‘I’d just made two films in America. Shooting on a Lancashire farm was very different. There was mud everywhere – and we’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in buns’

Whistle Down the Wind was originally a novel written by my mother, Mary Hayley Bell, about three children living on a farm in Sussex. The children – loosely based on my sister Juliet, my brother Jonathan and myself – discover a man in their barn. Thinking he’s Jesus, they decide to hide him and protect him from the adults because they don’t want the same thing to happen to him as before.

The latest in our series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort films is an ode to the teary 1994 adaptation of the classic novel

I have an ongoing argument with some friends about how I refuse to watch Interstellar again, despite considering it a beautiful and well-crafted film. It’s just so sad, I tell them, even with its hopeful ending. A desperate, choking lump forms in my chest as soon as I hear the futuristic swells of Hans Zimmer’s score and I have to remove myself before I am overtaken by emotion.

But at the same time, the movie I choose as my feelgood film is one that has reduced me to a sobbing, snotty mess time and time again, whether I’m watching it curled up with my cat on the couch, swaddled in blankets while sick in bed or jostling with my seatmate for the armrest on an airplane. And just like with the score from Interstellar, the moment I hear Thomas Newman’s wistful little oboe intro of the 1994 version of Little Women, I can feel my eyes well up with tears.