This is more like my ‘formative films' list…. in no particular order and subject to change … (and I've cheated!)

1. Elvis movies directed by random hacks– Elvis movies were a staple of weekend television when I was growing up – for a while there it was weird not to sit through an Elvis double on a Saturday afternoon – and I still derive great comfort from them. Elvis movies kind of blur into each other but my faves are Clambake – where Elvis is a rich hottie who wants someone to love him for himself and not his money. He switches identities with a poor water-skiiing instructor in order to find true love with Shelley Fabares; and Kid Galahad where Elvis plays an itinerant hobo who becomes a champion boxer and finds true love with Joan Blackman.
   
   
2. Superstar directed by Todd Haynes. This is one of those hard-to-get cult films that I read about long before I got to see it. It tells the story of Karen Carpenter – from her sudden rise to fame to her slow death from anorexia – with a cast of Ken and Barbie dolls. The Carpenters – Karen and her brother Richard - were a seventies pop sensation. It used to be easy to write them off as a couple of squares with creepy haircuts but time has a way of turning things around. This film made me see Karen as a saint skewered on a celebrity shish-kebab … It inspired me to write a story (and play) Xylophone about a teenage girl who gets love advice from the ghost of Karen Carpenter.
   
   
3. Desperately Seeking Susan directed by Susan Seidelman. This was Madonna's first (and only decent) film. She plays Susan, a sexy, crooked adventuress who hooks up with her boyfriend via the classifieds. Rosanna Arquette is the bored housewife who stalks her and unwittingly steals her identity. I too wanted to be Susan! She slept in hotels, she never paid for anything, she slunk around the Lower East Side smoking Camels and looking cool. She was a modern female outlaw! And I still get a little shiver when I hear Into the Groove.
   
   
4. Dogs in Space directed by Richard Lowenstein. This film came out when I was fifteen. My sister did work experience on it and my friends hung around the set and were inadvertent extras in it. It's set in Melbourne, 1978, in a household of punks and hippies and fugitives from straight society. Before Dogs my friends and I were wearing pastel jumpers and listening to Crowded House - after we were wearing black eyeliner and ripped jeans and listening to Nick Cave.
   
   
5. Foxes directed by Adrian Lyne. It's about a group of teenage girls hanging out in LA, wearing spandex, going to parties and getting off with guys … everything I aspired to much to my mother's chagrin. When I was about twelve it occurred to me that all the cool films were on way past my bedtime. Then I found an abandoned TV on someone's front lawn – dilemma solved. I smuggled it into my room, concealed it in the cupboard and while the rest of my family were sleeping I would turn on for the late night movie. Unfortunately – and after much struggle with makeshift coat hanger antennae - I couldn't get a picture, so I could only listen to the movies. And so it is that I remember dialogue from Foxes like I wrote it myself (Jodie Foster's mother crying, ‘You're all too beautiful! You make me hate my hips! I hate my hips!)
   
   
6. Ghost World directed by Terry Zwigoff. Ghost World is based on the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. It's about two girls in that limbo-land between high school and The Real World. Sardonic Thora Birch is un-thrilled with what the modern world has to offer, and is starting to realise that her best friend and co-conspirator, Scarlett Johansson, doesn't feel the same way. It's a really funny, sad, true and just about perfect film.
   
   
7. Times Square directed by Allen Moyle. Occasionally if there was something really good on the Midday Movie Show I would pretend to be sick so I could stay home and watch it. When I was fourteen Times Square had all the right ingredients. A senator's daughter and a street urchin meet in hospital and run away to start a new ‘renaissance' on the streets of New York. They squat in an abandoned riverside building and steal food from dumpsters. They send out poetry via a co-operative DJ and rock out in strip clubs. Pammy (Trina Alvarini) quotes TS Eliot and Nikki (Robin Johnson) quotes Joey Ramone. Nice.
   
   
8. Goodbye Gemini directed by Alan Gibson. This is a weird thriller that shows the seamy side of the swingin' sixties. It was something my sister and I discovered on the midday movie show and got irrationally attached to. Judy Geeson and Martin Potter play twins let loose in London. They like to dress up as each other and creep out whoever they're around. It's all fun and games until a murder occurs … Goodbye Gemini has a great soundtrack and is all sideburns, and houseboat parties and sinister queens saying ‘Darling …'
   
   
9. Harold and Maude directed by Hal Ashby. A sentimental favorite! Harold is twenty and Maude is seventy-nine. They meet because they both like going to strangers' funerals, and – improbably – they fall in love. For some reason, this film was impossible to get for the longest time. I remembered seeing it as a child and then when I met my husband it was one of the films we bonded over. Ahh!
   
   
10. I'm not that into horror films but there is a handful from the sixties-seventies that made the supernatural seem as real as anything. So if I owned an independent cinema, this would be my Halloween dusk-til-dawn: Rosemary's Baby, The Haunting of Julia, Don't Look Now, The Tenant, The Believers, The Stepford Wives, The Wicker Man, The Omen, Sisters, and Trilogy of Terror.
    
    

1. How to Marry a Millionaire
2. Chinatown
3. Midnight Cowboy
4. Vertigo
5. Withnail and I

First film experience: Jurassic Park
First film star crush: Heather Graham in Boogie Nights
First film epiphany: the backwards narrative of Reservoir Dogs