How the Guardian’s new film quiz turned this puzzle fan into a question setter | Anne Billson

<p>As a devoted puzzler and movie buff, Anne Billson jumped at the chance to compile questions for our new quiz – but keeping them the right side of fiendish was not simple</p><p>There must be people who don’t like quizzes, but I have yet to meet them. Meanwhile, the rest of us launch ourselves with obsessive-compulsive regularity into Wordiply, Wordle, the New York Times’s utterly infuriating Connections and the Guardian’s own <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/thursday-quiz">Thursday quiz</a>, which comes complete with its own official dog. Why do we do it? Presumably there’s a competitive element, though I have muted “wordle” on my Bluesky timeline, and it would never occur to me to boast about having named the Framed film in one go, or identified a west African country purely from its shape in Worldle.</p><p>Quizzes are educational, but only to a degree; Artistle has taught me more about 19th-century Russian landscape painters than is ever likely to be of use in any sphere of life apart from other quizzes. It’s certainly not social, though quizzes are not a solitary pastime per se, hence the popularity of Trivial Pursuit; I like to brag about having once won the French version – against French people! – but am less keen to be reminded of that time I humiliated myself at my sister’s local pub quiz by expecting to ace the round on 1980s cinema, only for most of the questions to be about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jun/04/the-goonies-making-of-chaos-pranks-richard-donner">The Goonies</a>, which I have never seen.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/08/guardian-new-film-quiz-puzzle-fan-question-setter-buff">Continue reading...</a>