The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

A Clockwork Orange
69
The idea of the juxtaposition with music in a way: taking extremely modern
situations and putting classical music to it. Particularly, with homages, one
of the things that I finally realized as I was finishing up film school at the
American Film Institute is that there really was only one Stanley Kubrick:
there really wasn’t a way to imitate his movies.
When I realized that you could actually go to film school, Stanley Kubrick’s
films had a huge impact on me. The symmetry that he uses in his compositions,
the sort of stylized, over-the-top acting in A Clockwork Orange.
I saw how you can combine art and music and make a movie. I really
came at it from that approach. As I became more of a student of filmmaking
and storytelling, I realized that’s kind of a bad thing.
I started out doing music videos, and as a director, you don’t want to stop
everything and show people a picture. You need to move the story along.
Kubrick does that. You’ll see these really wide-angle 18mm lenses where he
establishes the scene. Then he goes into more traditional over-the-shoulder
coverage and you get sucked into the story. Very few people can actually do
that and pull it off in a way that’s engaging to an audience. Even watching
the movie now, I think it’s a fantastic movie, but parts of it are almost—I
wouldn’t say amateur—but it really goes back to the ’60s and ’70s. Filmmaking
is so much more sophisticated now.
Is that to say Kubrick’s film was unsophisticated?
Dahl: I think unsophisticated is a bad word choice. I think he was less exploratory
and more focused—if there is a word for that. If the movie were being
made now there would have been much greater pressure to move the story
along. Would you really sit there and watch the English officer go through
the signing of three forms? Or walking through the record store and there’s
a copy of 2001, the album of music from his own movie in there. There are
great details that a director at that time, like Stanley Kubrick, could put into
his movie. Parts of it feel like the fun of a student film, because he’s discovering
things, in a way.
In your own work as a filmmaker, how difficult is it to please the author
or to please the screenwriter? What are the dangers of too much fidelity
to material and, again, making an enemy of the author’s voice?