I've randomly been on a huge Danny McBride kick lately, having come late to Righteous Gemstones after the series bowed last year and then devouring the rest of his TV series, including Vice Principals and Eastbound & Down. I've been doing it backward, which is a really fascinating way to see how his body of work has evolved.

McBride appeared in the Criterion Closet recently and pulled a stack of films that can help us see what has inspired his creative journey, sometimes directly through homage in his own shows. Check it out.

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Danny McBride's Criterion Closet Picks

  1. Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
  2. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
  3. A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957)
  4. Fantastic Planet (René Laloux, 1973)
  5. I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)
  6. George Washington (David Gordon Green, 2000)
  7. After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

He also did three blind picks:

  1. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
  2. Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka, 1975)
  3. Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)
A few of these are particular standouts. Of George Washington, McBride added a personal story. McBride worked on the film.
"I actually worked on this movie. I was the second-unit director," he said. "We shot this movie the day after I graduated from film school. I think we shot it in two weeks. It was so much fun. It was the very first time I worked on a production. It's what sort of launched David's career. We shot it in Winston-Salem, North Carolina."

Green has remained a frequent collaborator with McBride throughout their TV work.

He said Elia Kazan's 1957 film was a key reference for Season 4 of Eastbound & Down.

"Andy Griffith gives an insane performance here. It's awesome," McBride said. "We were actually inspired by this movie when we were writing the ... was it the fourth season of Eastbound? We were watching a lot of A Face in the Crowd. You know, he's this southern guy who gets put onto the main stage and is, like, milking that sort of down-home vibe. But he's a fraud. And we kind of took Kenny Powers on that same journey in the fourth season of Eastbound."

How many of these films have you already seen?

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