Life in 16 Films

Steve Waters's stage plays include The Contingency Plan (2009), Temple (2015), Limehouse (2017) and his radio plays include Miriam and Youssef (2020) for BBC World Service. He has taught at the University of Cambridge and University of Birmingham, where he ran the Playwriting MPhil and currently is Professor of Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Secret Life of Plays (2010), has edited the Contemporary Theatre Review (2013) and written a blog for the Guardian.

Playwright Steve Waters has come up with a brilliantly simple and original idea: a memoir built round the movies that have shaped his life. The result is partly autobiography, partly social history and partly a hymn of praise to the medium that made him. A jewel of a book: informative, moving, witty and compelling.

• Introduction – Dark Waters (2019, Todd Haynes)Watching film in an age of CovidThe Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) Working-class cinema-going in the Midlands; children and adult film; the Western; film as an embodiment of malenessLogan’s Run (1976, Michael Anderson) Rural England and the appeal of horror and sci-fi; rural v city; class conflictNosferatu The Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog) Grammar school in the 80s; uncinematic nature of provincial Britain; discovery of art and European filmSolaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky) Coming of age during Thatcher and punk; film and cycling; the rise of Channel 4 as a vector for film; second cold war; Solaris v Apocalypse NowShoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann) Kibbutz Dalia, Israel; Film and internationalism; film and the Holocaust; travels in the Middle East; confirmation biasVagabond (1985, Agnès Varda) Film and intellectualism at Oxford University; feminist and queer film; making filmComrades (1986, Bill Douglas) Film, work and radical politics; Communist and the city of Bristol; theatre and radical film-making; John Akomfrah and Julian IsaacThe White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929, Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst) Becoming a teacher; film history and education; falling in love through filmReservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino) Studying with playwrights Sarah Kane and David Edgar; Reservoir Dogs and Blasted; caught between film and theatre; influence of David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino and Sarah KaneWinter Light (1963, Ingmar Bergman)Film, marriage and faith; Bergman and Bresson; film as ritual; becoming a theatre director; becoming a playwrightCode Unknown (2001, Michael Haneke) Film and London; residential playwright at Hampstead Theatre; writing and multi-culturalism; Haneke's pessimism versus 'Cool Britannia'The Wind Will Carry Us (2000, Abbas Kiarostami) After 9/11; film and the War on Terror; film and having children; writing World music; influence of Iranian filmAn Inconvenient Truth (2006, Davis Guggenheim) Film and ecology; climate change activism and writing The Contingency Plan; adapting theatre to filmHell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie)Film and precarity; parents' death; illness; end of cinema; growth of populismAfterword - Girlhood (2019, Céline Sciamma) Watching films with my daughterIndex