When the Observer breaks the news of his triumph to Danny Boyle - and shows him the Top 25 list in full - his first reaction, he says, is one of shock. "What? No Life Less Ordinary?" - a self-mocking quip reminding us that his 1997 film, the follow-up to Trainspotting, starring Cameron Diaz alongside Ewan McGregor, was welcomed with no great enthusiasm and has tended not to trouble many "best of" lists.
Typically British perhaps, certainly typically Boyle to greet a gong with a bout of self-effacement. During his triumphant tour of award ceremonies with Slumdog Millionaire - culminating with the Oscar and lying ninth on our list - audiences grew accustomed to his good-natured grace. It's also easier to top a list, Boyle suggests, when our poll's "25-year rule" is in place. This, he explains, "ring-fences us all nicely from the likes of David Lean and Powell/Pressburger" - all-time Brit favourites of his own.
Trainspotting hit the cinema screens in 1996 like some freak weather event, upturning conventions and upsetting those it didn't thrill, and British cinema has never been quite the same since. Its look and sound and anarchic swagger have been copied nearly to death since its release, but the film remains terrifically fresh and made stars of Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller - and Danny Boyle.
McGregor sets the pace in the opening seconds as his character Mark "Rent-Boy" Renton runs full-pelt down Edinburgh's Princes Street while reciting, in voiceover, his famous "Choose life" speech. He and his friends have decided to opt out of fixed-interest mortgage payments and dental insurance in favour of a life in thrall to heroin, and the film proceeds to show us, with great visual flair, the highs and devastating lows that existence entails.
The Most Disgusting Toilet in Scotland; Renton sinking into the carpet; the dead baby: these are just a few of the film's many indelible images. The soundtrack was fantastically powerful and John Hodge's script, cleverly adapting the novel by Irvine Welsh, was hilarious, shocking and as pop-culture-savvy as anything by Tarantino.
For Boyle, assessing the achievement more than a decade on, "The breathtaking bravado of the acting goes without saying now, but for me the thrill remains the quality of the writing." He means both the novel and the adaptation: "Irvine Welsh's book is a modern masterpiece out of which a number of very different films could still be made. John Hodge's script somehow found the right mixture of devotion and disrespect. Both writers had a lunacy about their approach and we all followed giddily, longing for more. It's a very British lunacy of being prepared to laugh about anything."
As Boyle acknowledges, Trainspotting was very much the result of a team performance, in front and behind the camera. Andrew Macdonald as producer made up the last member of a very tight director/writer/producer trio that had already delivered with the impressive Shallow Grave a year before Trainspotting. And it was notable just how this sense of a team effort was reflected in the diversity of our judges' comments - the praise equally shared between acting, writing and direction.
Actor Sam Riley, star of Control (number 13 in our list), was, he says, too young to get into the cinema on Trainspotting's release, but, finally seeing the film, was inspired to act by the extraordinary power of the cast. Producer/director Stephen Woolley draws links with Boyle's later triumphs: "Trainspotting was shot," he says, "with the same impressive speed and sense of anarchy that Boyle brought to Slumdog Millionaire."
And what of the winner's own tastes? What are Boyle's favourite British films of the past 25 years? Evidently not one to follow consensus, he suggests Nic Roeg's Eureka . "And The Wrong Trousers by Nick Park."