‘The Room’ star Tommy Wiseau reveals his five favourite films of all time

The much-anticipated The Disaster Artist is seeing a nation-wide release in cinemas across the country today. The film directed by and starring James Franco tells the story behind the legendarily shit 2003 movie The Room – described by critics as one of the worst of all time – starring Tommy Wiseau.

If you’ve never seen this film, you absolutely have to. In fact, go and watch it right now. Seriously, I’ll wait.

…

OK, you’ve seen it now? Good, isn’t it!

The man responsible for the film has always been a mysterious figure. It’s believed he’s originally from Poland (although no-one really knows). And in an interview with Howard Stern, he claimed to be able to speak French. There’s also considerable intrigue about where he got the $6 million budget to make the movie in the first place. 

And now, in a fascinating interview with Rotten Tomatoes to promote the new James Franco flick, Wiseau has revealed his top five favourite films. And it’s everything we could have ever hoped for.

Here’s his picks:

1. Citizen Kane (1941) 

2. Giant (1956)

3. Sonny (2002)

4. Casablanca (1942)

5. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

While four out five of these are solid movies, it does make you wonder how many he’s actually seen, and whether he just looked up lists of critically-acclaimed films online. It’s also a bit odd that he chose the James Franco film Sonny – a movie barely anyone’s ever seen or even heard of, which has less than 25% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Anyway, in the rest of the interview, Wiseau gives a beautiful, rambling series of answers that would be perfectly at home in the awful dialogue of The Room.

At one point, he didn’t appear to understand how actors work and complained that they appeared in other projects after his own: “If you don’t have a passion, try not to steal other projects. As you probably noticed, perfect example is The Room. You can see on YouTube and other platform, people just steal stuff from The Room, including actors.”

Later, he made a strange, vague argument that is possibly meant to be about harassment in Hollywood: “And one other thing with another advice I can give to filmmakers that, the main thing, think positive, and also have respect for others. And that’s the thing what we all lack of in the industry. As you know, current affairs, etc. And so if you have respect for your…”

Finally, he ended on a rather touching note, where he reminds us not to hurt each other: “I always say, you can laugh, you can cry, you can express yourself. Please don’t hurt each other. Thank you.”

Keep doing you, Tommy. 

(Image: Rex)