What are the modern great movies, and why do they arouse so much passion? My quest for answers has led me to a caravan near Epsom, Surrey, and Stephen Woolley, one of the doyens of British cinema. The producer of Interview with the Vampire, The Crying Game and Scandal can lay claim to several classics. Kirsten Dunst, the star of his latest film (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People), has her own ideas about what makes a modern great. But will the age gap – she is 25, half his age – have any bearing on her choices?
My quest to unlock the secrets of the modern great precedes a six-week season of classic films on Sky Movies (from July 22). What instantly becomes clear is that one person’s modern classic is another’s idea of hell. I was stunned when Woolley admitted that he didn’t have the time of day for the underground epic Easy Rider (1969). For me, this is where the modern era of film-making, certainly in Hollywood, began. Dennis Hopper’s road movie threw the whole idea of conventional narrative – some may argue the entire point – out of the window. For Woolley it was like watching paint dry. His idea of modern great movies begins with the French auteurs of the Nouvelle Vague. This, he argues, is where real independent cinema comes from.
But the producer has a truly eclectic idea of what a modern great might be. He speaks eloquently of his fondness for Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982). And he gives a hair-raising account of watching one of the few performances of A Clockwork Orange (1971) in a public theatre before Stanley Kubrick pulled the film, supposedly after death threats against him.
Dunst’s modern cinematic hero is Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands (1990). “How can you not love Johnny Depp?” she argues, as if the whole matter of the modern matinee idol was now done and dusted. But interestingly most of the modern greats she nominates were made before she was born: in particular Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1973). The latter film made her weep from start to finish like a baby, she says.
“Our idea of great modern cinema is intensely personal,” Woolley empathises. “It often boils down to specific circumstances: where and when you see the film, how receptive you are at that moment, and what is going on in your life.”
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What I find surprising is the ease with which Woolley and Dunst scrap the received critical wisdom that a film can only be hailed a classic when viewed through the prism of time and a set of technical achievements. Cineastes are weaned on the idea that directors such as Godard and Scorsese are gods in the pantheon of auteurs – indeed, that they ushered in the era of modern cinema as we understand it today. But there is a far more fluid instinct for what constitutes a modern great than one might suspect, and it is not defined by any fixed idea of the high and mighty.
Steven Soderbergh was 12 years old in the summer of 1975 (and thus underage) when Steven Spielberg’s Jawschomped his conception of cinema to bits. It was part of a wave of 1970s shock movies – including Straw Dogs, Deliverance (the director Neil LaBute’s seminal memory), The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre– that terrified a generation. For Soderbergh it was the first time he became conscious of the process of making a movie.
For Stephen Daldry, Samantha Morton and Nick Broomfield, the modern great that branded itself on the imagination was Ken Loach’s bittersweet comedy, Kes(1969). Clearly, watching a film at an impressionable age has as much if not more bearing on what constitutes a classic than anything the critics might say. John Cusack was 14 when he saw Apocalypse Now (1979). “When it comes down to it, all criticism is bull****,” he says. “A piece of art just makes you feel . . .”
When Michael Mann, the director of Heatand The Insider, first saw Dr Strangelove (1964) in a creaky theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, he simply didn’t want it to end. Matthew Vaughn, the director of Layer Cake, was so besotted with Star Wars (1977) that he didn’t know whether he wanted to grow up to be George Lucas or a Jedi knight.
Curiously, the greatest resistance to the idea of the instant modern classic comes from the public. In a live poll that Tessa Dunlop and I conducted on BBC radio for the “all-time best animated feature film”, we were amazed that masterpieces such as Toy Story, Shrek and Monsters Inc barely figured. They were trounced by nostalgic votes for Bambi (1942), Dumbo (1941), Fantasia (1940) and The Jungle Book (1967). The poll was dominated by the palpable feeling that “they don’t make ’em like they used to”.
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My list of eight modern greats might not chime with any authorised list of the greatest modern films ever made. But I challenge you to pitch better. Each of these films changed the manner in which contemporary screen stories are told and painted. You can make an eloquent case for any number of films that set out to change the world, from Chinatown to Groundhog Day. But every single one of the films here has a crucial ingredient that distinguishes it as a true modern great. Enjoy.
— Modern Greats – Close Up, featuring Kirsten Dunst, is on Sky Movies Modern Greats on Sunday (1.30pm) and Sky Movies Premiere on July 20 (7.30pm). James Christopher will introduce each film before it is screened
The Conversation
A requisite of a modern great is the confidence to let the audience impose their own fears and fantasies on a film. In short, to let them read between the lines. This masterpiece from 1974 of Cold War paranoia has never been bettered. The plot, about a surveillance expert sucked into a fiendish government conspiracy, does little to lighten the heart. But the power of the film is how so much emotion and pressure can be conveyed with so very little. Gene Hackman has never been better as the tortured agent at the top of his (mind) game. July 29, 10pm
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The Terminator
The modern great reinvents familiar genres to reinvigorate its audience. No contemporary film illustrates this better than James Cameron’s Terminator films. There is something awesome about the robot in the 1984 original, sent from the future to destroy a pair of humans who hold the destiny of the human race in their hands. With an inexperienced director behind the camera and Arnold Schwarzenegger in front of it, the film should never have worked. But it became the template for every major sci-fi action spectacular. Aug 26, 10pm
Saturday Night Fever
A contemporary classic needs a definite sense of time and place. In this respect John Badham’s 1977 “musical” is the Zeitgeist-defining movie of them all. If you couldn’t relate to the handsome young kid looking for his first break as a dancer, you were out of the loop. The career of John Travolta as a snake-hipped disco god began the moment his loafers hit the chequerboard dance floor. But the film delved far deeper into the blue-collar angst of Italian immigrants than the line-dancing, mirrorballs and Bee Gees songs might suggest. July 22, 10pm
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
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The infectious joy of John Hughes’s 1986 film ushered in a new genre of slacker comedy. Matthew Broderick with Mia Sara and Alan Ruck, is Ferris, the charismatic teenage hero who drags his best friend on a day-long road trip to introduce him to a few illicit pleasures before adult responsibilities lay claim to his soul. There are few more perfect illustrations of the teenage itch. In a previous decade, the happy-go-lucky Ferris would be a insufferable geek. Here he is the most enduring high-school clown in 1980s cinema. Aug 12, 10pm
Sin City
An instant classic whose impact is so novel and immediate it is impossible to put in a box. Adapted from Frank Miller’s comic books, Robert Rodriguez’s dazzling film, released in 2005, intertwines the lives of pulp fiction characters in a seedy crime-world. Presented in glorious monochrome, with the odd lurid splash of colour when blood is spilt, the film is littered with startling images that have already entered the grammar of popular cinema. What’s so startling is how it blurs the line between graphic art and film, forcing us to think about the film-making process itself. Aug 19, 10pm
The Fly
In Hollywood, you tinker with science at your peril, and in the modern era there is no more chilling experiment than David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly (1986). The “transporter” seems the next logical leap in communication until its inventor, Jeff Goldblum, accidentally interacts with a fly during a test run. The rest is history. Cronenberg can be relied upon to put a serrated edge on dark stories, but this remake of Kurt Neumann’s black and white classic from 1958 is relatively restrained. As a result he transformed freaky and implausible thrills into mainstream chills. Aug 5, 10pm
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Easy Rider
The film that broke the mould and changed the look of cinema. In Dennis Hopper’s film, released in 1969, a pair of drug-dealers roar across America on motorcycles. They have scant regard for convention, whether it be Hollywood or the lynch-minded squares they meet in provincial towns. The film is fuelled by the charismatic cast, which included Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. There were many pretenders to cinema’s counter-cultural crown, but nothing epitomised the 1960s quite so vividly as this movie. Aug 25, 10pm
The Godfather
Once in a blue moon the cinematic stars align and something magical happens. Francis Ford Coppola’s elegiac portrait of a Mafia family at war is one of the most beautifully painted pictures of the modern era. The film, from 1972, hinges on the transfer of power between a monstrous patriarch and his reluctant youngest son (Al Pacino). There’s a creamy luxury about the film wherever you turn, be it the acting, the costumes, cinematography or music. You can feel history being made almost frame by frame. This is cinema at its most sublime. Aug 27, 10pm