Movie Quiz — 50 Questions with Answers

Which 1939 film follows Dorothy and her dog Toto down a yellow brick road?

Answer The Wizard of Oz

Kansas is in sepia and Oz is in color, which was the point of making it — the studio wanted a showcase for the process. The slippers are silver in the book and were changed to red for the same reason.

Who directed Psycho (1960)?

Answer Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock bought up copies of the novel to keep the ending from spreading, and shot in black and white with his television crew to keep the budget low. The shower sequence runs about forty-five seconds and took a week and dozens of separate setups.

Casablanca (1942) is set in which country?

Answer Morocco

Morocco, and none of it was filmed there — the whole thing was shot on studio lots in California. Many of the supporting players were themselves refugees from Europe, which is why the scene where they sing over the German officers plays the way it does.

Who played Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972)?

Answer Marlon Brando

He was not the studio's choice and had to test for the part, stuffing his cheeks with cotton to get the jaw. He also famously worked from cue cards placed around the set, which he said kept the delivery from sounding rehearsed.

Which 1952 musical is famous for its title number danced in a downpour?

Answer Singin' in the Rain

Gene Kelly filmed the title number with a fever, and milk was mixed into the water so the rain would show up on camera. The whole film is built from songs the studio already owned, which is why it exists at all.

Citizen Kane (1941) was directed by and starred which man?

Answer Orson Welles

Welles was twenty-five and had never made a feature. The newspaper magnate the story resembled tried hard to suppress it, the film lost money, and its reputation as the greatest ever made arrived decades later.

Which giant creature climbs the Empire State Building in a 1933 classic?

Answer King Kong

The creature was a model about eighteen inches tall, moved a frame at a time. What makes the effect hold up is not the model but the decision to give it a face that reacts, which is why audiences take its side by the end.

Which studio opens its films with a roaring lion?

Answer MGM

There have been several lions over the years, not one. The Latin motto around the frame translates as art for art's sake, which was an unusually lofty claim for a company built on popular entertainment.

Gone with the Wind is set during which war?

Answer The American Civil War

Adjusted for inflation it remains the highest-earning film ever released. It is also where the first Oscar won by a Black performer came from — and she was seated at a separate table at the segregated ceremony where she received it.

Some Like It Hot (1959) starred which actress?

Answer Marilyn Monroe

It was shot in black and white because color tests made the men's makeup look green. Monroe's difficulty on set is much repeated; less repeated is that the takes they kept are the ones she is best in.

Who directed both Jaws and E.T.?

Answer Steven Spielberg

The mechanical shark broke down constantly, so he shot around it and suggested the animal with music and a floating barrel instead. The film is scarier for the failure, and he has said so himself.

In Star Wars, what is the name of Han Solo's ship?

Answer The Millennium Falcon

The design was changed late in production because the original looked too much like a ship in another series then in development. The rejected shape was not wasted — it became the vessel the princess arrives in at the start.

Titanic (1997) was directed by whom?

Answer James Cameron

Cameron dived to the actual wreck twelve times before shooting, and the footage of the real ship that opens the film is his own. He has said he pitched the film partly as a way to fund the dives.

Which actor plays Iron Man in the Marvel films?

Answer Robert Downey Jr.

The studio did not want him, and the director pushed hard enough to get him a screen test. The casting decision is usually described as the one the entire connected series was built on.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed mainly in which country?

Answer New Zealand

New Zealand, and the effect on the country was large enough to be studied — tourism rose sharply and stayed up, and the government created a position to manage the association.

Jurassic Park (1993) was based on a novel by which author?

Answer Michael Crichton

Crichton wrote the novel and worked on the screenplay, and in the same period created a long-running hospital drama for television. The book's dinosaurs are considerably more frightening than the film's, mostly because the page has no budget.

Keanu Reeves chooses between a red pill and a blue pill in which 1999 film?

Answer The Matrix

The effect where the camera circles a frozen moment was made with more than a hundred still cameras fired in sequence. It was so widely imitated in the years after that the film's own style dated faster than its ideas.

Which film series features Dominic Toretto and street racing?

Answer Fast & Furious

The series began with a magazine article about street racing in New York, and the first film is a small crime story. What it turned into over two decades is one of the odder transformations in film.

Avatar (2009) is largely set on which alien moon?

Answer Pandora

Pandora is a moon rather than a planet — it orbits a gas giant, which is why the giant is visible in the sky in so many shots. The detail is easy to miss and it is doing a lot of the work in making the place feel unfamiliar.

Who played Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean?

Answer Johnny Depp

Depp based the character on a rock guitarist and the studio was alarmed enough during filming to ask what he was doing. He kept going, and the performance is the reason the series continued.

Which 2019 Korean film won the Oscar for Best Picture?

Answer Parasite

It was the first film not in English to win Best Picture, ninety-two years after the award began. Its director noted in his speech that subtitles are a one-inch barrier, which turned out to be the most quoted line of the night.

Who won the most acting Oscars in history, with four?

Answer Katharine Hepburn

Four acting Oscars, more than anyone else, and she attended the ceremony only once in her life — and not to collect any of them. Her fourth came for a film released when she was seventy-four.

What is the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival called?

Answer The Palme d'Or

The Golden Palm, named for the palm trees on the city's coat of arms. Unlike the Oscars it is decided by a small jury that changes every year, which is why its winners are less predictable and its arguments more public.

Who directed Inception, Interstellar and Oppenheimer?

Answer Christopher Nolan

Nolan shoots on film rather than digitally and prefers to build effects in front of the camera. The plane crashed in one of his films was a real plane, bought secondhand because it cost less than the visual effect would have.

Which director made Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill?

Answer Quentin Tarantino

Pulp Fiction tells its story out of order, and reassembling it is part of what people did after seeing it. The structure was not new, but it was new to a film that made that much money, which is what made it influential.

Martin Scorsese finally won Best Director for which film?

Answer The Departed

He won for a remake of a Hong Kong thriller, after five previous nominations for films now considered classics. The presenters that year opened the envelope together, which was widely read as the industry making sure it happened.

Which film won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture?

Answer Wings

A silent film about First World War pilots, and the only silent winner until a deliberately silent film won again in 2011. It also contains a battle sequence shot with real aircraft, which is why the flying still looks convincing.

Meryl Streep won an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in which film?

Answer The Iron Lady

Her third Oscar, thirty-two years after her first. She has been nominated more times than any performer in the award's history, by a wide margin.

Which Ridley Scott film introduced Ellen Ripley?

Answer Alien

The script specified that every character could be played by a man or a woman, which is how the lead became a woman almost by accident. It changed what an action lead could look like for decades afterward.

Parasite also won the top prize at which film festival?

Answer Cannes

It won at Cannes and then Best Picture, which almost never happens — the two juries usually want different things. Only a handful of films have managed both in the whole history of either award.

What was the first full-length Pixar film?

Answer Toy Story

The first feature made entirely with computer animation, in 1995. The studio had been making short films for years to prove the technique worked, and the feature almost collapsed mid-production when the studio behind it demanded a darker tone.

In Frozen, Elsa is queen of which kingdom?

Answer Arendelle

The kingdom is modeled on Norway, and the crew traveled there to study the light, the buildings and the way snow actually behaves. The film's snow required its own simulation software, which the studio later published a paper about.

Which Studio Ghibli film won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature?

Answer Spirited Away

It remains the only hand-drawn film not in English to win that category. Its director did not attend the ceremony, and later said he had stayed away because of the war his country was then supporting.

What kind of creature is Shrek?

Answer An ogre

An ogre, and the role was recorded almost entirely by a different actor who died before the film was finished. The version that exists was rebuilt around a new voice, which is why the character's personality shifted from the early drafts.

The Lion King is set on which continent?

Answer Africa

Africa, and the film borrows its structure fairly openly from a much older story about a prince avenging his father. The comparison was noted immediately on release and has been argued about ever since.

Who is the cowboy doll in Toy Story?

Answer Woody

In the earliest version he was a sharp-tongued ventriloquist's dummy and thoroughly unlikeable. The studio saw a cut, hated it, and shut production down — the film that exists is the rewrite that followed.

What kind of fish is Nemo?

Answer A clownfish

A clownfish, and the film caused a surge in demand for them as pets, which was hard on wild populations. That the plot is about a fish taken from the reef and desperate to get home makes the outcome unusually pointed.

What was Walt Disney's first feature-length animated film (1937)?

Answer Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

It was called Disney's Folly while it was being made, because nobody believed audiences would sit through a feature-length cartoon. It received an honorary Oscar presented as one full-size statuette with seven small ones beside it.

In Up, the house is lifted into the sky by thousands of what?

Answer Balloons

Balloons, and the number shown is nowhere near enough — lifting a house would take millions rather than thousands. The team knew, and chose the image that reads over the one that calculates.

Which Japanese director made Your Name (2016)?

Answer Makoto Shinkai

Shinkai wrote, directed, edited and storyboarded it, which is unusual at that scale. His earlier work was made largely alone on a home computer, and that habit shows in how much of the film is weather and light.

Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai inspired which Hollywood western?

Answer The Magnificent Seven

Seven Samurai became a western about hired gunmen, and the same structure has been reused so often since that the phrase seven of something now signals the plot by itself. An animated film about insects used it too.

Which Italian director made La Dolce Vita?

Answer Federico Fellini

The word paparazzi comes from this film — a photographer character named Paparazzo. The name spread first in Italian journalism and then everywhere, which is a rare case of a single minor character naming a profession.

Cinema's first public screening in 1895 was held by which brothers?

Answer The Lumiere brothers

The Lumière brothers, in Paris in 1895. They regarded the whole thing as a scientific curiosity and said the cinema was an invention without a future, which is the most quoted wrong prediction in the medium.

The Three Colors trilogy director Krzysztof Kieslowski came from which country?

Answer Poland

Poland. The trilogy is named for the colors of the French flag and each film takes one of the values those colors stand for, which is why they can be watched separately and mean more together.

The word 'Bollywood' blends Hollywood with which city's old name?

Answer Bombay

Bombay, now Mumbai. The name is often used loosely for all Indian cinema, which is misleading — India has several large film industries in different languages, and the Hindi one is not always the biggest.

Which Mexican director made Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water?

Answer Guillermo del Toro

Del Toro designs his creatures himself and keeps notebooks of them for years before they appear. He has said he prefers monsters to villains, which is why his films tend to put the frightening thing on the side of the child.

Battleship Potemkin (1925), famous for its Odessa Steps sequence, came from which country?

Answer The Soviet Union

The Soviet Union, and the massacre on the steps that made the film famous never happened. It was invented for the film, and it has been quoted and imitated so often that many people believe it is a historical record.

Which Hong Kong director made In the Mood for Love?

Answer Wong Kar-wai

Wong shoots without a finished script, developing the film as he goes and often discarding most of what he shoots. This one was cut from far more material, including an entirely different story that became a separate film.

Das Boot follows the crew of what kind of vessel?

Answer A submarine

A submarine, and the set was built to the exact dimensions of a real one, which is why the camera has to squeeze through the compartments. The crew shot in sequence over months so the actors would visibly deteriorate along with the characters.

Which 1948 Italian classic follows a father hunting for his stolen bicycle?

Answer Bicycle Thieves

The father and son were played by non-professionals — the lead was a factory worker. The style has a name, and its whole argument was that ordinary people in real streets would be truer than actors on sets.