“That’s as good as it gets”: the only movie John Turturro called “perfect”
There can’t have been many better on-screen performances given in the last few years than John Turturro has put in on the majestic, twisting Apple TV+ show Severance.
He gives a masterclass in hidden depth as Irving B, the company man who is a stickler for rules but falls in love with a married colleague and gradually begins to understand what his shady corporation is really up to.
But then it’s no surprise to see the quality Turtorro brings to the show when you look back at his body of work spanning 45 years and the consistent standard of the productions he’s been involved with. The Brooklyn-born actor has a hit list of movies and collaborators that would make the majority of actors jealous, including the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou and The Big Lebowski, plus Raging Bull and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
That last film, the Spike Lee ‘joint’ released in 1989, is just one of many that the director and Turturro have worked on, nine in fact, including Denzel Washington’s He Got Game in 1998 and the serial killer movie Summer of Sam a year later.
And Turturro, who studied drama in New York and appeared on Broadway before his break into films, recently spoke to Lee about his influences, one of which was the Japanese directing great Akira Kurosawa, with Lee telling him, “It wasn’t until my first year of film school that I really understood who the great master Kurosawa was.”
Lee has just made his own version of a Kurosawa classic in Highest 2 Lowest, again starring Washington, and it’s another film by the Japanese auteur that almost makes Turturro’s list of his favourite films, but not quite, losing out to a French war drama from 1937.
He told Rotten Tomatoes: “(It’s) a toss-up between (Kurosawa’s) The Seven Samurai and (La) Grande Illusion. I still don’t know what to say. I’ll just say… La Grande Illusion, which I think is a perfect film.”
Directed by Jean Renoir, La Grande Illusion is the story of a group of French prisoners of war plotting to escape from the Germans during World War One. Made as the Nazi party were continuing their path toward a second mass conflict, Renoir used it as commentary on the state of European politics at the time and the gulf between rich and poor. Considered one of the finest films ever made, at the time it was thought of as sacrilege by the Nazis who ordered prints of it to be burned.
Adds Turturro: “That’s as good as it gets… Jean Renoir’s films have such a tremendous intelligence and humanity, and there’s all this great depth and there’s this great joie de vivre — there’s this great joy in the film. It’s almost like (professional theatre) commedia dell’arte, but then it exposes something really deep down.”
Elsewhere on his list of greatest films, the actor went for The Godfather, 1942’s Casablanca, On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando and Nights of Cabiria from Italian legend Federico Fellini
Meanwhile, Turturro has confirmed that he’ll be back for the third season of Severance which is expected to air some time in 2026. This week though, he plays a vicious boxing trainer in Orlando Bloom’s latest movie The Cut, which tells the story of a boxer trying to win one last title fight by dramatically losing weight. The practice, known as ‘weight cutting’, can be incredibly dangerous when taken to extremes.
