"""The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… 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. I’d be, you know, This is my world. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell–starring, the idea of kids — while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film. For years I wondered about why some sequences were in black and white, and many years later I was reading an interview with Lindsey Anderson and discovered it was because they ran out of money for color film, so they just went over to black and white stock, which works in several places through the story."""

"An early sixties, black and white British gem from John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay plays a dreamer who wants to bust out of his small town with the help of Julie Christie. One of the saddest endings to a comedy I’ve ever seen. I saw John Schlesinger give a Q&A after a special screening at the Film Forum, and he said he didn’t feel that the ending was sad at all, just appropriate to Billy’s character."

"I came from a small town, with parents whose only wish for my future was a factory job, so this film, and the novel it was based on, felt close to home. My only desire was to somehow escape my surroundings, so when I first watched this movie in my early teens, I found the ending truly agonizing. Beautifully shot in black and white by Denys Coop, who also shot This Sporting Life for Lindsay Anderson that same year."