Owen Wilson’s All-Time Favorite Movie Released 26 Years Ago Will Move You!

A common question that stars are often eager to answer is about their favorite films—specifically, not the ones they’ve starred in themselves. These favorites can vary greatly, each chosen for different significant reasons: some might have been eye-opening, others could have influenced their careers, or simply left a mark during their childhood.

For over three decades, Owen Wilson’s familiar face has been a fixture in Hollywood. Frequently seen alongside his cohort Ben Stiller, Wilson is also deeply embedded in the quirky, offbeat universe of Wes Anderson. This relationship began during their college days and led to their collaborative early work on a short film that evolved into the acclaimed feature, Bottle Rocket.

“Russell Crowe is incredible in it”

Journalist Cindy Pearlman, formerly of the New York Times and Chicago Sun-Times, once asked Wilson about his favorite film for her book, You Gotta See This, published in 2007.

Wilson cherishes two films. One is Punch Drunk Love by Paul Thomas Anderson, a true gem where Adam Sandler delivers one of his career-best performances, usually overshadowed by his comedy roles. This film stands out alongside another highlight of his career, Uncut Gems.

The other is a significant yet underappreciated film, Michael Mann’s The Insider, which was released 26 years ago. “I find it incredibly moving. Russell Crowe is somewhat like an ordinary father. There’s this scene where he rushes out of his house, trips, and falls. I found the film deeply moving, and I think Russell Crowe is fabulous in it.”

A Whistleblower Facing Death Threats

The plot centers initially around Lowell Bergman, a renowned investigative journalist and producer for the TV show “60 Minutes.” One day, he receives a mysterious package from an anonymous employee at the tobacco company Philip Morris detailing the harmful effects of nicotine and its addictiveness.

Bergman reaches out to Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist in the “Research & Development” department at Brown & Williamson, the third-largest tobacco manufacturer in the U.S. His investigations reveal that cigarette makers had been adding substances like ammonia and coumarin to cigarettes, enhancing nicotine’s effects and increasing user dependency…

Four years after revolutionizing the crime genre with his masterpiece Heat, Michael Mann continues to excel in his craft with this film, partly inspired by a renowned article from Vanity Fair, The Man Who Knew Too Much, published in May 1996. With a powerful leading duo of Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, The Insider is an enthralling, tense, and riveting movie that closely adheres to the shocking truths it unfolds.

In May 1994, Mississippi became the first American state to sue tobacco manufacturers to recover healthcare costs. By 1998, a settlement agreement was reached between 46 states and the tobacco companies, compelling them to pay $206 billion over twenty-five years for healthcare expenses.

In March 2000, shortly after the film’s release, a San Francisco court ordered Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds to pay $20 million to a cancer patient who began smoking after 1969, the year warnings started appearing on cigarette packs. Four months later, a Miami court imposed a record fine of nearly $145 billion on Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, Lorillard, and Liggett.

The Bravery of Disney

It’s easy to forget, but this extraordinary film was produced by Disney’s subsidiary, Touchstone Pictures. Considering its highly controversial subject and the potential pressure from extremely powerful lobbies, producing this film was indeed a bold move, as Michael Mann pointed out in 2024.

“The legal director of Disney and I worked to verify every element of the script meticulously. When we wrote the script, we adhered to the standard of verification that Lowell Bergman applies to everything he does, which means he would never accept something as true unless it was verified approximately three times… Eric Roth and I disciplined ourselves in the same way… No dramatic license.”

Despite these precautions, the implicated lobbies scrutinized The Insider… “There was some nervousness – there was a threat letter. Film operations are relatively porous, and I did not want our editing room or anything we did to be vulnerable. So, we had quite elaborate security before anyone could enter our editing rooms and our office,” Mann recounted.

“I had a guy who had just retired – he had set up security for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow – and he worked on the physical structure of our editing. And then I later found out that someone had infiltrated our operations. One of the law firms we talk about in the film, based in Kansas City, had hired someone who came to work as a transcriber doing a lot of our dictation…”

It’s a shame that such a film has never been released on Blu-ray in our region. To watch The Insider, one must look either to VOD or to the DVD released 25 years ago.