The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

68 John Dahl
way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life,
nor cause life.” Of course life is, in his view in the film, violent and
morally complex.
Dahl: Right. For example, I saw this movie at a very young age and it had
a huge impact on me. I liked the clothing. I liked the fashion. I liked the
artwork. I liked the music. Forever, I was trying to figure out how to make
a movie like Stanley Kubrick, but I also clearly knew that violence is wrong.
I also recognized the fact that, in young men, there is a glee and joy in violence.
Violence is part of life. You can’t ignore it. You can’t walk away from
it. I think the one thing about this film is that it revels in that youthful abandon.
I can only imagine people’s reactions. Alex is sitting there in the prison
reading the Bible, and then they cut to him whipping Christ as he’s carrying
the cross. That’s just so nasty. But what Kubrick’s trying to do is show the
warped mind of someone who is a sociopath.
How did this change your life?
Dahl: Again, I was growing up in Montana. I didn’t really know anybody
who made movies. Making movies wasn’t even something that even was
remotely possible. When I was in high school I did some animation because
I was in an art class and some friends of mine had a 16mm camera. We shot
a couple of home movies, but the idea of actually moving to Hollywood and
becoming a filmmaker never really entered my mind. This film captured my
imagination so much. It was the first film that I saw that made me realize
that somebody has to make this stuff. Somebody has to build those sets.
Somebody has to paint those paintings. All of a sudden it became accessible.
The movie was so compelling and interesting to me on so many levels. The
one thing that struck me was that somebody made a movie, and that it was
something that maybe, possibly, I could do.
You had talked about this film’s profound influence in your own canon
and that it kept creeping up in your own movies. Can you articulate
that for me? What have its direct influences been? Have there been
any homages?
Dahl: It had a profound impact on films I did as a student. I made movies
with three guys walking around in uniforms beating the crap out of people.