Neil Gaiman names his five favourite films
Neil Gaiman has undoubtedly become something of a British national treasure. He is a writer of novels, comic books, graphic novels, films, and theatre; anything you can write with words, Gaiman has done it. Many of his works have been adapted into films or TV series, including the supremely successful recent Netflix adaptation of The Sandman.
Gaiman had been adorned with several envious awards, including the prestigious Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards. The Graveyard Book, released in 2008, made Gaiman the first author to win both the Newbery and Carnegie medals for the same work.
Gaiman once shared his five favourite films on Rotten Tomatoes. His first pick is Lindsay Anderson’s if…., a satire of the English public school system. It centres on a group of young pupils who stage a violent revolt against the authority figures at the school.
Of the film, Gaiman said: “It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed. I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood. Which was a completely new one for me.”
Gaiman followed up with All That Jazz, a musical drama directed by Bob Fosse in 1979. It’s a semi-autobiographical fantasy that focuses on Fosse’s life as a director, dancer and choreographer, influenced by the desperate efforts to direct his film Lenny whilst simultaneously staging Chicago in 1975.
Gaiman said: “It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey, and you know, on the one hand, it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does”.
His third pick is His Girl Friday, a 1940 screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks. It tells the story of a newspaper editor soon to lose his best reporter to another outlet and his wife to another man. He suggests that they try out one last story as he tries to win his wife back. “It’s funny, “Gaiman said. “It moves, it actually has huge social responsibility, and they did a thing where they gender-swapped the lead. Hilly is a guy going off to get married and having that be sabotaged by his editor. There was brilliance in that, and it’s feisty, and it’s funny, and it’s something that I can watch over and over again and never get tired of.”
Gaiman admitted to loving Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, his adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, but ultimately set down his fourth film choice as the 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast, directed by the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Discussing the film, he said: “I remember watching it and feeling transported. For me, it’s like dreaming. It does the same that Bride of Frankenstein does, where I can never quite remember the plot when it’s over; I’m just aware that it’s finished now, and this wonderful place that I went has gone away. Everything is being improvised. Everything is being created on the fly, and yet what they come up with is something that is so much cooler than any infinite amount of CGI.”
Gaiman’s final film choice is Drowning by Numbers, directed by Peter Greenway and released in 1988. The film centres on three women from a different generation in the same family, who each drown their husband.
Neil Gaiman’s five favourite films:
- if…. (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
- All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
- Drowning by Numbers (Peter Greenaway, 1988)
- Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
- His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
Gaiman’s final film choice is Drowning by Numbers, directed by Peter Greenway and released in 1988. The film centres on three women from a different generation in the same family, who each drown their husband.
Gaiman said of the film, “It’s a film about games, it’s a film about numbers, it’s a film about murder, men being murdered by women, who may all be the same woman, but are, at least the way that I read it, aspects of the triple Goddess — the maiden, the mother, and the crone — but all of them are having the same relationship with men. All of them are profoundly killing off these rather abusive and appalling men in their life, and it’s a strangely beautiful and absolutely surreal film that plays by its own rules.”
