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Rising To The Occasion: Ben Wheatley's Cinematic Baker's Dozen
Ian Schultz , March 17th, 2016 07:32

Ahead of the release of his JG Ballard adaptation High-Rise, director Ben Wheatley talks Ian Schultz through his 13 all-time favourite films

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2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

It’s probably the first Kubrick film I saw. I saw it in black and white, on my TV at home, on my own. I was probably about 11 or 12, and it was a film that had a reputation of being impossible to understand, within the circles that I lived in anyway. When I watched it I thought it was pretty straight-forward what it was saying, but I had never seen anything like it.

In the same way that Scorsese mixes almost hand-held documentary with impressionistic scenes, 2001 is like a documentary into the future for most of the movie. What you’re looking at is so extreme but so interesting, that you don't need the story, you’re just experiencing him talking to his daughter on the phone, or talking about sandwiches as they go out to the moon base. It’s so transporting and so revolutionary that even now people are still picking the pieces out of that movie and really coming to terms with what it is.