Mahershala Ali

“I see Yojimbo up here, Kurosawa movie that is absolutely amazing and very inspiring. Has a good bit of sword work in it, but there is sort of, like… there’s something in the essence of this film that is definitely worth seeing. It’s beautifully shot, so well acted, and an absolutely wonderful film. So I’ma actually put this in my bag. And the music in this thing is incredible too. For those who like to sample, there are some samples in here.”

“Hoop Dreams. Picking Hoop Dreams because some of you may know that I used to be a basketball player. I went to undergrad on a basketball scholarship, and when this film came out, I was sort of in the throes of that journey and really had Dreams of potentially playing professional ball, and I really love sort of the honest portrait of the difficulty around that journey. It’s a great documentary, one of the better documentaries ever made.”

“Short Cuts. This film I really love and appreciate because it did something that… For me– it was right before I started acting, or was really even thinking about acting, but my father and I watched this movie on laserdisc, and this was one of the films that he exposed me to. And what I remember being profoundly moved by was how Robert Altman was able to stitch together 22 different characters and their lives sort of were able to weave together in a way. So, Short Cuts. It’s a good one.”

“Hollywood Shuffle. Robert Townsend, what a filmmaker. Oh, man, I really appreciate this film. There were so many things that were funny to me in this film before I started acting that are so much funnier now, and also a little painful, too. But just as a Black actor navigating and trying to traverse this terrain, I think that there are so many things in this film that are absolutely hilarious that Robert Townsend gets spot on, and this film should be talked about even more than what it is.”

“When I saw this film in, I don’t know, the ’90s, or whatever, I wasn’t familiar with Jean-Michel Basquiat, but I had seen Jeffrey Wright do Angels on stage. What an actor. And so to get to see him in this film, the work in this, how sort of left-handed this movie is, on a certain level, it’s just a little off-center, and this is the kind of work that I, at least, aspire to do. And I just admire him as a human being, Jeffrey, in general. This is my jam. Basquiat.”

“Ghost Dog. The man, the myth, the legend, Forest Whitaker. What I would give to work with Forest Whitaker. And this performance, a man trying to live by a code in Modern Times, a code that is probably dated for the era, and also working in sort of a criminal element, and I feel like Jim Jarmusch created a really wonderful world.”