Sweet and Low: Shawn Levy

The director of 'Big Fat Liar', chooses his best and worst scenes of all time

Best scene: Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981)

The last three minutes are as close to perfect film-making as anything I've seen. The sequence starts with Frank (played by Mel Gibson) running to tell the soldiers in the trenches they shouldn't advance. Then it cuts to Archy (Mark Lee) running to the enemy. The final shot of the movie is a freeze frame of Archy being shot down. I've seen the movie around 20 times and every time this scene devastates me. There's the friendship Archy and Frank have formed in the army through competing as sprinters, and then here is the ultimate sprint: Frank isn't fast enough to save his friend, who runs towards his death. Its inter-cutting of activity with death creates an unbelievable tension. There is a fast-paced Jean-Michel Jarre score as Frank runs to warn Archy, which then cuts to Adagio in G minor by Albinoni, a slow, orchestral theme, and finally all of the sound bleeds out and we hear nothing but Archy's breath. The sound design is both intimate and unrealistic. The scene is a perfect marriage of editing, camera movement and sound design. It made me want to direct movies because, though it might seem an odd choice for a director of family comedy, it's so visually rich and unabashedly emotional. It's humanist, and I admire that.

Worst scene: A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

This is a scene that I find profoundly discomforting, and one that I simultaneously immensely admire, too. Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell) is brutalising a woman in front of her husband and he's singing "Singin' in the Rain" during the rape. There's this feel-good musical staple alongside a non-feel-good visual sequence. It's a juxtaposition of sound and image that is so powerful (once again). It's 10 years since I last watched the movie, and I still remember my distaste for that sequence viscerally. But that's what Kubrick was trying to accomplish, and his refusal to let an audience be comfortable is his genius. It's a style of film-making that isn't to my taste and is unlike my own directorial style, and the way it fills me with fear and loathing is, of course, exactly the point of the scene.