Taika Waititi recommends three must-watch films from the 1970s
Director, writer, actor, painter, and photographer: Taika Waititi is one of modern cinema’s great polymaths. He’s the kind of person you can quite easily imagine picking up an Olympic-standard bow and immediately landing a bullseye. “Huh, beginner’s luck,” he’d say, ambling off in another direction.
After directing and appearing in a number of successful low-budget productions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Waititi’s short film Two Cars, One Night was nominated for an academy award in 2005. Since then, he’s gone from strength to strength, working on projects such as Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnorak, the wry, deadpan humour of which was honed in his scripts for Flight of The Conchords and What We Do In The Shadows. Here, Waititi recommends three of his favourite movies from the 1970s.
First up, a masterclass in scriptwriting: “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore‘ – Martin Scorsese, Ellen Burstyn, a wonderful film that I love,” Waititi says. “Solo mum struggling to find love and giver her son the best life she can.” Released in 1974, Scorsese’s fourth feature film won Burstyn an Academy Award for Best Actress. She plays Alice Hyatt, a 35-year-old who has recently become a widow.
After leaving her small hometown in New Mexico with ambitions of becoming a famous singer, money problems force her and her precocious young son to settle in Arizona, where Alice takes a job as a waitress in a small diner and falls for a rancher called David – played wonderfully by Kris Kristofferson. One of the best films from New Hollywood’s golden age, this touching picture is a tender and brilliantly funny portrait of ordinary Americans chasing extraordinary dreams.
The second film on Waititi’s must-watch list was released a year before Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in 1973: “Badlands, one of my all-time favourites,” he begins. “Terrence Mallick. Two kids who are murderers on the run across America”.
The film that bought Mallick international acclaim, Badlands focuses on Charles Starkweather’s infamous killing spree in the late 1950s. Released at a time when Charles Manson and the Zodiac Killer still haunted public consciousness, Badlands uses the serial-killer narrative to explore the adolescent romance of the film’s central couple, played by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Enigmatic, violent and beautifully shot, Badlands spawned countless imitators. “If you watch Badlands, and then watch some other films, you’ll see I’ve stolen basically and based all my films on Badlands,” Waititi later confessed.
The director’s final choice is a film we’ve all probably seen countless times: “The next film I’m going to go with is Jaws. Because I think Jaw is one of the greats.” Released on Boxing Day, 1975, this Steven Spielberg classic is the great monster movie of the second half of the 20th century. It set a new standard for directors trying to conjure up cinematic suspense and is undoubtedly one of the most iconic films of all time – perhaps because it boasts one of the most recognisable scores of all time.
