Swear, self-promote and pretend you’re on a first date: a celebrities’ guide to Letterboxd’s Four Favourites

Once a humble app feature, Letterboxd’s Four Favourites has mutated into our era’s cinematic confession booth. Users choose (and can endlessly reshuffle) their top four films on their profile, while clips of celebrities and civilians alike performing the same ritual play out to Letterboxd’s 2.4 million Instagram followers.

It’s now a social-media genre of its own: the red carpet backdrop, the jaunty music, the snappy edits, the cheerful pings as posters slide into place. Each clip is a perfect little slice of fame, fandom and carefully choreographed spontaneity. And yet, beneath the surface chaos, there are rules. Unwritten (until now), but as binding as an Oscars embargo. So if you ever find yourself ambushed by the Letterboxd camera, here’s how to put in a convincing performance.

1. Act surprised

In the words of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada: “Why is no one ready?” Picks performances are usually preceded by flustered professions of unpreparedness that give them an aura of authenticity (“Oh shit,” exclaims Michelle Williams; Jenna Ortega wails that she “should’ve read the email”). Writer, director and museum curator Zoë DeLeon (should you ask: Memoir of a Snail, Mulholland Drive, Amélie, Me and You and Everyone We Know) tells me that her unrehearsed response was genuine, as she was not informed in advance before being grilled on camera. “They asked me very quickly with no time to prepare an answer,” she says. And be sure to say “Just four?”, outraged at such a horrifying prospect. Everyone does that.

2. Plug your movie. And yourself

This is Hollywood, after all. Or if you’re a civilian picked on at a film festival, it is at the very least a bump to your Letterboxd followers. So we all need to sell ourselves a bit. Perhaps in a bid to ensure conjugal harmony, half of Monica Bellucci’s all-time list were made by her then paramour Tim Burton. She then linked those choices to his latest, in which she also coincidentally featured. Meanwhile, Halle Berry’s nomination of The Shining gave her the perfect opportunity to discuss why she wanted to make Never Let Go, which she was shilling at the time. Out promoting Paddington in Peru, Ben Whishaw even gamely played along by speculating what the marmalade-munching ursine star’s own top picks would be, while no doubt quietly wondering if this was really what his Rada training had been building toward. (Whishaw claimed Paddington would be drawn to Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suggesting that perhaps animated bears prefer them as well). Alternatively, abandon subtlety altogether. Geena Davis and Carol Kane both kept it personal, with two of their four favourites being their own movies.

3. Look cool

Even if you’re not out promoting a movie, you’re building an image of yourself. As Kristen Stewart remarks after reeling off her picks, “I feel like you can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in Letterboxd”. Unsurprisingly, rappers such as Snoop Dogg and Busta Rhymes protect their tough-guy credentials by choosing Scarface rather than confessing to any secret passion for Disney classics. Others take the opportunity to display their arthouse credentials. Heretic star Chloe East proclaims her love of Kurosawa, adding that “there’s your pretentious favourite movie and then just your favourite movie”.

The point is that it’s not just about which movies you aimlessly switch on when bored but constructing an ambience, a microcosm of yourself. How people define their favourites is a movable feast: what makes for an ideal group, the ones you love today or always? Technical brilliance or emotional devastation? Taking a much-needed opportunity to draw attention to lesser-known artists? Past Lives actor Teo Yoo explains during his turn that “it changes every day because every day I’m another person”.

4. Be coherent

Your four little film posters sit side by side. You know this. They need to make sense together. Hugh Grant didn’t get the memo. He – apparently seriously – dived in with The Sound of Music, followed it up with Auschwitz drama The Zone of Interest and then went with Finding Nemo; this is a man oscillating wildly between genocide and animated clownfish. Mackenzie Davis even switched around The Princess Bride and The Night Porter on the grounds that The Princess Bride should be watched after The Night Porter.

And you do read the Guardian so there need to be great directors and performances in there. Pretend you’re on a first date. Be your best self, not the slob re-watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in your underpants. Willem Dafoe’s choices (Onibaba, The Magician, Barry Lyndon, Poor Things) each spiked in popularity, so try to bring overlooked gems to light. Then throw in one that’s ironic or deeply personal, like a film that shaped your early years. But avoid the fatal mistake Andrew Garfield made of choosing only childhood favourites, since your taste has hopefully developed since the days of Bugsy Malone and The Goonies.

Because, let’s be honest, this is just a way to associate ourselves with great cinema. We may have had nothing to do with the production, but we’re still tied to it in some small way because we have correctly identified genius. In an ephemeral age of streaming, Letterboxd functions as a form of ownership, a way of holding on to and possessing art, not dissimilar to keeping the DVD on a prominent shelf or walking around with a record under your arm. And this is no different from the days of putting up a poster for The Dreamers to show off how cool you were for “getting” it. Except, before, you didn’t know that Mia Goth agreed with you.