The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

40 Bill Condon
How would you describe Bonnie and Clyde to someone who has never
seen it?
Condon: It is a film that, if you buy into the idea that there was a sort of
golden age of American filmmaking in the late ’60s and early ’70s, for me,
it seems at least that this is the film that began it. This is a film that was the
first kind of French New Wave movie made in America. That influence just
changed movies radically in a very short time.
It’s about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and the Barrow gang, and
Bonnie and Clyde were young bank robbers in the early ’30s in the Depression
who became legendary. They went on a robbing and killing spree across
the Southwest.
Can you tell me about when and how you saw the film?
Condon: I grew up in Queens in an Irish Catholic neighborhood with a
father who was kind of skittish about all things sexual. But my mother was
the opposite. My mother would get her friends together and go see Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because my father wouldn’t go, and she loved going
to the theater, and she was very progressive. I always liked movies, but Bonnie
and Clyde, I remember, was the first movie my older sisters got me into for
the first time when it played at our local theater.
I probably had just turned twelve. Part of the movie is that it’s sexual. And
this was the first indelible, overwhelming experience I had where I felt myself
drawn back over and over again. I saw it easily six, maybe eight times. When
it’s all so new to you, everything about the experience becomes powerful.
For example, the way that Bonnie and Clyde starts. It starts with these
photographs coming up and just the very simple sound of a click of a camera,
and then interspersed with titles, white titles, white letters, that fill with
red, fill with blood. And just that, the sensual pleasure of that was something
that I would always look forward to when seeing the movie again.
There’s something mysterious about how you’re in touch with a film without
being in touch with a hundred other kids, but you know what’s interesting
and new and what isn’t.
I didn’t understand on first viewing how revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde
was. But one of the things that happened is that because it was so controversial
and there was so much written about it, it also became my way into