‘You didn’t sit where the tramps peed themselves’
Mike Leigh

In my days as an impecunious young cineaste, there was the Tolmer cinema in Euston, the cheapest picturehouse in London, or anywhere – two shillings a time. A converted church, it was filthy, decrepit and gloriously eclectic. It showed whatever they could find, new prints and old. The Leopard – the original version, no subtitles; Hellzapoppin’; Rashomon; Svenska Flickor I Franska Sexorgier. Incomplete prints, sudden random reels from other films, frames catching fire in the projector. Wonderful. An education in cinema. But you didn’t sit where the tramps peed themselves.

‘A spear flung from the back of the crowd stays dangling on the screen’
Tilda Swinton

1980. A sheet hung on a tree in the middle of a village in Kitui County, Kenya, a cranky old western screened via an even crankier old projector and its generator, which was all driven round by two geezers from Nairobi in a loop from Somalia to Tanzania and up and over again every two years or so. An audience of hundreds, gathered from a distance of many miles. In the middle of the shoot-out in the saloon, a spear flung from the back of the crowd hits the baddie in the chest and stays dangling in the heart of the sheet right up to the final romantic clinch. Unforgettable. Magic cinema of dreams, you rock us everywhere and always – ad astra and back, ad infinitum and beyond. Respect.

‘Not a whiff of fast food’
Ken Loach

Not one ecstatic moment, but a tale of three cinemas, from half a century ago. The Hippodrome in Nuneaton was an old variety theatre, rumoured to have livestock in the faded velvet seats. No matter, for late adolescents, lowering their voices to get into French films such as La Ronde, it was an escape to an exotic world far removed from the industrial Midlands. Then there was the Phoenix in Oxford in the late 50s and the films of Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda and the first splash of the French New Wave. Finally, there was the Academy, on Oxford Street in London, where we shared the joys of the Czech films of the 60s: Closely Observed Trains, A Blonde in Love (AKA Loves of a Blonde) and many more. They were all cinemas with great memories – and not a whiff of fast food in any of them!

‘I had butterflies in my stomach right up to my chest’
Steve McQueen

My first time in a cinema was seeing The Magnificent Seven at the Hammersmith Odeon, in London. I remember brushing my hand along the side of the wall and being shocked that it was carpeted. West Indians have a big affiliation with westerns, and watching that one with my father was a big thing. The film was incredible; an amazing cacophony of sound and image. I had butterflies in my stomach right up to my chest.

I must also mention a matinee reissue of North by Northwest 20 years ago at the Lumiere in St Martin’s Lane, an underground cinema in the centre of London that is now a gym. You would go down three or four flights of stairs, shedding the reality of life in London, and find yourself in this gorgeous oval space, like being inside a whale’s ribcage.

Alfred Hitchcock created that film for an audience. He orchestrated their oohs and aahs, when they would lean forward and when they would sit back. This wasn’t about someone on the sofa at home getting distracted by their phone or the doorbell or going to get a drink. The place was full of energy and at the end everyone stood and applauded; just as they did when I saw Slumdog Millionaire at the ArcLight in Los Angeles.

Can you imagine being on a rollercoaster ride on your own? The majority of the experience is that you are with other people and are thrilled together. That’s what makes it exciting. There is nothing better than witnessing a story with other people. It is a collective thing and a confirmative of humanity. I am just desperate that people do go back to cinemas. It’s too painful. I don’t want this to ever die – and I am definitely not alone.

‘I wanted to feel the way I was feeling at that moment for ever’
Emma Thompson

Superman, 1978. Huge cinema. We were 17. It was exciting, funny and dramatic but, rarest of all, the female lead was as interesting and inspiring as the male even though she couldn’t fly on her own. When I exited the cinema I wanted to feel the way I was feeling at that moment for ever.

‘In the dark, among strangers, I was transformed’
Sarah Polley

I saw The Thin Red Line in a cinema in Toronto in Canada when I was 20. I entered the theatre militantly atheist, depressed and with the belief that working in film was a superficial thing to do with one’s life. I left the theatre with a glimpse of what faith meant, having been lifted and carried out of my sadness, and wanting to make my own films one day. In the dark of the cinema, among strangers, I was transformed.

‘The blue-white light filling the auditorium. It was bewitching’
Steve Coogan

I remember an October evening when my mother took me and a couple of friends to the local fleapit for my 10th birthday to see a double bill of Live and Let Die and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The memory still gives me goose bumps. Being transported to the sunny Everglades, watching a glamorous speedboat chase, followed by John Barry’s best score accompanying George Lazenby and Diana Rigg skiing in the Swiss Alps. The blue-white light filling the auditorium. It was bewitching. My mum fell asleep. How could she? I remember the jolt of reality as I stepped outside into the cold damp night. They were silly films really, but that childhood excitement has stayed with me.

A well-crafted story, a cinematic experience is unique. In two hours you can give people a profound experience, make them question themselves, make them cry, make them laugh, lift them up and give them hope.

‘As we had read it already, we couldn’t possibly be scared’
Edgar Wright

My whole career has been spent trying to replicate the various highs I have had in a cinema. One memorable screening at my local cinema in Somerset was the afternoon I happened to see the 15-certificate Gremlins at the age of 10. My brother and I approached the manager with the novelisation of Gremlins in hand, explaining that, as we had read it, we couldn’t possibly be scared by the actual film. Amazingly, he let us in and the thrill of watching the film, while also thinking I could be thrown out at any moment, was off the charts. I am still chasing that buzz.

‘A purely human form of communication, rooted in desire, myth and magic’
László Nemes

As the past 10 years have been highly effective in killing the true experience of a physical projected film by installing what are effectively television screens in cinemas, I recall with increasing nostalgia watching a restored print of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon more than a decade ago. It was truly visceral and thought-provoking at the same time, while reaffirming for me the appeal of a work grounded in craftsmanship, made in a physical dimension, with every cut thoroughly thought through. There was no place for computers, only a purely human form of communication, rooted in desire, myth and magic.

‘You could hear the rattle of the film on the sprockets’
Michael Winterbottom

When I was about 15 or 16 I discovered there was a film society in Blackburn, Lancashire. It screened films once a week in a small room at the top of the library. To be honest, I don’t remember which was the first film that I saw there, but they had programmed a German season, so it might have been Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul, or Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities, or Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

The films were shown on a 16mm projector which was in the room, so you could hear the rattle of the film on the sprockets. At the end of each reel there was a break, the lights went on, and someone got up from the audience and laced up the next reel. There was something simple and mechanical and magical about having the projector there right next to you, which was matched by the films themselves – low-budget, shot on location, often with non-professional actors, they seemed at the same time recognisable and exotic, simple yet loaded with meaning which they felt no need to explain.

‘Total madness and joy’
Whit Stillman

The best ever experience was the pre-Christmas all-cartoon children’s matinees at the Storm King theatre, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY. They were the form’s art at its peak – total madness and joy. At the Orson Welles cinema near Harvard, my projectionist brother would splice together Bugs Bunny: Superstar for the cinema manager Larry Jackson, starting the cartoon features craze.

Then there were seeing war films with my father: The Longest Day, 55 Days at Peking and, during a summer sailing cruise, Zulu at the magnificent Criterion theatre in Bar Harbor, Maine. With my mother, there were delightful foreign films such as Genevieve, Kind Hearts & Coronets and Divorce Italian Style.
But it was a double-feature in 1971 that I saw at the Harvard Square theatre that set me on my career: François Truffaut’s Bed & Board (loved), and Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (hated, except the knee).

‘The cinema must be the headlights of our new society’
Francis Ford Coppola

In these difficult times, people are frightened and yearn for what they call “back to normal”. But who now would say that the most important concerns are what we earn or how much we are worth? Nothing is more important than the health and safety of those we love, universal education, justice and care of our common home, Earth. Perhaps now it is the artists, especially the cinema, who need play the role of being the “headlights” of society: to express themes and principles to stimulate and change our former long-held priorities. “Where are we really going?” said Novalis. “Always home.”

‘I barely breathed’
Tricia Tuttle

Seeing a good film is always a pleasure, on any platform. Yet my most vivid viewing memories are overwhelmingly ones where I am lost in story, watching flickering lights in a dark room with other people. I saw Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures in a small independent three-screen venue in a suburban strip mall.

Drawn into the feverish, obsessive private world of teenaged Juliet and Pauline as they fell in love, I barely breathed; it was a totally immersive experience and Jackson and Kate Winslet dictated my every heartbeat as the film dragged me towards a brutal finale. I knew the ending was inevitable. Pauline’s narration had already told me so. But dread overwhelmed me. A path through a wood, a rock. The horrible deed was done and the lights came up but few people left the cinema.

I was suddenly overcome with all of the emotion that Pauline must have felt – sober with sudden loss, aching with remorse and regret. I sat in a fully lit cinema and cried with strangers.
Tricia Tuttle is artistic director of the London film festival

‘Bats swooped through the moonlight’
Cameron Bailey

I have watched Oprah Winfrey dazzle 2,000 people at TIFF’s Roy Thomson Hall; I have felt the buzz of Amitabh Bachchan sitting among us. But I will never forget Fespaco (the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou). There, in Burkina Faso, I have joined hundreds in an open-air cinema, as bats swooped through moonlight and the bright screen bathed us in homegrown balm. We communed.
Cameron Bailey is artistic director of the Toronto film festival

‘I was secretly a bit freaked out at how scuzzy the seats were’
Peter Bradshaw

When I was 22 years old in 1985, I was in New York City for work and one night I daringly went on my own to see a film called Blood Simple at the Waverly theater in Greenwich Village. Timid Brit country mouse that I was, I was secretly a bit freaked out at how scuzzy and hard the seats were, how sticky the carpet was and how eerily, menacingly sparse the audience seemed.

Then I was even more freaked out – and transported and disturbed – by the film itself. When Dan Hedaya’s sinister bar owner appears to barf a gallon of blood, I felt this blood had leaked out through the screen and was pooling around my feet on the thrillingly icky floor. The film was intimately horrible, and it fused in my mind with the cinema itself. It was only when I was back in the creepily plush Coenesque Warwick hotel that I fully realised how weirdly glorious that experience was.
Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian’s film critic

‘She sat beside me in the stalls: bare midriff, jewels and veils’
David Thomson

At the Granada, in Tooting, 1949, I was eight-ish, watching Samson and Delilah: unimpressed with the religious stuff but fearful of having a haircut. So I dreaded her golden scissors with Victor Mature’s locks clattering on the floor. Then Delilah came and sat beside me in the stalls – bare midriff, jewels and veils, in a sickly perfume. Miss Lamar looked at me and whispered in her sinister way: “Not to be afraid, sweetheart.” No, this couldn’t have happened. But years later, when Hedy was revealed as a mistress of electronic intimacy, I was not surprised.
David Thomson writes on film for the Guardian

‘I can still feel my jaw literally dropping open’
Hadley Freeman

The movie to see in August 1991 was, of course, Terminator 2. And so, encouraged by the five-star review in my then guide to life, Empire magazine, I headed to the Odeon on Kensington High Street. The cinema was packed out. I was not surprised. After all, Empire had said this movie was IMPORTANT. Empire was right. I can still feel my jaw literally dropping open when the T-1000 walks through the bars. Those special effects, coined by James Cameron, completely – it is no hyperbole to say – blew my mind. I have been to a lot of movies since then and seen a lot of CGI. But nothing will ever compete with seeing that on the big screen for the first time. I felt like I had just witnessed the first talking picture. And, in a certain way, I had.
Hadley Freeman is a Guardian writer and columnist

‘A runaway pram ploughed at speed’
Xan Brooks

Cinema 180 was a fairground attraction at Thorpe Park in Surrey in the 80s. I went on a school trip when I was 13. You stood in a dome and stared at a wraparound screen. This showed POV shots from the front car of a rollercoaster or a ski-jumper’s helmet. The aim was immersion; I was fully immersed. For the grand finale, a runaway pram ploughed at speed down a hill and on to a busy main road. At the very last gasp, a lorry hit the brakes. The shock was so great I fell flat on my face.
Xan Brooks writes on film for the Guardian

‘You could almost feel the air being sucked out of the room’
Anne Billson

I had watched Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents on TV, VHS and DVD, but I had never really seen it until 2015, when Brussels Cinematek showed it on the big screen. For the first time I was truly able to appreciate Freddie Francis’s exquisite black and white cinematography with its immaculate widescreen framing and beautiful deep focus – all designed to scare the bejeesus out of you. And so, when the ghost appeared at the window behind Miss Giddens, you could almost feel the air being sucked out of the room as the entire audience gasped in unison. Cinematic nirvana.
Anne Billson writes on film for the Guardian

‘The smoking section and the non-smoking section both erupted with applause’
Ryan Gilbey

When Indiana Jones dispatched with a single lazy bullet the fancypants swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the audience at the Harlow Odeon in Essex erupted into crazed applause: the smoking section on the left of the auditorium, the non-smoking section on the right, everyone clapping wildly in the blue haze. It was a midweek evening in the early 1980s and I was a stunned 11-year-old. I had never heard applause in a cinema. I am generally not a fan. Unless the film-makers are in the room, please restrain yourselves. But this was different – a helpless outpouring of spontaneous joy. Remember those?
Ryan Gilbey writes on film for the Guardian

‘People were screaming and crying and grabbing each other for comfort’
Stuart Heritage

I saw the first Kill Bill in a packed cinema in the UK, where it played to total silence. Then, a fortnight later, I moved to South Korea. This is where I saw the sequel. The difference was like night and day. As soon as the first big set-piece kicked in – as soon as Uma Thurman got shot – it was bedlam. People were screaming and crying and grabbing each other for comfort, and it didn’t let up until the end credits. My boss told me afterwards that she truly believed she was going to vomit. She meant it as a compliment, too.
Stuart Heritage is a Guardian writer

‘Scream 4 was the perfect anniversary date movie’
Benjamin Lee

At 26, I was in love for the first time. He was smart, handsome, hated queue-jumping and, most seductively, like me also wrote fan fiction for an imagined fourth Scream movie as a teen. It was meant to be. And so the release of an actual fourth Scream movie on the same weekend as our one-year anniversary felt almost comically serendipitous. My friends ridiculed my inexperienced idea of romance, but to us, having spent our younger years obsessing over the slasher franchise, it felt like the perfect date.

And it was. Not just the thrill of reuniting with characters we had grown up with, but of knowing we were each just as thrilled as the other. In my teens, film had been something I was accustomed to mostly experiencing alone and so there was something hugely comforting about that warm spring evening, at a wildly overpriced and eerily empty Odeon, experiencing it with him instead, holding hands as we swooned over a string of vicious and deadly stabbings.
Benjamin Lee is arts editor of Guardian US

‘I was completely unprepared for full-immersion trauma’
Andrew Pulver

As you stumble from screening to screening, film festivals can be bit of a chore – but they can also create the conditions for supercharged cinema, particularly as you are normally watching films you know next to nothing about, and expect even less. The sensational “Mexican dog movie” that turned out to be called Amores Perros, a super-violent Brazilian gang saga that went on to become City of God, a new one from “the Pi guy” that distilled the crystalline insanity of Hubert Selby Jr’s Requiem for a Dream. But the one that still stands out is the first showing in 2015 of Son of Saul at Cannes. I knew dimly that it was about Auschwitz, but I was completely unprepared for the full-immersion trauma that would follow, a totally unvarnished attempt to recreate the dehumanising nightmare of the Nazi death camp. It was a shattering experience; I still haven’t got over it.
Andrew Pulver is the Guardian’s associate editor, film

‘Just Richard Gere and the cicadas’
Catherine Shoard

It hadn’t been the best day of the trip. Cash was low. Tempers a bit scratchy. We had been so long (two-and-a-half-weeks!) so far (Greece!) from home. It was a daft plan to backpack all day down the Samariá gorge in 38C heat. You couldn’t turn around. There was no shade and no coffee. A man died on the boat back.

Then we went to see Autumn in New York at Paleochora’s outdoor cinema. God it was awful, and God it was perfect. The place was pretty deserted; just us, the beer and gyros, the cicadas and the moon, Richard Gere at his smuggest and Winona Ryder’s manic pixie dream milliner, unconvincingly smitten. We quoted it for years after. I once rewatched it, but that balmy Cretan majesty had gone.
Catherine Shoard is the Guardian’s film editor

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