Austin Garrick’s favourite movies of all time
Toronto duo Electric Youth, made up of Bronwyn Griffin and Austin Garrick, should be well known to film lovers. If not, their track ‘A Real Hero’, the theme song to Nicolas Winding Refn‘s movie Drive, most certainly will be. The pair soundtracked the Ryan Gosling vehicle with the lush waltz that accompanied his twilight drives.
Garrick said their debut album, 2014’s Innerworld, was primarily inspired by David Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror, Videodrome. “Personally, as a music maker, I’m more inspired by film than I am by other music,” he said. As a self-confessed cinephile, Garrick has “valued personal connections” to a lot of movies but managed to whittle them down to a top ten.
In the top spot is Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, a 1977 Japanese experimental comedy horror. Garrick said seeing it for the first time was his fondest film-watching experience in recent years, and was drawn to the notion of creative purity the movie leads with, likening it to a John Hughes-esque bizarre children’s TV show, all rolled into one 88-minute feature.
“The result is a heartful, imaginative, creepy, weird, and wonderful dream come to life,” said Garrick. “The score in its more sincere moments is also incredible.”
Another more humorous film he’s a fan of is Seven Samurai, which he and bandmate Griffin saw at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, which he professed was the “shortest, most engaging three and a half hours” he’d ever spent in a theatre.
Garrick also had high praise for the classics, namely Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, which he was first shown by Griffin. “What I love about this film is that you get this sincere, Old Hollywood romantic chemistry between Bergman and Cary Grant, in addition to some classic Hitchcock greatness,” he said. “We project films while we write and record, and this film played a lot during the making of our debut album.”
In another foundational piece of modern cinema, Garrick listed Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless as one of his favourites, owing to its relatable dynamic of two characters with a somewhat undefinable relationship, which “feels as modern as ever”.
Another slightly more modern flick on his list was Dazed and Confused, which remains timeless for Garrick: “I wasn’t in high school until several decades after this film was set, yet I went to school with every one of these characters.”
For that same reason, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is another firm favourite Garrick dubbed the “best of the past decade,” primarily because of its portrayal of teenage life. “This is one of those rare movies that have the power to make you forget you’re even watching a movie in the first place, instead making you feel you’re witnessing someone’s life unfold,” said Garrick.
Also on the multi-instrumentalist’s lists were Blue is The Warmest Colour, The Killers, Videodrome, Blow Out, and Thief. His eclectic tastes not only remain rewatchable favourites but serve as inspiration for the breezy synth tracks he produces with Electric Youth.
Take a look at a collection of Austin Garrick’s all-time favourites below:
Austin Garrick’s favourite movies:
- House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
- Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
- Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
- Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
- Thief (Michael Mann, 1981)
- Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
- Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
- Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
- The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964)
- Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
