Simon Pegg

“This is a beautiful, beautiful film: My Life as a Dog, Lasse Hallström. It’s all about the first stirrings of romantic love and interacting with adults that are, you know, a lot older than you. It’s just really great. And The Kid who plays Ingemar is wonderful. It’s like he doesn’t know he’s in a movie. It’s like he’s living the film. And it’s director-approved, this print, so I’m gonna show this to my kid because this film was one of my favorites. Check it out if you haven’t seen it.”

“How could I not? Night of the Living Dead. George Romero basically invented the modern zombie and I don’t think he gets enough credit for it, because a lot of people have taken his idea, myself included, and sort of run with it as if it’s like the public domain. But this was 1968, right in the middle of the civil rights movement. It was a major kind of thing that he cast Duane Jones as the lead, a Black actor. As a tribute to George, an amazing maverick filmmaker, this is where it all began.”

“Quadrophenia. This is one of the definitive British teen movies of the 1970s. Very disillusioned young man who has an awful job in the post office, who at the Weekend becomes a mod and fights rockers. He goes down to Brighton and there’s this massive fight on the beach. And it also features an amazing Performance from Sting, who plays this sort of uber-mod. It’s just so beautifully played by Phil Daniels. It has an amazing soundtrack by The Who. It’s an important one, this one.”

“I wanted to pick a David Lynch as a tribute to Harry Dean Stanton, who we sadly lost recently. I got to meet him at the Paramount 100th anniversary photograph. And he was so sweet and so nice and so normal, so not the guy that you thought would come up with stuff like Blue Velvet, which is an insanely disturbing movie. I showed this to my daughter the other day and she hated it. But she hated it for exactly the reasons that David Lynch wanted you to hate it.”