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The Movie Jeffrey Wright Has 'Seen A Million Times'

By: Lily Percy // January 26, 2013
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The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

For actor Jeffrey Wright, whose credits include Basquiat, Syriana, W. and Broken City (currently playing in theaters) — the movie he could watch a million times is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Interview Highlights

On when he first saw Apocalypse Now

"I guess I was maybe 16 or 17 when I first saw it and you know, for a teenager, you know, becoming a man, there's a — to some extent — a kind of natural fascination with conflict and war for young men and so this movie was in some ways kind of the closest that I had to a war experience."

On meeting Albert Hall, one of the movie's stars

"The first movie I ever did was a mini-series called "Separate But Equal" with Sidney Poitier and Albert Hall, who played Chief in Apocalypse Now. And I said, 'Albert, oh man, I've seen Apocalypse Now I don't know probably 163 times, and it's just the most meaningful thing to me.' And when we finished filming he gave me a book and he wrote inside, 'Jeffrey, evolution is when a young actor comes up to you and says, "I've seen your work, you know, a hundred so times, and it has meaning to me." ' And it was, I don't know, that's just kind of an anecdote of what the film meant to me."

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