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Olivia Wilde names her favourite film of all time
Blossoming into a major creative talent in the past five years, Olivia Wilde has gone from a middling Hollywood actor to a director and producer at the very forefront of the industry. She’s certainly come a long way from her small acting debut in 2004’s The Girl Next Door, with Wilde working her way up the ladder of cinema to star in some of the 21st century’s biggest and most significant films.
Working her way through minor film roles and the occasional mainstream release, Wilde featured in 2009’s Year One by Harold Ramis and 2011’s Cowboys & Aliens with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford as she gradually worked her way to the height of the industry. Despite several successful supporting roles, Wilde wouldn’t see considerable success until her directorial debut with Booksmart in 2019.
Reinventing her whole career, the success of the movie made the industry appreciate the actor as a filmmaker, with Wilde telling Vogue in 2021, “I’ll never forget the moment at South by Southwest when we premiered it, and I was shaking backstage thinking, I’ve never felt more exposed”. Making note of the inspiration behind the film, following the lives of two academic high schoolers who go on a frivolous night out on their last day of school, Wilde adds, “Quentin Tarantino always says, ‘Make the movie only you can make.’ So I knew that with my first opportunity, I had to make something that just had my DNA all over it”.
Almost instantly, Wilde became a popular pop-culture icon with fans across the world eager to hear about her filmmaking influences and aspirations for the future of her career.
When it comes to the one film that inspires her most, Olivia Wilde can’t get away from her favourite movie of all time, explaining, “I love The Godfather so much for so many reasons”. Stating her opinion in an interview with MTV, Wilde announces, “I love gangster movies, you can’t turn me away from a gangster movie,” making reference to the films of Francis Ford Coppola and, almost certainly, Martin Scorsese.
Involving intricate crime stories, infighting, backstabbing and violent murder, the gangster subgenre has existed since the very dawn of cinema and was popularised by the aforementioned filmmakers who brought such Italian-inspired stories to the big screen. “Love the intensity, I love the comedy that’s always exists in a gangster movie, I love the stakes of a gangster movie, and certainly with The Godfather I and II that’s done perfectly,” Wilde notes, with much of this frenetic intensity appearing in her most debut movie, Booksmart.
Olivia Wilde’s next project, Don’t Worry Darling, is drumming up plenty of excitement ahead of its release in September 2022, with the contemporary culture icons Florence Pugh and Harry Styles being major figures of allure for audiences across the world. The brand new film joins Wilde’s future feature film for Marvel that’s currently in pre-production, placing the director in a unique and inarguably powerful position in modern Hollywood.
