Andrew Garfield

“The first thing that I come to is a man that I've worked with called Terry Gilliam and this is one of his all-time great films Brazil and I adore it. It's so inventive, it's 1984-esque, it's dystopian, it's anti-capitalist, it's anti-commercialism. It is a masterpiece of rebellion and of insanity and Jonathan Pryce has never been so incredible and Terry has never been so let off the leash. I'm going to start there.”

“Scorsese would be very upset with me if I don't grab one of his favorite films of all time, The Red Shoes, that he helped restore I believe and it was him that told me to see it for the first time and I did, so there's a story.”

“I'm going to grab a couple of documentaries... The first one is a Maysles' documentary called Salesman that I watched on the advice of Mike Nichols. We did a play called Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and this was one of the things that Mike said that we must watch just to develop our souls as well as prepare us to make that play. Again, the kind of the failure of capitalism that we're currently living at the end of, hopefully.”

“Hoop Dreams, another great documentary, one of the great documentaries of all time about one of the great sports. Basketball is more important to me than most things in my life and I think what this film does so purely is it gets in touch with our collective human longing to make something meaningful out of this life. It's a film about our essential needs as human beings to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to try to follow the image of a dream.”

“My favorite Mike Leigh film, one of my favorite films of all time, Naked, with one of the great performances of all time by David Thewlis. Mike Leigh is someone who I just need to bow to quickly because he's defined British filmmaking for the last however many decades. I auditioned for him once and it was a three-hour audition, it was improvised where he just observed you creating a character and living that character. No one's doing it like Mike Leigh.”

“Oh, Kes. Another one of our great British filmmakers, Ken Loach. It's a humanist story and it's tragic and it's beautiful and it's about someone who's been kind of deemed unworthy, unnecessary, useless and disposable finding out that he is anything but through his connection to nature, through his connection to a wild creature that accepts him as he is because he's a wild creature himself. It's an honoring of his own wildness and all of our wildness.”

“So, Fincher, goddamn. This is one of his early films, The Game, and it is so thrilling and it is so fun. You kind of go, 'This probably exists.' What Michael Douglas is being put through, like rich guys probably can access this kind of adventure and terror. And Sean Penn... I love this film, I'll watch it like once a year. The filmmaking is so good, it's so beautifully constructed. He was a master from the beginning.”

“Happiness. I love Happiness so much. I'm like mouth agape. It's a heavy film and with the late great, one of the greatest actors that has ever existed, Philip Seymour Hoffman. I was like 19, 20 when I saw this film and I was like, 'Films like this can be made and they can be profound and they can have compassion for people that we deem as monsters.' I just thought it was so funny and so weird and so... You know what film can do.”

“Company the cast album one of the great documentaries one of the great films about the creative process The Agony and the Ecstasy it's so wild the access that you have you feel like you're there and it's it's all suggestive there's no real narrative you're just kind of with these artists these like Thor breed artists who are struggling to capture suim's impossibly incredible music da penaka who's on the on the operating the camera is Right In The Souls of these people it's one of my fa...”

“And this is Tampopo, which is my father's favorite film of all time. When we were kids, he would say, 'So tonight are we going to watch Tampopo?' and me and my brother are like 9 and 12 and we're like, 'We don't want to watch a Japanese ramen comedy, Dad.' About 10 years ago, I finally bit the bullet and I watched Tampopo and I realized that my dad had incredible taste. One of my favorite scenes in cinema history of an egg yolk being passed back and forth between two lovers.”