Michelle Rodriguez’s Five Favorite Films

Stanley [Kubrick] has an innate ability to…  Whatever he’s doing metaphorically with a concept, he can transfer that to all the senses. I feel he does the same tone visually that he’s doing phonetically — that you can actually hear. He does it with all his senses. With Clockwork, he just went to town.

Such a hard stance to take something really complex, turn it into a metaphor, and translate it with light and sound in two hours . [Christopher Nolan]’s just so damned good. I was dancing around the room all, “No he didn’t!” when I saw that movie [laughing].

This one is stupid but it’s not. Those [directors], man. What [they] did with color, it’s almost like color didn’t exist before [that]. Color was around a couple years, but that darn movie made it pop. They dance with it. They danced with sound, danced with music, danced with the metaphors of the theme of the movie. I like when it all comes together, and they did a great job with that. Magical.

Just because Quentin [Tarantino] did such an amazing job. I mean, he’s just so gangster, he’s so good at it. I can’t even explain it, you know.  Everything all comes together, and when you can’t explain it, it’s like, “Wait, what happened?”

The metaphor, man. The fact that they would take this age old, vilified idea of a powerful woman and take away that dark mystique that’s been repeated throughout history and in such a mean way to all women. Like, anytime you see in cartoons, in movies, anything from, like, the ’50s, the ’40s, you would see this dark bitter woman. And you would see her explored in a way where she always represented evil, but never with a sense of justified evil. Rewrote the history books on the vilification of a powerful woman. I thought that was really, really powerful for Disney to do that. It’s like taking an old metaphor that’s been repeated for so many years and putting it on its head. It makes you think twice when you look at a person that’s a “bad guy.” That‘s a powerful message for kids to not be judgmental.