air.
“You know, you can watch certain films and there are certain things that will stick out for you. It can be a great character or a performance or an ensemble performance or whatever, but when everything seems to come into play, it’s always really impressive, I think, when every single cast member is very strong. So I felt like with this film, cinematically, it just kind of ticked all those boxes for me,” she concluded.
Taxi Driver is a great movie by Martin Scorsese, centring one of cinema’s most enduring anti-heroes, Travis Bickle. Played brilliantly by Robert De Niro, the war veteran spends his nights driving around New York as a taxi driver, distracting himself from his PTSD-induced insomnia. The complexity of his character has certainly inspired Ronan, who often opts for darker, more complicated roles.
