Danny Boyle

“Bob Fosse, All That Jazz. So I just watched this again quite recently, actually. It’s a work of absolute genius, in my opinion. And if you want to look at where a lot of modern editing gets its ideas from, just look at the sequences of him taking the pills, which are spread throughout it. I think that’s a great movie. Great, great, great, great, great, great movie. So this is one I am taking home.”

“So they’ve got Anora, which… To my shame, I hadn’t seen his other movies. And I went immediately after watching Anora, which I thought was just wonderful, and I went back to Florida Project, which is even more remarkable in a way. And I’d missed it the first time around. So apologies, Sean Baker, and chapeau.”

“They’ve got one of his other films here, which I am going to take, The Prince of Broadway, which I knew about, but I haven’t seen. So I’ll be taking both those, please, if I may.”

“So I have to give a shout-out to a great and very, very underrated British director, Stephen Frears. Really one of our great craftsmen. And this is a film he made with John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening: The Grifters. I think it’s based on a Jim Thompson novel or short story, and… who’s a great writer. Incredible. This, you’ve got to see this film for three sterling performances. You watch Annette Bening and you think, “Oh my goodness me, what an actor.””

“Yeah, I was looking… I was looking for Fish Tank. And there it is. Yes. Oh, here we go. So this is a British filmmaker, Andrea Arnold. If you don’t know her, you should see her work. True independent. Brilliant filmmaker. This is a wonderful film that she made. Michael Fassbender’s in it, and it’s partly about Essex, which is an area of the UK. And it has the most extraordinary skies. You cannot believe the… They’re so beautiful and it’s shot by Robbie Ryan, who I think shot her new movie, Bird, as well. The casting that she does, the way she finds actors… remarkable. Yeah, wonderful film and a wonderful filmmaker.”

“So there is a theory that… which I’m happy to say that this is absolute proof of, that your first film is always your best film. And my first film, which is also available on the Criterion Collection, was called Shallow Grave, and it… My dad always used to say… I used to take my dad to all my films, and he’d say the same thing every time when he came out of them. Didn’t matter what it was, whether it’d won Oscars or whatever, he said, “Oh yeah, it was good, son, but it wasn’t as good as Shallow Grave.” So he believed the theory that your first film is always your best film. To say that the Coen brothers have never made a better movie than this is not an insult. It is an extraordinary… It just shows you the talent that’s there, and you can see them learning their craft as they make it. So if you want to watch where it all began, then this is the one to start with: Blood Simple.”

“Oh my goodness me. So, I was talking earlier about Shallow Grave, the first film, and one of the buzzes when you do films and you kind of like… you get invited to exotic places. And we got invited to Cuba, to the Havana Film Festival. And it was an incredible experience to be in Cuba. And two of the films that we saw while we were there was this: I Am Cuba, which is a staple and is recommended, and everybody should see it really.”

“But this film is the film with the worst title, I think, probably imaginable. It’s called Memories of Underdevelopment, and it’s a film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. What can I tell you about this film? When I saw this film, we were working on Trainspotting, so we’d released Shallow Grave and we were working on Trainspotting, and I can’t remember whether we’d… I think we’d shot… No, we hadn’t shot it. We were working on it, and we didn’t have an ending. And I saw this film, and I stole, frame by frame, the last shot of this film for the last shot of Trainspotting. And if you happen to watch this movie, which is available on Criterion and is available on an extraordinary, proper regrade of this, you’ll see the last shot of this film as it was intended to do, as it reflected the last shot of this film. And you’ll realize how the phrase, “We stand on the shoulder of giants,” is highly appropriate. Yeah.”