The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Bonnie and Clyde
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learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.”
How does Bonnie and Clyde achieve that?
Condon: First of all, I feel lucky that that was my moment of discovering
movies. It’s a great moment to be discovering these things. In Bonnie and
Clyde, there’s a sense that each step that each character takes, they realize
that they’ve just kind of signed their own death sentence. They’ve become
these outlaws; they’ve crossed the line. There’s that great scene toward the
end where Clyde says, “At this point we ain’t headin’ to nowhere, we just
runnin’ from.”
That’s so played into as well as those other movies you mentioned, literally
hundreds of others, but played into the feeling of being an adolescent
in the late 1960s, when there was just such a sense of an absolute rejection
of all your parents’ values. Where did these kinds of communal ideas come
from when you’re not exposed to them?
And it is interesting now if you look at the movies that kids get turned on
by, everything has a happy ending, and it has for twenty years.
Even though this is set in the Depression of the 1930s, it’s really about
the 1960s. And so what other things signal to you that it was about the
time you were growing up in?
Condon: I had a chance to look at it recently, and I do think the things that
make it about the ’60s are the least interesting things in it. There’s something
about being specific to a time and a place and a vision that paradoxically
becomes universal, but when you’re trying to connect to your own time and
trying to make an explicit connection I think those things then become trite.
For example, every favorite movie—especially a movie you see over and
over and over again—has its moments where if you watch it enough, you
give yourself over to it. For me, for example, it’s that scene with Gene Wilder
and Evans Evans where they’re kidnapped. It has a great punch line where
he turns out to be an undertaker and Bonnie gets him thrown out of the car.
But until then it seems to me like a classic ’60s movie. Hippies and renegades
making fun of preppies, of people who were straight, and the establishment.
It was like a thousand other scenes that you came to see in those movies. It’s
something Bonnie and Clyde does so brilliantly. So brilliantly conceived and
written that they would never let it be about just one thing, and it does have