Coffee at the movies

The first time I noticed that movies use coffee as a kind of furniture, I was watching Heat at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. The scene where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino finally sit down across from each other in a diner is the most famous in the film, and the thing on the table between them is a cup of coffee. Two cops, one criminal, twenty minutes of dialogue, and a pot of coffee that nobody really drinks. The coffee is there to give the actors something to do with their hands, to mark time, to make the booth they’re sitting in feel like a real place. It’s working as set decoration, and it’s working hard.

That’s what most movie coffee actually does. It signals that we’re in the morning, or that we’re being honest with each other, or that something serious is about to happen. The cup itself is rarely the subject. A coffee shop on screen is usually shorthand for “the place where you have conversations you wouldn’t have anywhere else.” A cup placed in front of a character before a difficult exchange is shorthand for “this matters, slow down.” For something so culturally pervasive, coffee gets surprisingly few starring roles in cinema. But when you start looking, the supporting role it plays is everywhere, and the films that bother to make the cup actually mean something tend to stick in your memory.

This article first ran in 2007 and gathered 23 comments over the years, almost all of them readers correcting omissions and adding films we missed. The rewrite below incorporates what they pointed us to and adds the films and television that have happened in the intervening seventeen years. Several iconic coffee scenes are also from before 2007 and were simply absent from the original. Those are here too.

When the cup is actually the subject

The cleanest example is still Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003), an anthology of eleven short black-and-white scenes Jarmusch shot intermittently over thirteen years on the side of his other productions. Iggy Pop and Tom Waits at a diner. Cate Blanchett playing twin sisters at a hotel café. Bill Murray serving coffee at a Brooklyn diner while RZA and GZA give him medical advice (“you should drink some hot herbal tea instead, Bill Murray”). Steve Coogan being condescending to Alfred Molina in Los Angeles. The film is exactly what its title says it is. The scenes don’t connect. The coffee is genuinely the subject. Iggy Pop’s line – “Cigarettes and coffee, man, that’s a combination” – is the closest thing the film has to a thesis.

The other film where the cup is the subject, and it’s a different kind of subject, is Black Gold (Marc and Nick Francis, 2006), a documentary about Ethiopian coffee farmers and the global commodity market that determines what they get paid. It follows Tadesse Meskela, who manages the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, as he tries to negotiate fair prices for the people growing the beans that end up in our cups. It is not a film you watch to feel good. It is the one to watch if you want to understand why “fair trade” exists and what the alternatives look like from the producer side.

For a gentler documentary, A Film About Coffee (Brandon Loper, 2014) is a portrait of the third-wave specialty movement: Stumptown, Counter Culture, Blue Bottle, the people who roast and pour. It’s the documentary equivalent of walking into a very serious café and being told what you’re drinking. Barista (Rock Baijnauth, 2015) follows five competitors at the United States Barista Championship and is the closest cinema has come to making a sports movie about coffee.

When the cup carries the scene

These are the films where coffee isn’t the subject but is doing real work in the camera frame. Pour-overs are not metaphors; they are just there. But the choice to put them there – or to keep returning to them – is intentional.

• Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994). The diner scene that frames the entire film is held together by coffee. Honey Bunny and Pumpkin start at a booth with cups in front of them. Vincent and Jules end at a booth with cups in front of them. The cup is what tells you the scene is allowed to keep going. And earlier in the film, Marsellus’s instruction to Vincent involves a careful preparation that ritualizes the moment in a way only coffee allows.
• Heat (Michael Mann, 1995). The coffee shop standoff between Pacino and De Niro is twelve minutes long. Both actors are barely touching the cups in front of them. The coffee is the entire reason the scene can exist as a scene, in a place, with rules.
• The Ipcress File (1965), pointed out by reader Ipso in 2010. Michael Caine’s character makes coffee in a French press in a famously elegant pre-Bond British spy sequence. The product placement at the time was deliberate; the result was that an entire generation of British men learned what a cafetiere was.
• Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), also from Ipso. Starbucks cups are everywhere, often as background absurdity. The film is partly a critique of the kind of consumer culture that produces a Starbucks on every corner, which the film then puts a Starbucks on every corner of, with knowing irony.
• Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987). The “coffee soup” scene is a small disaster of British cooking that Marwood and Withnail eat anyway. The cup is also the only thing that signals normal life in a film otherwise structured around the absence of it.
• The Bucket List (Rob Reiner, 2007). Jack Nicholson’s character brags about drinking Kopi Luwak, the famously expensive Indonesian civet coffee, until Morgan Freeman explains how it’s actually made. The scene is the most-cited reference for Kopi Luwak in popular culture, for better or worse. The original version of this article mentioned this one and several readers (Trinitati Saragih Arthur in 2008, and others) confirmed they’d come to coffee through the scene.
• Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987). Reader Nerdulon5 pointed this out: three of the film’s key moments revolve around beverages, two of them coffee. A film about angels watching humans, and coffee is one of the human rituals the angels notice.
• Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998). “You were ambushed by a coffee,” in Robert De Niro’s growl, is one of the strangest reader-submitted recommendations I’ve ever encountered. It is also memorable in exactly the way the comment suggested.
• Kicking & Screaming (2005), Will Ferrell as a soccer-coaching father whose progression from “I don’t drink coffee” to ordering quadruple-espressos at full Italian volume is the comedic engine of the film. Hat tip to Ipso (2010) again.
• Feast of Love (2007) with Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear, set largely around a Portland coffee shop. You’ve Got Mail (1998) with the Starbucks sequence about Tall, Decaf, Cappuccinos and the “thousand decisions” people make ordering coffee. Both submitted by baristachiq in 2009.

The post-2010 cinema additions

Movies kept being made after this article first published in 2007, which is in retrospect an obvious thing to note, but the original never went back to add the later additions. These deserve to be on the list:

• Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017). The breakfast scenes between Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps are some of the most intricate uses of food and coffee on screen this century. The way Reynolds Woodcock notices Alma’s pouring of his tea, the elaborate care of preparation, the silence around the cup. Anderson is making an entire film about the rituals two people build around small things, and breakfast – the cup, the toast, the pastry – is most of the vocabulary.
• La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016). Emma Stone’s character works at a Warner Bros. lot coffee cart. The film starts with her at the counter and returns there as a structural anchor. The coffee cart is the location that connects ordinary work life to the dream sequences.
• Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011). The diner scenes are some of the most loaded silences in 21st-century American cinema, and the cup in front of Ryan Gosling is doing as much work as the cup in Heat.
• The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015). Coffee is one of the small civilian rituals the dystopian rules of the hotel constantly interrupt. The scene where Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz share a quiet cup in the woods is the closest the film gets to tenderness.
• Spy (Paul Feig, 2015). Melissa McCarthy’s opening sequence is built around her CIA-analyst desk and the coffee cup she keeps refilling while a more glamorous spy gets the action. The cup is exactly the joke.
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019). Brad Pitt’s stunt double drinks coffee constantly throughout the film. It is set in 1969 Los Angeles, when coffee was something you drank in a diner with a waitress refilling your cup, and Tarantino is making a film about the world that existed before Starbucks did.
• The Bear (FX, 2022 to present). Television, not film, but the show’s Italian-American family restaurant in Chicago is built around espresso culture. Carmy’s grief and Carmy’s craft both run through the same espresso machine. It is the closest American television has come to taking coffee as seriously as it takes itself.

The television coffee shows

Several readers in the comments pointed out, correctly, that the original article only looked at movies and missed where coffee actually lives in screen culture, which is on television. The serialized format gives coffee scenes time to repeat until they become character. These are the ones that built their identity around it:

• Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990-91 and 2017). Reader Herr Mayer flagged this in 2007 and was completely right. Special Agent Dale Cooper’s “Damn fine cup of coffee” at the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks, Washington, is the single most iconic coffee moment in American television. Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime, 2017) brought Cooper back twenty-five years later, and his confused, amnesiac journey back to himself was driven partly by a cup of coffee that finally tasted right.
• Friends (1994-2004). Reader Hazelnut Brown in 2009 pointed out (and was correct) that the show is essentially about the booth at Central Perk. The six characters spent ten seasons sitting on the orange couch with their cups, and the show built one of the most-watched sitcoms in television history out of “six friends in a coffee shop.” Central Perk has since become a real-world Starbucks tribute location in multiple cities.
• Gilmore Girls (2000-2007). Reader Kylie in 2009 noted this was missing and she was right. Lorelai Gilmore’s obsession with Luke’s coffee at Luke’s Diner is the running joke of the entire series and also the romantic engine of the show. Luke’s Diner pop-up coffee shops materialized in 250 cities for a single day in 2016 when the show came back for a Netflix revival; the lines stretched for blocks.
• Mad Men (2007-2015). The show ran for the entire decade after this article was written and built its 1960s Madison Avenue setting around coffee as the office stimulant. Don Draper drinks coffee constantly in the early seasons. The shift later in the series toward more elaborate cocktail culture maps onto Don’s deteriorating life. Coffee was the morning, and the morning was when he still had a chance.
• Better Call Saul (2015-2022). The series ends with Jimmy McGill, hiding from the law, working at a Cinnabon in an Omaha mall. The Cinnabon coffee bar becomes the place where the entire arc of the character compresses into a single ordinary American retail moment. It is one of the most quietly devastating uses of coffee in television history.
• Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020). Café Tropical is the small-town diner where the Rose family relearns to be civilians. The coffee is mediocre. The show treats this as a feature rather than a bug.
• Cheers (1982-1993). Not coffee, but worth a parallel mention – the bar in Cheers is the same dramatic device for adults that Central Perk is for younger characters. The format is older than coffee shop sitcoms because bars predate them, but the principle is the same: a third place that isn’t home or work.

The single iconic coffee scenes

• Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999). “Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Mondays.” The original article quoted this scene and it remains one of the most-quoted lines in American workplace comedy. Chotchkie’s is a parody of TGI Friday’s-style chain restaurants, and the suspender-flair waiter trying to upsell while Peter just wants coffee is the scene where the film’s contempt for corporate retail crystallizes.
• L.A. Story (Steve Martin, 1991). Steve Martin’s coffee-order parody (“I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon”) predicted the entire Starbucks customization era a decade before it actually happened. The film is a love letter to Los Angeles and a satire of its self-seriousness, and the coffee scene is the most enduring joke.
• When Harry Met Sally (1989). The deli scene gets all the attention, but most of the film’s emotional structure runs through Harry and Sally meeting at coffee shops and diners across two decades of their lives.
• Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). The kitchen-table coffee Tommy DeVito serves while sitting on a dead body in the trunk is one of the great unsettled-stomach moments of American cinema.
• Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001). Two coffees at Winkie’s diner, both wrong, and the man who has been having the dream that the homeless person behind the dumpster is in his head. Lynch is the director who most consistently uses coffee as a hinge into another reality.
• The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers, 1998). The White Russian is what the Dude actually orders, but the coffee that the Stranger drinks at the bar with the Dude at the end of the film is the framing device of the entire story.

Why coffee keeps showing up

There’s a practical reason most directors reach for a cup. A character holding coffee can pause without seeming idle. A character making coffee can talk while doing something with their hands, which is more interesting than two people just sitting in chairs. A coffee shop has the right ambient sound for dialogue – clatter, espresso steam, low conversation – that gives the audio engineer something to work with without overpowering the words. The cup gives the actor permission to be still without seeming static, and the location gives the editor a reason to cut back to a wide shot every few minutes. It is, in pure craft terms, an extremely useful prop.

There’s also a more thematic reason. Coffee is the daily ritual most cultures share that doesn’t require a meal. It marks the morning, but it also marks the conversation after the meal, or the work break, or the recovery from a long night. Putting two people in front of cups places them in any number of small, contained, slightly intimate situations without explaining anything. It buys time. The Pacino-De Niro scene in Heat would not be twelve minutes long if they were sitting at a desk together. It is twelve minutes long because they are at a diner with coffee in front of them, and the diner permits silence.

Coffee shops and diners also became third places (the sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s term for the spaces that are neither home nor work) at a moment when American cities were losing them. The 1990s sitcoms that built themselves around coffee shops – Friends, Frasier (which had Café Nervosa), Seinfeld (the diner) – were arriving exactly when American third places were thinning out. The shows weren’t documenting coffee culture so much as creating an aspirational version of it on the screen. Whether that turned into Starbucks dominance or whether Starbucks dominance shaped the shows is a chicken-and-egg question that nobody has cleanly answered.

Either way, when a director needs a place where the audience will believe two people might be alone with each other in public, the coffee shop is still the first place they reach for. It probably will be for a while.

What we missed last time, and a request

The original version of this article missed Twin Peaks, Friends, Gilmore Girls, Wings of Desire, Fight Club, Withnail & I, The Ipcress File, Heat, Office Space mostly (it quoted the Chotchkie’s scene but missed the larger structural point), L.A. Story, Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive, Goodfellas, When Harry Met Sally, The Big Lebowski, and nearly twenty years of subsequent cinema and television. Thanks to readers Ipso, Herr Mayer, Hazelnut Brown, Kylie, Andrea, Nerdulon5, baristachiq, Trinitati Saragih Arthur, Alison, and several others for filling those gaps over the years.

If your favorite coffee scene isn’t above, the comment thread on this article has been open since 2007 and we are still adding to it. Leave the film and the scene. We will keep updating.

Related reading

• Kopi Luwak and the most expensive coffee in the world (the coffee from The Bucket List)
• Coffee ads from the past
• Coffee culture in Asia
• Fair trade coffee and why it exists (the Black Gold context)