Rowan Atkinson’s Five Favorite Films

I’ll start with This is Spinal Tap. It sort of took an American perspective to show the characters and the attitudes surrounding British rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s, which, I guess, was what it was supposed to be, and I just thought the characters drawn were so excellent. And yet, it was odd, because everyone involved was American. You’d think it’d be just the kind of thing that some British writers or comedians could’ve done better, but clearly we didn’t. And I thought Christopher Guest, et al., did it fantastically well.

It’s just always a kind of reassuringly funny film. The best comedy is watching humans interact, and people with their own petty ambitions, and self delusions, and all that sort of stuff. And that movie is absolutely brim full of it. If they say that comedy is essentially exaggerated truth, that was almost the perfect exemplar of it, where it’s almost a documentary. Well, it is obviously a mockumentary, but you don’t have to exaggerate much for it to become inherently comic. So that’s kind of what it is. It’s a perfect exaggeration, but exaggerated not very much.

I’ve always wondered what a British person thought of that American portrayal of them.

I’m a British person. I think it’s fantastic, and the accents are very good indeed. They may not be absolutely perfect, but it just shows that so much about accent is not necessarily about the detail vowel sound. It’s about the attitude. It’s the way of talking as much as the accent, if you see what I mean. It’s sort of wonderfully, sort of slovenly, sort of self conscious cool, which they did so well.

The Apartment, Jack Lemmon movie. That is a great movie. Again, it’s watching humans trying to live their lives, but beautifully done. Billy Wilder generally, I’m a great admirer of his work. Some Like it Hot is perhaps the more obvious choice, but there’s a kind of extra wackiness to Some Like it Hot, which I like less. But The Apartment is a fairly proper, serious movie, but with some wonderful social observations and ironies. And of course, it’s just a fabulous performance from Jack Lemmon, one of my very favorite performers.

Peter Sellers movies, I would have to have in on him. I’m tempted by Being There. Again, one of his more serious things, but a beautifully attenuated performance I thought he did in that. I haven’t seen the movie for a long time. I’m always nervous about saying, “Oh, that was a brilliant movie,” if you haven’t seen them for 15 years or 20 years, because you may go back to them now and think, “Oh, ah, well actually, it’s not great.” Or at least, “It’s got those great bits that I remember, but there’s a lot of stuff in between that is very unimpressive.”

But I seem to remember the only thing that really spoiled it — and it was very much the fashion at the time — was the sort of bloopers edit over the end credits. And I thought that movie in particular did not suit and did not need shots of Peter Sellers cracking up. But obviously the producers or the distributors said, “Look, it’s a Peter Sellers movie and it hasn’t got a lot of laughs in it. Can we just stick something silly in the end?” And that is what they did, and it didn’t completely ruin the film, but it came very, very close, in my opinion.

I think Toy Story would be one of my favorites, the first one. A beautifully observed thing. Really, really strong characters. It was the definitive family comedy movie. A close second would be The Incredibles. Haven’t seen the second Incredibles, but the first one was great. Again, it’s just very good, funny characters, well done.

I’d have to include Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, a Jacques Tati movie, which I remember watching at my school when I was 17, and it was such a revelation for me as a movie, as a sort of a comedy tone and attitude which I’d never seen. Almost purely visual, for a start; no words. And like most people, in terms of comedy movies, I’d been brought up on British and American comedy movies, which tend to be fast moving, and they tend to be very verbal, with the exception of the Pink Panthers, actually. Of course, I could veer off into that in terms of the Peter Sellers…

But it just had a fabulous comic tone and comic attitude which I’d never seen before, which is basically where you just sit back and watch people behaving in a slightly exaggerated way. And, again, if comedy is exaggerated truth, there it was again. It was the pace of it, the slow pace of it. That’s what was such an eye-opener for me, and taught me one thing, really, which is that comedy is not about pace. It’s about rhythm. Rhythm is what’s important, and the rhythm can be surprisingly slow and still funny. And even if you know the joke’s coming, even if you can hear the joke trundling just the other side of the horizon, and you know it’s going to come over the horizon, you can enjoy it as much as if it’s a surprise. And that was the insight that I feel I got from that.

This was one of the inspirations for Mr. Bean, then?

Oh, very much. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, sorry, yes, I should’ve added that. I mean, that was the most important thing about it, at least in retrospect, because it undoubtedly told me that you could tell jokes without words, and tell a story without words — even more difficult. Although, Mr. Bean is a far less pleasant character than Monsieur Hulot. Monsieur Hulot is a very affable, generous minded individual, which Mr. Bean isn’t; he’s foul or a self-serving anarchist. So, yeah, that was very important part of it.