The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Bonnie and Clyde
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reading about movies, which became such a huge part of loving movies. The
thing that made me more interested in movies and making movies was the
fact that there were some great people writing about them. The first movie
that was debated on that scale was Bonnie and Clyde.
It came out the same year as The Graduate and was followed two years
later by Easy Rider. The film historian and critic Glenn Man says those
were the three films that “exploded or questioned dominant myths.”
And if that rings true for you, what myths or cinematic structures was
Bonnie and Clyde challenging?
Condon: I don’t think I knew enough to know what they were. I think
he’s right about those three seminal movies. Take that sort of shocking way
that it opens, with Faye Dunaway clearly naked. And obviously that was
something I had never seen before. There was something very blatant about
the way it was shot. It seemed as if there was no way she couldn’t have been
naked and that’s the beginning of the movie. I think all great movies are
kind of contradictory in some way. And here’s a movie that, in the spirit of
the New Wave, was shot in Texas and had the sense of reality to it and that
whole kind of Depression Era photography, but the thing that made it so
powerful was that Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in that first scene are
just such incredibly glamorous figures.
So if that’s something that made it American, that made it so sensuous.
The sexual ambiguity of Clyde Barrow and the fact that here’s this beautiful
woman who’s coming on to him. And he doesn’t/can’t respond and yet she
bugs him anyway. Obviously, as a very young gay guy, there was something
about Bonnie and Clyde that I think I connected to at a very, very basic level.
You wonder if there’s a ménage à trois going on with the Michael Pollard
character. And there’s one point in which Bonnie is so upset because Estelle
Parsons and Gene Hackman are all over each other and the four of them are
playing a game of checkers. Warren Beatty is sort of draped over Michael
Pollard, and she’s out in the cold. There’s a whole sexual tension there that I
think was speaking to me in some way that I didn’t even understand.
A ménage à trois was in fact cut from the script. We talked about some
of the subtext hitting you, but when were you fully aware of it?