The stars at TIFF reflect on the movies that changed them

Movies change all of us — even the stars who act in them Chris Knight

Imagine a 10-year-old John C. Reilly, entranced by the image of Willy Wonka doing a somersault on the big screen. Or young Maria Bello, watching Indiana Jones outrunning the boulder and thinking, “That could be me.” Or Gwaii Edenshaw seeing a movie that reflects his culture.

Movies change us. And this year, I asked each person I interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival what movie had the biggest effect on her or him.

Reilly, starring in and producing The Sisters Brothers, an existential Western based on the novel by Patrick Dewitt, seemed unwilling to answer. Then he drew a deep breath. “I will say this,” he began. “Gene Wilder as an actor really changed my perception of what a man could be. I saw all his films as a kid, but particularly in Willy Wonka; that movie gave me a template for how to be a man. You could be sensitive and you could be whimsical and you could be into romantic things.”

He continued: “There’s a sort of duality to my personality. And I feel like when I saw that movie as a kid I was like, well I’m half Charlie Bucket – you know, the little kid who gets the ticket – and I’m half Willy Wonka. I really do relate to that: ‘We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams,’ you know that wonderful poem that he says.

“So that made a big impact on me because at the time, in the 1970s, when that movie came out we were still holding onto these ideas of macho virility ... people like Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, these intense very virile tough guys. But somehow I felt like I was never going to be quite that tough. I had all these other things going on inside me. And then I saw Gene Wilder and I was like: Oh, you can be like that.”

Mario Bello, who plays the mother of a sexually confused teenager in the Canadian coming-of-age story Giant Little Ones, also saw in the movies a version of herself that she hadn’t previously thought possible. “When Indiana Jones came out I remember thinking: I’m an adventurer. I want to see the world. I’m that guy. But I wasn’t. I was a girl. So I feel like one of the reasons I became an actor is because I wanted to be that.

“And when I look at it now – and now there are female action heroes; back then when I was growing up there weren’t – but now I live it. I was just in Ethiopia, visiting a tribe who only five people meet a year ... and for me that was so exciting, to live in a tent by a river filled with crocodiles, and to jump out of helicopters into sulphur pools in the middle of nowhere; to me that was true adventure and excitement.”

For Gwaii Edenshaw, codirector of the first feature filmed entirely in the endangered language of the Haida Gwaii archipelago, the movie that hit him hardest was Once Were Warriors, a 1994 Australian drama about a Maori family. Though the Indigenous group hailed from half a world away, said Edenshaw, “it was a movie where it felt like somebody was talking about us.”

He also mentioned Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 films Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

For Tina Keeper, First Nations actor, politician and producer of the movie Through Black Spruce, it was a film about a strong female artist that most affected her. “It was when I was in theatre school, when I was in university. I remember seeing the film Camille Claudel. I thought, even if I just live and die as an artist, a female artist! Because she was a great artist.”

Keeper didn’t think there were many avenues for a First Nations actor – it would be a few more years before she shot to fame with TV’s North of 60 – but Camille Claudel helped keep her going. “It really spoke to me and helped me make that decision to do theatre despite whatever. I loved acting.”

That feeling of seeing yourself, or an idealized version of yourself, came through in many of the answers. Olivia Vieweg, whose graphic novel formed the template for the German zombie movie Endzeit – Ever After, said 2001’s Ghost World changed her. “I saw it when I was 18, and it felt like it was about me and my feelings. I thought it was super cool that it was a comic adaptation – like our film!”

Her director, Carolina Hellsgård, recalled: “One of the earliest key moments, when I was 10, I remember watching Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remember hiding behind the couch, watching at my grandma’s place. I couldn’t go outside for a while afterwards. When I think back, I remember how transformative the experience was.”

For directors, the movie that most affected them was sometimes the one that made them want to make movies themselves. David Mackenzie, at TIFF with Outlaw King, said it was Stranger Than Paradise, a 1984 film by Jim Jarmusch: “I saw it when I was 18 and I went to see it four times in one week. It just blew my socks off.”

Don McKellar, director of Through Black Spruce, saw Modern Times as a little kid. “I remember my parents took me to this Charlie Chaplin retrospective at the Eglinton Cinema when I was quite young. I didn’t even know what was going on – it was black and white, they weren’t talking – and it was amazing.”

And Eva Husson, the French director of Girls of the Sun, which also played Cannes: “One of them might be Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai. The fact that he dared to be extremely subjective and poetic. But I will add another: Jane Campion, The Piano. She was a woman director and she won the Palme d’Or. It was possible! I was 16 and I thought, I can do that – it’s possible to put a strong woman on the screen.”

Ever the contrarian, Werner Herzog said he had no answer to the question. “It doesn’t exist for me. It’s more literature. I read; I do not see many films. I had the feeling that I was the inventor of cinema in a way. And I still behave as if I was the inventor of cinema.” Perhaps sensing that this seemed a little over the top he added: “I’m speaking about a general climate in my soul.”

A formative film can also drive one to try to capture the same kind of lightning. Peter Hedges, director of an addiction drama called Ben Is Back, said Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration changed him. “It is such a raw, real depiction of a family. It’s a film I watch and re-watch. If I could make a film that was in that range of emotion and humanity, I’d be happy, and I’ve certainly never gotten closer than with Ben Is Back.”

Jimmy Chin, co-director of the cliff-climbing documentary Free Solo, said that when he saw the 2010 Formula One doc Senna, “it flipped a switch for me, because I went into it with a certain attitude, like I’m not really interested in race car driving, and I knew that was one of the issues with climbing films; they don’t necessarily have a broad appeal.

“But after watching the film and understanding the danger and the technical aspects and the aspiration, all that stuff, I came out thinking: Formula One driving is so badass. Senna is the most badass thing ever. It made me think: I know how to do that with climbing a mountain.”

And Joel Edgerton said that watching (and starring in) the 2016 drama Loving, about an interracial couple in the 1960s, awoke in him an anger at injustice that echoed when he read Garrard Conley’s memoir Boy Erased, about gay conversion therapy. He adapted it into a film of the same name that he also acted in and directed. “And I wonder, if I hadn’t gone through this experience (with Loving), if reading the book would have had a different effect on me.”

Reilly, clearly affected by watching Wilder, went on to a career as a comedian, singer, theatre actor and bigscreen star. “And I can only hope through my work that I’m touching someone who’s 10 years old right now in the same way. That I’m showing them there are a million ways to be a man.”

AND THEN I SAW GENE WILDER AND I WAS LIKE: OH, YOU CAN BE LIKE THAT.