Sharon Horgan

“I’m gonna go for this one first because, Princess Bride, which was the incredible Rob Reiner’s beautiful family fantasy. I mean, he was just one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I think about the breadth of stuff that he made. You know, Spinal Tap and Stand by Me and A Few Good Men. That’s what I would aspire to be, someone who just doesn’t make the same film many times over. And The Princess Bride is so funny. Incredible set pieces and comedic characters that you remember forever, and it’s so full of heart, but it’s not sentimental in any way at all. And amongst all those family films, it was a huge stand out and it makes me think of my girl, so I’m gonna… This’ll be the first one.”

“Loves of a Blonde. This is a bit of a cynical choice because I haven’t seen it. I know it’s a Miloš Forman film and I know that it inspired Ken Loach a lot in his filmmaking. All those Czechoslovakian filmmakers of that era were a huge inspiration to him. And I’m going to pop this in the bag now. I got it because I went looking for it the other night with my boyfriend, who’s a proper film buff and who would kill to be here.”

“Because of Kes, which I think is… Yeah. Here. So we went to Karlovy Vary, which is this incredible film festival in the Czech Republic, and it was, I think, the 60th anniversary and it was coinciding with Ken Loach’s 90th birthday, and he had won their big prize when Kes first came out. So I watched it on the big screen there, just, like, a couple of months ago, and to say I was destroyed afterwards is an understatement. I couldn’t… I couldn’t speak. And it’s mad because I think if you ask anyone who watched Kes when they were young, it is one of those films, even if you watch it when you’re a really, really young kid, it just stays with you, it gets under your skin, and it’s because I think he’s removed any sort of block between the filmmaker and the audience. It’s not, like, “Here’s your wide, here’s your mid, here’s your close-up.” He’s just observing, and I think that brings a real freedom to the performances and it feels like you’re watching a living, breathing thing.”

“Okay, so I watched this very recently, Velvet Underground. I love documentaries, and I especially love music documentaries. And I think there’s nothing better or more relaxing than putting on your favorite music and hearing about how the members of that band kind of tore each other apart in the course of… in the course of making that sort of life-changing music. So, I’m gonna have that.”

“Okay. So, The Graduate. I’m choosing it for a bunch of reasons. It was my daughter’s twenty-second birthday recently and we took her to this little cinema that plays film. It was the most glorious thing watching my daughter watch it for the first time. And I think it sort of changed my life, or it changed what I thought about cinema. Just how it was shot, those mad, extreme close-ups and that sort of hidden-observer thing, shot behind doors, and it feels like one of those films that has a bit of a Hollywood story. Like, I think they were going to offer it to Robert Redford, and Mike Nichols didn’t believe that he had ever had any trouble with women. I think he asked him, “Have you ever been rejected by a woman?” And Robert Redford said, “What do you mean?” So he was like, “No.” And then the music. Music is so important to me in everything I do, and I think maybe that all was kick-started by watching The Graduate and seeing how the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack told the story.”

“Okay, so for my last pick, I’m just going to see what the Closet offers up. What the hell is that? So I got It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It looks mad. But never heard of it, so that’s exciting.”

“The Before Trilogy. I adore all of these films made by Richard Linklater. But Before Midnight stayed with me the most because there was something about the representation of just a real marriage. And the argument at the end, which I’ve tried to recreate in other shows of mine, actually, but never could. But that argument that they have in that little hotel room, that starts off as lovemaking and just becomes the most violently brutal argument you could have as a married couple, is just an extraordinary thing. And it was quite an inspiration for Catastrophe when Rob and I were writing it.”

“The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse. I mean, this is just such a simple premise, and it just shows you the magic of film, really, how it can take something like a red balloon, like this little boy’s relationship to a red balloon, and for an inanimate object to become something that you really care about. I’ve had my daughters get emotional about a paper bag that was in the shape of a… a doll, get thrown away. They… It’s that gorgeous childhood thing of… like, putting a personality onto it. And I… I mean, spoiler alert, but, when they burst the balloon, I cried.”