Wesley Snipes names the six movies that changed his life
Although it was action hero superstardom that helped take his career to the next level, Wesley Snipes initially rose to prominence by delivering a string of talked-about performances in drama and comedy, with Mo’ Better Blues, New Jack City, Jungle Fever, and White Men Can’t Jump showing different sides of his multifaceted skillset.
As a result, the six movies that Snipes named to A.Frame as those to have had a profound impact on him are as varied as his filmography. There’s romance, drama, adventure, musicals, action, and comedy, as well as one that parlayed directly into his lifelong practising of martial arts.
The actor immediately identified with John Berry’s Claudine, having experienced many of the same issues that faced Diahann Carroll’s title character, who found love with James Earl Jones’ garbage collector that threatens to impact her livelihood as a maid for wealthy white families: “I was living in an environment like this and I could relate to Diahann as the mom,” he said. “She was trying to figure out her struggle, relationships, her and her kids’ challenges on the streets and in what looked like a 500-square-foot or smaller living space.”
Coming-of-age dramedy Cooley High was another that spoke directly to a life Snipes felt as though he was living, which he recalled “may have been the first film in which I cried”. The approach to class and race divides and the way they affected the teenage protagonists was also hugely impactful, with Snipes remarking, “In that era, that was a big, bold, deal”.
Snipes ended up becoming quite the accomplished swordsman as the figurehead of the Blade trilogy, with 1948’s The Three Musketeers leaving an impression for the intense training that would eventually become a regular part of his regimen: “I studied the actors’ body movements, all gifts in motion, using manoeuvres to define their characters,” he said. “Gene Kelly is amazing and to me, a true, what I call ‘BMM’ – body movement master.”
With his background in musical theatre, West Side Story being one of Snipes’ formative experiences is hardly a shock, and not just because he’s “had roles in many performances of West Side Story and won many awards from those roles”. Indelibly linked to a pivotal part of his life, the actor “was inspired by watching the film from an early age.”
Straight to the point with his admiration for the franchise-launching Uptown Saturday Night, Snipes didn’t even need to look beyond the cast to justify its inclusion: “Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby – no need to say much more. Sophisticated, elegant, classy, each character had a style, all for me about the cool factor.”
No list of movies that had a profound impact on Snipes would be complete without at least one martial arts film, with Shaw Brothers favourite Five Deadly Venoms – directed by John Woo’s mentor Chang Cheh – being watched by the future on-screen action star “hundreds of times” as he found himself “attempting to figure out why they did what they did.”
Wesley Snipes’ favourite movies:
- Claudine (John Berry, 1974)
- Cooley High (Michael Schultz, 1975)
- The Three Musketeers (George Sidney, 1948)
- West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961)
- Uptown Saturday Night (Sidney Poitier, 1974)
- Five Deadly Venoms (Chang Cheh, 1978)
