Minnie Driver

“Well, look, I'm an actress, okay, so All About Eve is required watching because, you know, probably at any given time you're either, you're, you're either like Bette Davis or you're Anne Baxter. I mean, I don't really love seeing women pitted against each other type movies. If there is one movie where I will watch it, it is this one, because it is clever and sharp and clearly of a time when women gave as good as they got.”

“I mean, here's the thing, you just, I again, like, what year was this? So '86, so I was 15 when I watched Betty Blue. Like, Béatrice Dalle was like, like somebody, like somebody drew her and she came to life, like this embodiment of everything that I wanted to be as a woman. Something about French, French movies when you're a teenager as well, they kind of let me down when I grew up, when I realized that life wasn't like that. Like, I really did think that it was that beautifully lit, it was that hot, there was that much sex and that much power. And that also, I was disappointed that there weren't more women like Béatrice Dalle in the world, but I think perhaps there can only be one.”

“An Angel at My Table by Jane Campion. It is about New Zealand's probably most famous author called Janet Frame and her apparent madness, even though she wasn't really mad, and the landscape of New Zealand, this power and grace and beauty of this place, and the experience of this brilliant artist who was just treated so appallingly. One of my first jobs out of drama school was this really beautiful, strange four-part series for the BBC that Danny Boyle directed called Mr. Wroe's Virgins, and Kerry Fox, who stars in An Angel at My Table, was in it, and she is a rare, deep, beautiful actress.”

“Uncut Gems. Uncut Gems. I do not understand why Adam Sandler was not nominated for an Academy Award and why he did not win. What I found so arresting about this film, apart from Adam Sandler's performance and the direction and the horrifying music, which is literally like you think there's something wrong with your ears and you need to go to a doctor, is that the female characters are so fully drawn. They are so full of blood and life, and it makes this very kind of dirty male tale so centered and so, rife with life. I love this film. I could not believe how hard it was to listen to it.”

“This film, this along with Withnail and I, Down by Law and Withnail and I are probably the two movies, maybe Betty Blue as well, the three movies that I would watch when I was a teenager, and it was exactly what I dreamed being an adult would be like. This slightly surreal, you can do anything, but you may well end up in prison, that maybe I could fall in love with someone as cool as John Lurie or Tom Waits or indeed Roberto Benigni. I mean, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream," like I've, I've cackled that on so many occasions like as a kid. I mean, Jim Jarmusch, I don't know, he just captures this part of that unbridled imagination that you have when you're young, that everything and anything is possible, that everything can be cool and funny and also tragic and broken. I feel like there's, there's a line between Jarmusch and the Safdies, like I, I, I do maybe watch these together while, you know, having a drink, you know, or not, just watch them totally sober as well.”

“So La Cage aux Folles, I guess I did, I did, I mean, who didn't love—I love The Birdcage, I love the remake of this film, but this, this, this is, this is the one to watch. Really, like in 1978, to be telling a story of, of a gay couple and like this big caper, it's like a, a gay caper movie. It's, it's a "gaper" movie. It makes you laugh at the absolute kind of mortification of the way in which people behave, at the deep love that is at the center of it. It's a really brilliant film. It was, it was one of my father's favorite movies.”