Fittingly, Bad Boys: Ride or Die directing duo Adil & Bilall have been ride or die creative soulmates since the moment they met. The Belgium-born Moroccan filmmakers met at art school in Brussels; on the first day of class, Bilall Fallah walked in and immediately spotted Adil El Arbi.
"They really want to make auteur cinema, so you're watching Godard and those filmmakers. And I loved Hollywood. So, when I came to school, I saw only the white artistic people. And then in the corner, I saw Adil. I was like, 'Yo, are you Moroccan?!'" recalls Fallah. "And he loved Hollywood movies like me! We felt a little bit like rebels in film school, because you had the real artists walking around, and then we were, like, the popcorn Hollywood movie wannabes. Organically, we just started working together and had the same vision."
Their shared vision quickly caught the attention of the Belgium film industry — Adil & Bilall broke out with 2015's Black, a Romeo and Juliet-inspired crime film set in Brussels — and eventually, their beloved Hollywood. With 2020's Bad Boys for Life, they assumed the reins of the buddy cop franchise from director Michael Bay. That film became the franchise's highest-grossing installment, and Adil & Bilall were promptly tapped for projects in both Marvel and DC's superhero universes. (They directed episodes of Disney+'s Ms. Marvel, as well as Warner Bros.' ill-fated Batgirl movie.)
Having finally made it big in Hollywood, the duo returned to their roots with Rebel, a 2022 drama about a Belgian family of Moroccan descent torn apart by war and radicalism. And then they returned Stateside for the latest installment in the Bad Boys franchise, this summer's Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Looking ahead, they hope to remain with a foot in both worlds.
"It's a great balance, because we don't live in Hollywood; we live in Belgium, and those are really very important stories to us," El Arbi explains. "Making a Belgium project allows us to take risks and do tough stories, controversial stories, and also to try out stuff on an artistic level that you would never be allowed to do [in Hollywood] — unless you become Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve, which we're not on that level yet! So, we're able to develop our artistic vision and take risks, and then if it works out, take whatever we learn and go back to Hollywood. We're always going to try to have that balance so that we are always developing as artists."
Below, Adil & Bilall share with A.frame their five favorite films, including movies by a trio of filmmakers whose work most inspires their own. As Fallah says, "We have three directors that mean everything to us: Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese."
Directed by: Oliver Stone | Written by: Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar
Adil El Arbi: JFK has always been my all-time favorite movie, and we are very lucky now that we got to know Oliver Stone and he became a buddy of ours. With JFK, it's the way that he sees history as art, and how a historical event becomes so interesting and thrilling to see. You feel as if you're watching an important movie. It's so cerebral and creates a web of filmmaking that has a lot of tension. Just on a technical level, back then, it broke the record for the most cuts in a movie, so, even in a Bad Boys movie, we tried to have those cool, snappy cuts and have that constant tension in our films.
Bilall Fallah: JFK was a big inspiration on Rebel, because it has the political theme and is telling something really important. We were like, "If Oliver Stone would come to our premiere, that would be the dream," and we got him! He saw the movie. So, Oliver Stone watched Rebel and that was enough for us!
Directed by: Spike Lee | Written by: Arnold Perl and Spike Lee
Bilall Fallah: I relate to Malcolm X. I'm Muslim, he's Muslim, and when I was growing up in Belgium as a Muslim, seeing gods of cinema like Spike Lee and Denzel Washington make that movie was such a big impact on me. It's epic movie storytelling that goes through all these different periods of time and really explains his whole story.
Adil El Arbi: It was the same thing for me. Growing up as a teenager in Belgium, sometimes you would have an identity crisis where you felt like you didn't fit in, and then you'd watch a movie where you have one of the biggest stars of the world playing a Muslim character in a positive way. I still think it is the best Denzel performance — and maybe one of the best performances ever on film. You felt honored to be a Muslim and to watch that movie. Even though I love all of Spike Lee's movies, like Clockers and Do The Right Thing and 25th Hour, this is really his magnum opus. We would love one day to do a movie like that.
Directed by: Martin Scorsese | Written by: Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese
Adil El Arbi: It was a difficult choice, because Goodfellas is the obvious choice! So many people put Goodfellas on their list. [Laughs.] But Goodfellas represents a kind of storytelling that triggered a whole genre: the fast-paced gangster movie with a voiceover. Now, it's almost a cliché, but when Goodfellas came out, gangster movies were pretty classically made, like The Godfather. Goodfellas was really fast and crazy, and it's why I believe that you have Quentin Tarantino movies and Guy Ritchie movies. It's a slice of life kind of vibe. And that Italian-American aspect sometimes reminds us of growing up in Brussels and Antwerp. That family vibe really felt personal, and sometimes when we would be at gatherings with our family, it felt as if we were in a scene of Goodfellas. So many movies are compared to Goodfellas, but you will never be able to beat that movie.
Bilall Fallah: The only thing I want to add is how Scorsese uses music. Every scene you can think about, you can be reminded, "Oh yeah, that song is from that scene!" Martin is a genius in choosing songs, which is also a very big inspiration for us.
Directed by: Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund | Written by: Bráulio Mantovani
Bilall Fallah: Cidade de Deus really changed me as a director on all fronts, because of the energy and the camera work, which, at the same time, was very raw but slick. You feel like you're in the streets of the favelas, and it is so cool to see a movie that has that universal visual language but talks about a specific place and can really reach out to the whole world and how it is in every ghetto.
Adil El Arbi: Cidade de Deus probably would not have been made that way if there was not Goodfellas — and it takes it to another level. It has the sensibility of another world, and when we watched that movie, it made an impact. It was so energetic and so crazy and flowed so well. It was also hard. There was at tonality where there was a lot of humor but also very, very harsh scenes. We always felt like our breakthrough movie Black — that basically was our ticket to Hollywood — would be our Cidade de Deus. If you watch our movies, they have that kind of energy. And the performances of non-actors brought a level of authenticity that we're always trying to find in our work and the realness of the performances.
Written and Directed by: Mathieu Kassovitz
Adil El Arbi: If you see Goodfellas, or just the whole of Scorsese's library, whether it's Mean Streets or Raging Bull, and then you see Cidade de Deus and La Haine, there's a connection and a through line between those three movies. It's a movie about the French neighborhood and the rough aspects of it, and it's shot almost like a documentary, but it's also filmmaking artistry. This movie is from 1995, but it's still relevant; the situation today in the rough neighborhoods in Belgium, France and probably in other cities in Europe is still the same. There has not really been a movie like that made since. We tried to get close to it with Black; we would say that Black is a mix between La Haine, Cidade de Deus and Clockers.
Bilall Fallah: On personal level, it made me realize that I wanted to be a movie director. Before La Haine, being able to make American movies felt like it was from another planet. It was something that's unreachable. But when I saw La Haine, the movie showed a neighborhood that looked like my neighborhood, and a character that looks like me, and seeing my world portrayed on the big screen in such an artistic way, I was like, "Oh, s--t! Maybe I can make movies too!"
