Jason Sudeikis

“I’m gonna start off: my favorite Stanley Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut. I saw this movie in the theater. I understand it a little bit more now. I mean, I understand, like… I understand the beginning, middle, and end, but what… what it means to me, I am still trying to figure it out. I think this movie rocks. Scary as it is sexy as it is interesting as it is smart as it is weird as it is just special. One of my all-time favorite movies, and I love that Criterion has…”

“You can get Eyes Wide Shut, you can get, you know, Fellini, or you can get House Party. Watched this recently, actually, with my kids. The kids love it. The dance sequence, this moment right here between the guys and the gals, is thrilling. Gave me goosebumps when I was a kid, gave my kids goosebumps, gives me goosebumps as an adult. Love having that in the mix.”

“Again, one of my absolute faves: A Face in the Crowd. Andy Griffith, who everybody thinks of as just being from his show and the whistling and the country bumpkin, but he is such a mean son of a gun in this thing. If I could remake any movie, it would be this movie right here. So if anybody at Warner Brothers, if several other people pass, come my way. I would love to take a crack at that, but I wouldn’t try to screw it up too much.”

“Two of the most lovely people ever to maybe be on Earth, but also do acting: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, having a fun little Charade, this movie, stylish as hell. You’d think it’s a Hitchcock movie. It’s not. And that may be the idea. But Stanley Donen, come on. You can’t go wrong with that guy. He knows what he’s doing.”

“One of the all-time great film noir movies: Double Indemnity. I mean, Billy Wilder, genre meant nothing to him. It’s him and William Goldman. What story they want to tell, they just told. It’s, like, “Is that a William Goldman?” They don’t care. “Is it a Billy Wilder?” He doesn’t care. This movie is based on a real-life story of a woman who… her and her boyfriend killed… killed her husband and then got the insurance claim. That woman was then executed. The New York Daily News ran a photograph of it. A photographer snuck into the… when they did the electrocution, had a camera strapped to his ankle and the whole wire coming up his leg, and then had to hold his leg perfectly still because it was a glass negative, and captured it, and then they ran it the next day. Fun fact: the guy that took that photo, named Tom Howard, my great-grandfather. So, we’ll take this.”

“I mean, look, Love & Basketball, I think this thing is beautiful. I mean, I rewatched it with my kids, actually, and with the exception of only two scenes that I had to, like, “Okay…” You know, they’re nine and 12. So I was like, “All right, all right, all right.” I think the nine year old was probably looking like this. The 12 year old wants nothing. The little boy, he was like, “Let’s just get back to the basketball. Enough with the love.” But the fact that it starts with them as little kids, they were hooked. They love it. Great soundtrack. I’ve seen Gina from across the court at a few Sparks games, and I’ve yet to make my way over to her, but big fan.”

“One of the best… Actually, speaking of sports movies, here we go, this one, another one: Bull Durham. Ron Shelton is basically, in my opinion, the Nora Ephron of sports films. And to write and direct and this be your first one, it still holds up, and it’s… it’s so funny. Because we would always talk about– Ted Lasso, this used to be our comp, so we used to… I remember recommending Juno Temple watch this, and she fell in love with it, as I think any guy or gal does when they get to see it for the first time. But I come back to this movie all the time. So between Love & Basketball and Bull Durham, those are two of my all-time favorite sports… They’re all about the love, all about the people, not about baseball, set in baseball, not about basketball, set in basketball, about everything else.”

“Okay, Dazed and Confused. Come on. Classic. Now, first time I saw this movie, did not like it. And here’s why: because I failed English my first semester of senior year and my second semester because I just never… I never handed in homework, and so, yeah, I had to go to summer school, and I remember they showed this in summer school, and a lot of the kids in summer school were a lot like a lot of the characters in this thing. So I was like, “Oi yoi.” It just felt like too much. I remember the one day that I was the only one at summer school. It was, like, a Thursday. And it’s because there was, like, a Pink Floyd cover band in town. Funny first time, to think that… whatever that teacher was thinking, “How do I connect with these young kids in summer school? I know: I’ll show them Dazed and Confused.” It worked.”

“Speaking of, hold on, my night-school movie. Look, when people ask me what my favorite movie is, I genuinely say Citizen Kane. And it’s not… I’m not a cinephile, by any means. I have friends… Golly, Bill Hader’s episode of this, when he’s going through, he’s, like… he knows this whole thing, and I love people like that, but for me, Mr. Zinger showed this at night school, and, again, I mean, black-and-white movies when you’re 17, 18, and failing English, I remember looking around and I’m just riveted, following this movie, looking around, everybody’s asleep. This was the first movie that I feel I saw that I understood it that movies were art, as corny as that may seem. The fact that that guy did all that, at that age. That guy being Orson Welles. It’s so subversive, it’s so clever, it’s so funny, it’s so heartbreaking. Yeah, so my summer-school movie and now my night-school movie are all part of the Criterion Collection. So, you know.”

“Martin Scorsese, After Hours. This movie was absolutely the inspiration for an episode of Ted Lasso we did, season two, where the character Coach Beard, played by co-creator and star and dear friend Brendan Hunt, is our little nod in celebration to this film. But it’s just great storytelling, great performances, and yet, you know, any cynic could watch it and just go, “Just walk north, man.” It’s, like, “Hey, sometimes life isn’t that easy, all right?””

“Pickup on South Street by Sam Fuller. I don’t know this one. I’ve never heard of this movie.”

“You got one that you’d already seen, just close your eyes and grab from the back wall, so you get your… The Devil’s Backbone by Guillermo del Toro. I haven’t seen this. I don’t know anything about this. Awesome. That’s fun. That’s the way to do it, because, yeah, I have picked a bunch of movies that I’ve seen, and here are two that I hadn’t even heard of. And those will get viewed probably before anything else.”

“All right, oh, here we go, The Before Trilogy. I have not seen the third one yet, and I only watched the first two in the last few months. It’s nuts to watch something that you feel like you’ve seen and have always wanted and then it’s existed, then you catch up with it. That’s what these first two movies felt like. And these would have come out when I was working at Blockbuster Video, and this is something that I would have gravitated towards. I love the movie Leaving Las Vegas, and this is in that… genre, if you will. Just two people, just great dialogue, great performances, and you get to be a fly on the wall and you kind of, like, romantically hope to seek out one of those… one of those moments in life. There’s a great line in the book Leaving Las Vegas: “the unspoken anticipation of conversations yet to be had.” This… The first two of these movies are living example of those things. I mean, this is getting heavy.”