What are your top ten favorite movies?
1. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
The black-and-white original is, for me, the definitive anti-war film. I first saw it in 1991, sitting with my late grandfather, a WWI veteran and machine gunner on the Western Front. It was his favourite film, and watching it together on a worn VHS cassette made its message unforgettable. It is cinema and family memory: war as lived experience, passed down.
2. Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959)
Truffaut’s portrait of Antoine Doinel captures the ache of childhood alienation. For me, it rhymes with the boys in The Girl in the Garden and Form Photo, who hover between innocence and exile.
3. Walkabout (1971, dir. Nicolas Roeg)
Dreamlike survival in the Australian outback. A film that strips civilisation bare, which is what I often do with my characters: test them by placing them where context falls away.
4. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
A garden becomes a wilderness. Playful, but formative — teaching me that perspective, scale, and imagination can transform the ordinary into the epic.
5. Avatar (2009)
Myth, ecology, and kinship with the non-human. Its vision of hybrid belonging is exactly what I chase in Watersprites: interbreeding, merging, evolving together.
6. Dune (2021, dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Only Villeneuve’s version — vast, immersive, and faithful to the ecological heart of Herbert’s novel. Destiny, power, and fragile ecosystems colliding: a world-building template I admire.
7. Interstellar (2014)
A story of time, sacrifice, and love stretched across galaxies. I admire its risk: to speak of survival in emotional rather than mechanical terms.
8. Ex Machina (2015)
A chamber piece of AI and power, intimate and unsettling. It chimes with my daily entanglement with AI tools — and my interest in what happens when the ‘other’ we create reveals more about us than them.
9. Stand by Me (1986)
Friendship, mortality, the bittersweet edge of childhood. A story that feels cousin to my boarding school tales, where the boys’ loyalty is tested against the discovery of death.
10. The Dark Crystal (1982)
My older brother’s favourite, which I came to later, studying it for its Jim Henson craftsmanship. It still inspires my experiments with Watersprites as puppetry, as myth made tangible.
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