What is the film you want to watch before you die? I don’t mean this in the manner of those ever-present lists which recommend good films to watch, and add the “before you die” like a juicy worm, for us, the circling carp. Because there’s nothing like a little bit of death to make us pay attention.
I had a journalism teacher who used to insist on this. He would grow apoplectic at the sight of a story that began: “Nobody died when …” “Nobody died!” he shouted. “If nobody died, don’t go telling the reader that straight away! At least let them think someone might have died! At least give them that!”
But what I mean here is: what is the film you’d want to watch right before you die? Assuming you have the time to cue one up.
I started thinking about this before my father died. His decline was sudden: an aggressive cancer, quite far along before it was spotted. It felt as if we were running out of time and should spend all his remaining hours locked in profound conversations.
But he had no energy. “Let’s watch a film,” he would say. One afternoon I asked if I could record an interview with him. I do this all the time in my job. “Good idea,” my father said. “Let’s do it when we’ve finished this film.”
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The film was Lawrence of Arabia. It’s nearly four hours. People get lost in the desert. A chap gets swallowed up by quicksand. It’s a fabulous film but there are moments when you wonder if you will live to the end of it. Dad was exhausted afterwards. He had to go into hospital the next day, and that afternoon turned out to be his last window for a big interview.
But he could still watch films. My job was to get one ready for the evening. It felt like quite a responsibility. What if this is his last, I thought. What if the last thing he ever sees is Speed 2?
I had the idea — the same one that drives those lists — that I ought to show him something new. My wife still makes fun of me for saying, when she wanted to go to an acclaimed new production at the National Theatre, that I’d already seen Hamlet. (But surely it’s better if you don’t know how it ends?)
My father was not a film buff but occasionally he would return from work trips having watched something on the plane, sounding as if his entire world had been remade by it. “This cop is in a skyscraper fighting these terrorists,” Dad said. “He throws one of them out the window on to the bonnet of a police car, and he shouts, ‘Welcome to the party, pal!’ Yo-ho!” my father added, as he did when overcome with enthusiasm. This was how we first heard of Die Hard.
He was also very struck by the Steven Seagal film Under Siege. He went out and bought the video. But! He also liked a Gérard Depardieu film set in rural France that ends with everyone dying by suicide.
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One night in hospital I tried to show him a Wes Anderson film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s beautiful, it’s funny, there are Nazis, a prison escape, Ralph Fiennes. In the first three seconds, to choral music, a girl clomps into a snowbound cemetery. “No!” Dad said. “Not this.”
My sister suggested Good Will Hunting, which I remembered fondly. Dad agreed to try it, but only, as it turned out, because it stars Matt Damon and he took it for an action film. Instead, Damon plays a troubled genius from a rough part of Boston who will not let anyone get close to him. Dad was outraged by his behaviour. He didn’t seem to understand that Damon was the hero.
“Who’d help this guy?” he said. “This is a complete waste of time.”
Also, and somehow I had forgotten this, there’s an entire subplot about someone dying of cancer. It was strange how often this happened: how often a film seemed to be speaking directly to us.
It’s sometimes said that Shakespeare’s first audiences found his plays more potent because they lived in a violent world, where people were always dying untimely deaths, or seeing ghosts. “He’s talking to me!” they thought. “I am always leaving places pursued by a bear.”
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Well, the same is true of Top Gun in a cancer ward. “When I first met you, you were larger than life,” Kelly McGillis says to the Tom Cruise character, Maverick, when he is about to give up. “Now look at you.” I thought she was talking to Dad.
Top Gun was the last film we watched together properly, with some of his customary running commentary. “That’s a good bike,” he said, at one point. “Good old Maverick,” he said, after Maverick blew up the last enemy fighter jet.
It was the most successful of my film selections. You might conclude, simply, that I tried to thrust pretentious films on my poor, ailing father and finally came to my senses. But the process made me reconsider the films I like.
The writer Nick Hornby once complained that guests on Desert Island Discs talked not about the music but about what they were doing when they first heard it. They’re not really music lovers, he said. It’s about them.
Perhaps I like Good Will Hunting because I saw it for the first time in a little cinema in the Himalayas, when I was 19, and because afterwards we had drinks and what felt like a deep conversation about the film’s contention that the only people who matter are the ones who have suffered.
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Perhaps my father liked Top Gun because we watched it one Christmas with all the family, my uncle saying “ew!” when a pilot shouted: “This bogey’s all over me!”, pulling a face and shaking himself, as if trying to get it off. And my cousin saying that she and her friend passed a happy afternoon just watching the scene where the pilots take their tops off and play beach volleyball. And my father saying: “Yo-ho! Got him!” when the last MiG explodes into flames.
I am now at the end of this column and, disappointingly, I have not offered you The Ten Best Deathbed Films of All Time. Or even any list at all. But I think it boils down to this: it is not a time for new stories, but for ones that bring your own life roaring back to you, at Mach 2, when it is nearly over.
Will Pavia is New York correspondent
Giles Coren is away
