Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the release of Clark Duke’s new feature, Stranglehold, starring Ashley Benson, Jake Lacy, Justin Long, Chandler Duke, Ron Perlman, Elle King and David Arquette, the actor turned writer-director shared some of the things that bring him joy in life. — N.D.
Christmas Music
My first thing is Christmas music, which ties in nicely with my new movie, Stranglehold, because we have a great original Christmas music soundtrack by Theresa Wayman of the band Warpaint. Elle King, who's in the movie, also sings on “Jingle Bell Rock.” Having that music in there was really exciting for me, because I wanted to make a Shane Black-style Christmas movie. Part of the genesis for me of making the film came from a solo visit to Graceland that I took around the holidays a couple years ago. It was at Christmas time, and I found it deeply moving, so I fell in love with Elvis's first Christmas album. That was, oddly, a big influence on Stranglehold.
The music for A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi is a personal favorite, and that’s pretty hard to beat as Christmas music. (We have some Vince Guaraldi influence in Stranglehold, too, like “O Tannenbaum” and a little bit of piano stuff here and there.) I also love the Flaming Lips’ Christmas music. They've made two or three Christmas albums now, and I love them in general. They did the music for my first film, Arkansas, and they were maybe my favorite band in high school.
I’m a big Christmas person in general, and I really like the decorating. I've already got my tree up. Last year, I started decorating it as a Halloween tree and I've done it again this year. I kind of feel like I started the trend of the Halloween tree, though I know I'm not going to get credit for it. I swear, last year I made a Halloween tree, with pumpkins instead of gifts under the tree, and I posted a picture of it on Instagram. And then this year I went to Michael's, the craft store, and they basically had replicated my Halloween tree as a store display! So, I don't know, I feel like I kickstarted the Halloween tree phenomenon.
Home Surround Sound Systems
A home surround sound system is a thing that really adds a lot of value to people's movie-watching experience, but is often something people haven't thought of. I feel like everybody is focused on getting the biggest TV possible, but to me, the aspect of seeing a movie in the theater that you're really missing at home is the good audio. So I've got a surround sound set up in my living room and also in my bedroom at home, and I've got pretty nice monitors in my office too, because I'm less concerned about the big screen and more about the pristine audio fidelity.
There are wireless home surround sound systems now, and it's very easy to set all this up, compared to what it used to be when you had to run a bunch of wires all over the house or in the attic or the floor. That era is over. I’ve had surround sound at home for about 20 years – I'm a big believer in 5.1 audio in the home.
As a film lover and a filmmaker, good audio is hugely important to me. In both the movies I've directed, Arkansas andnow Stranglehold,I have scenes and instances of really intensive subjective audio, and the soundtracks have been key to both movies for the vibe of the whole thing, and this new one, in particular. In Stranglehold, there's an entire sequence that's built around the same song being played on a loop and turned up to a painful volume, so loud we have to have subtitles and distorts as everybody's talking. So, from a filmmaking perspective, I love the audio side of things, and I think it gets overlooked a lot.
Maybe my favorite movie in terms of its audio is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, because that's such an incredible audio-focused movie, or Blow Out, the Brian De Palma movie, which is another good pure sound design-type film. I also love all the Sergio Leone movies – Once Upon a Time in the West is one of my favorites, just because of the score, and I feel like the dub is almost part of the experience. I recently watched all the Alejandro Jodorowsky movies for the first time – I'd never even seen Holy Mountain – and the sound design of those films is pretty wild. Visually, they are also pretty unbelievable and that led me to getting really into his graphic novels, so I bought all of those and started reading them.
’80s and ’90s Vertigo Comics
Jodorowsky’s graphic novels are a good segue into my third thing, which is ’80s and ’90s Vertigo comics. There's something about Thatcher's Britain that produced all my favorite writers (and also a bunch of my favorite music), though I don't know why. But there's the whole British invasion, that wave of comics like Hellblazer, The Sandman and Animal Man and writers like Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Peter Milligan and Mark Millar, my buddy who made Kick-Ass and a zillion other awesome comics.
To me, specifically, I think The Invisibles by Grant Morrison is, alongside The Sopranos, maybe the most stolen-from, influential, underrated work of my lifetime. And I feel like it's aged exceptionally well, too, because all of its wild conspiracy theory stuff feels more relevant than ever, and less like science-fiction than ever. So anybody who hasn't read The Invisibles, do so immediately.
The Thatcher years were a very dark time in the U.K., and I think usually during or just after any kind of tumultuous historical period is when you get the best art. I wasn’t there at that time, but obviously there was something that sparked the creativity of all these bands and all these writers that I love. In my lifetime, comics have been my biggest passions since I was a child, and all my favorite comic books come from the U.K. and specifically from that period.
Featured image of Clark Duke is by Steven Meiers Dominguez, courtesy Clark Duke.
