The unfolding drama featuring Netflix and Blockbuster has the makings of a Hollywood movie, sort of: Inspired entrepreneur takes on corporate empire, all for the good of—and this is where the plot falters a bit—a movie-viewing public too lazy to leave home to rent a video. Okay, so world peace does not hang in the balance in the battle between the two reigning movie-rental companies. But the story is compelling enough that I thought it fitting, and just plain fun, to ask Netflix founder (and newest Microsoft board member) Reed Hastings which business movies have resonated with him over the years.

Hastings, 46, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was never a movie buff. Before starting Netflix in 1997, he rarely rented more than two movies a month, and only came up with the idea for the company after losing a rental and racking up a huge late charge. Now a regular at the Sundance Film Festival, his appreciation for film has grown since he started hanging out with “movie people.”

When it comes to business flicks, Hastings—who sold his first startup, Pure Software, in 1997—thinks Hollywood’s take on business, as exemplified in films such as Wall Street and Erin Brockovich, is overly simplistic and exaggerated and portrays large companies in an unflattering light. So which films is he a fan of?

For starters, he likes a recent German film, The Lives of Others, in which the main character works for the East German secret police in 1984 and faces a moral crisis between the personal and professional poles in his life. “Those of us leading companies face value tradeoffs all the time, whether it is family and work or dealing with employees,” he says. Hastings is also taken with The Inheritance, a 2003 Danish film about a middle-aged man who inherits his father’s steel mill and becomes conflicted between his corporate responsibilities and personal needs. “It’s about a crisis of conscience,” says Hastings. “The lead character cannot figure out how to be the person he wants to be for society, family, and for himself.”

One career film that Hastings talked up was unknown to me: Prefontaine. The biographical docudrama profiles a runner, Steve Prefontaine, who for Hastings “embodied the magic and romance of the purity of commitment.” Intrigued, I rented Prefontaine the night after our interview. (Full disclosure: With my deadline 24 hours away, I ran to the nearest Blockbuster.) I tried to see beyond the film’s lousy acting and corny script to find the allure of the main character, a winning-obsessed runner who races and comes in fourth at the Olympic Games in Munich, then dies in a car crash before he can fulfill his dream. His demise and the film’s shortfalls aside, Prefontaine’s tenacity is admirable. “He lived a total life of passion for running,” a particular athletic commitment Hastings says he does not share, but that he finds inspiring.

For Hastings, the inherent tensions that exist within companies are “fertile ground” for movies. As for what business scenario the Netflix chief would like to see depicted on the big screen, his answer is telling: He wants a movie that shows both sides of some major rivalry—Merck and Eli Lilly, Boeing and Airbus, McDonald’s and Burger King—as the two companies compete head-to-head. “It would be fascinating to have a look at both sides and how they thought about one another, and how much they really understood about each other,” he says. Fascinating indeed, especially considering that his own rivalry has yet to conclude.

I ask which event from his own career journey might make a memorable onscreen scene. “One day, at my first company,” he says, “I was 33 years old and I told the board that they should get someone else to run the company because I had screwed some things up. They said, ‘Yes, you screwed some things up, but we still want you,’ ” Hastings says. “For me, that moment was like a confessional, an acceptance of my mistakes. I felt enough guilt that I did not want to repeat the situation, but not enough guilt that it was destructive to the point that I was consumed by it.”

The scene may lack the sweeping intensity of, say, a Bud Fox-climbing-the-courthouse-steps or a Working Girl-who-gets-her-own-office climax, but then again, the most revealing moments in one’s career can be difficult to compellingly capture on film. To that end, I wonder aloud which actor Hastings imagines portraying him in a movie version of his own professional life. He pauses. “Keanu Reeves. I like his character in The Matrix, although he’s much cooler than I am.”

Maybe not. Reeves’ Matrix character, Neo, is just another tech geek who saves the human race from out-of-control machines, which is not so far afield from what Hastings says makes for a good story and for good business: “the individual’s fight for justice against the totalitarian state or corporate entity.” Are you listening, Blockbuster?