The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

42 Bill Condon
Condon: Oh, I think later on, like favorite movies you come back to. They
change for you over time, and I do think probably when I was in college
and saw it again and gave in, then you start to see other things that are
there that in real life that was part of the appeal. It didn’t happen in the first
run, certainly.
Everything good has some sort of bad. The fact that candor and openness
came next. We now live in a society that deals openly with homosexuality,
but in movies we have lost all of the coded imagery. And I don’t think I’d
ever make that trade back. But you do look at a movie like Bonnie and Clyde
now and you see him redoing her hair—he doesn’t like the way her curl is
and he redoes it. It’s a little bit of Hitchcock—she’s the Hitchcock blonde in
a way—but also it’s a little bit of simply being a hairdresser.
Sometimes that can be more powerful than making it explicit because,
especially when it comes to gay things, especially at a young age, you are
alone in the world. You are there with your parents, you don’t understand
how it happened, they don’t know anything about it, and you don’t think
there are any other people like you, necessarily. So it’s all about sort of
pretending in a way and reading situations and reading clues and getting
instinctual feelings. I wonder if the same movie twenty years later would
have had the same powerful effect on me. That’s the great thing about
movies—they are of their time.
Just a little bit of background: Both Jean-Luc Godard and François
Truffaut passed on the script. After it was made, it was panned by Time
and Newsweek and the New York Times and then pulled from distribution.
There’s even a great story about how the Warner Bros. distributor
said, “It’s a piece of shit.” But it was only a cry from the auteurist camp
that saved it. And many people point to Pauline Kael’s essay praising
the film as the turning point of her career. Did you encounter that essay
at the time?
Condon: I believe I did, and if it wasn’t then it was shortly after.
In the essay, she writes: “Our experience as we watch it has some connection
with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how
we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we