Its been a long time since I counted the number of movies I watch on any given year. I’d say my guesstimate would, maybe, be around 300, tops. Between Sundance, Cannes and Toronto, that must be around 120 and probably another 150, or so, outside the festival circuit.
Being the parent of two toddlers surely doesn’t help with my movie watching numbers. I’ll still attend a daily press screening in the morning, go to a few film festivals and, sometimes, buy a movie ticket for a movie I might have missed out on, but otherwise my number seems to be dead set at around 300 per year.
All I can say is thank the cinematic heavens I went on a massive binge watch of film classics from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s before I became a parent. This lasted a few years and the amount of great films I saw during that time span I will forever cherish.
This past weekend, Guillermo del Toro came in person to Portland to accept a Cinema Unbound award from PAM CUT [via IndieWire]. He confessed that he still watches 3 movies a day, so his number is near 1000 movies watched per year!
Del Toro said that as he continues to develop movies like “The Buried Giant,” he still watches “three movies a day” for inspiration, and often that means rewatching. “If you see all ‘All About Eve’ when you’re 15, and you see ‘All About Eve’ when you’re 40, you see two entirely different movies.”
Richard Linklater was the original movie-watching king. I had unearthed a 2014 profile on Linklater via the New Yorker in which the “Boyhood” director claimed he used to watch 600 movies a year in his twenties.
“He never returned to school. Instead, for the next two and half years, whenever he came back to the mainland, in Houston, he would watch movies: first two a day, then three, then four. By his early twenties, he was seeing six hundred films a year. “I just felt I’d discovered something, like this whole world had opened up,” he says. “I was greedy for it.”
600 movies a year is A LOT. That's 1.64 per day! Del Toro almost doubled him.
In my twenties, maybe I was reaching 400-500 max a year. I had a lot more time in my hands and it wasn’t just new movies I had to catch up with, but all the classics from different eras.
Watching 1000 movies a year could be a much better investment for a film career than actually going to film school. You start to notice the camera positions/movements more, the editing, but really just the entire mise-en-scene becomes more apparent.