John Dahl on A Clockwork Orange: “There’s the quaint ’70s style of it all, but I think it’s a powerful movie about rehabilitating criminals. Can you? And if you could, would you?”

“It’s the ultimate dance between people and not knowing what you’re doing, and acting as if you know what you’re doing. It’s a very strange universe in which you are both the ruler and your own victim. You seem to be in charge of everybody and everything, and you have to have answers for everybody and everything. More often than not, you don’t have an answer, but you have to give an answer. It’s a kind of universe that you make up as you go along.”

“It’s really harsh. It’s strange, the way in pop culture film always seems so much slower than music. I guess music can turn around more quickly. The do-it-yourself aesthetic of music in 1977 took a long time to bleed through to film, that’s for sure.”

“When I did Hospital, I wanted the feeling that the audience was peeking around the corner. So I did a lot of it handheld. I kept saying to the operators on certain shots, “Messy good, messy good.” Which is very hard for the operator to hear. They’re trained to be good and they can’t be messy. Then you’d say, “But I want that.” Deep down the camera operators were afraid that other operators would look at it and say, “You’re messy.” So I’d have to create shots that they couldn’t do well, or I’d go handheld. And a lot of it is done that way.”