What movie has the greatest ending? Brief Encounter.

"We had rehearsals for a few weeks before [shooting] where we all went around the table and talked about our experiences related to the story. It was an amazing way to get to know each other and all remind ourselves of what story we were telling together. Throughout the shoot [director Mike Nichols] would have weekly screenings for us every weekend of double features. The most disturbing one I remember was a double feature of Brief Encounter and Irreversible. It would be a lineup like that every weekend."

The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie, Now, Voyager). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of 60 years passed (a lending library in Boots the chemist! a string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.

What was the last film you saw, and name some of your favourite movies? Inception. Extraodinary, breathtaking mindmaze of a thriller. Badlands, Elephant, The Shining, Let the Right One In, Zoolander, Withnail and I, Brief Encounter, I am Love, Michael Clayton, The Prophet, the Bourne trilogy and anything from Michael Winterbottom and Steve Soderbergh, Kubrick and Hitchcock.