"It was... magnificent." "One of his pictures are equivalent to ten of somebody else's." ""Oh, Nicole," and shake his head." "And nobody ever really knew him." "He was known as a kind of future threat." "One of the all-time great motion picture makers." "A future threat to peace and quiet." "Legendary meanness." "At times he drove me crazy." "He was a very loveable individual." "I love him one minute, and the next I could kill him." "Maybe the smartest man I ever met." "He got fascinated with Nescafé commercials..." "Did you see the film Groundhog Day?" "...because they told stories so fast." "That's what it was like." "This man was born to push the envelope..." "There is still a part of Stanley that is a great mystery." "...and he always pushed it." "You expect someone like that to be different from us." "We were too scared of him over here." "Everybody pretty much acknowledges he's the Man and I still feel that underrates him." "This film is about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick:" "An outstanding filmmaker, one of the great artists of our time." "Stanley Kubrick was an enigma to many people." "In his films he was extrovert challenging, and ready to break conventions." "But Kubrick himself was intensely private:" "Shunning publicity and fiercely guarding his anonymity happiest at work and at home with his family and a large circle of friends." "He was a chess player in every sense." "Both cautious and aggressive he took great risks but evaluated each move with the greatest of care." "Stanley was born in New York and remained a New Yorker all his life even though he and his family lived in England for nearly 40 years." "He died at his home on the seventh of March, 1999." "This film will make use of unique material which has never been seen." "It is a document about a man who remained silent whether he was being applauded or damned." "Stanley Kubrick was born in New York on the 26th of July, 1928." "His father, Jack, was a doctor who'd married Gertrude Perveler the previous year." "His sister, Barbara, was born six years later, in 1934." "Today, a lot of people that have kids that are that far apart they encourage the older one to nurture the younger one as a baby so they get to love them." "But I gather Stanley was very jealous you know, that I was there." "He was very good, though." "He was very good to me." "Nobody ever accuses him of being playful." "Well, he was playful like on The Addams Family kind of playful." "When he was little, I think they considered him kind of a sissy because he just wasn't like your typical boy." "He read a lot." "He always had a book." "Well, my mother read all the time." "She always was behind him, always, and she really believed it." "She says, "There's nothing you can't do."" "She always was supportive of him." "She was really a great mother, I think." " Were they strict, Gert and Jack?" " No." "Never." "He always did what he wanted." "In 1941, when Stanley was 12 years old he went to Taft High School in the Bronx." "At the beginning, I think, of the second week, Stanley turned to me as the class opened and said could I let him copy the day's homework?" "I said, "Sure, why not?"" "The next day he asked the same thing." "And the next day after that, and before I knew it he was doing it every day." "So after about a week or ten days I finally got up enough aggressiveness to say:" ""Stanley, why aren't you doing your homework?" He said simply and in what I learned was his characteristic quiet way:" ""Well, I'm not interested."" "It wasn't as if he were stupid." "He was simply not interested and acted upon that." "Stanley was really quite involved, quite passionate about photography." "Stanley, you must understand, was, by the general lights of the time the son of a wealthy person, as they had their own home." "They could have a darkroom." "His father was interested in photography and I think he encouraged Stanley to use it and become a photographer." "That darkroom background, actually was one of the bedrock things that enabled him to develop a very high level of sophistication about photography and then finally cinematography." "Stanley was fascinated by photography." "He was the photographer on the school newspaper and looked for pictures that would capture the imagination." "We interrupt for a special news bulletin." "A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead." "Roosevelt was a god to us." "That's what my mother said." "She said:" ""I'm not sure there's a God," when he died." "And then when he took that picture, whoa." "It made everybody that saw it cry." "They'd just start to cry." "He looked like just the world had ended and Stanley just got that." "It was this photograph of a news vendor mourning the death of Roosevelt that transformed the amateur into a professional." "Stanley was just 16 when he sold this picture to Look one of America's great illustrated magazines." "When he graduated high school, he joined Look as a photographer taking thousands of pictures experimenting and gaining experience for the next stage of his career." "Kubrick shot several features on boxing for Look one on the rising young fighter Walter Cartier." "Passionate about the sport he realized he'd found the subject for his first film." "Day of the Fight was Stanley's first effort at filmmaking." "I was his assistant on that and I'm very proud of the fact that I operated the second camera during the final fight sequence, which is a real fight." "And we were alternating with each other:" "I was shooting when he was loading." "I got the knockdown because Stanley was loading." "He's done it." "He's KO'd Bobby Jane." "This is a fighter, Walter Cartier." "He's just moved up one more place in a line that may end with the championship." "Following Day of the Fight, Kubrick quit his job at Look and devoted himself to making films." "He moved to Greenwich Village and supported himself by making short documentaries, hustling chess in Washington Square and playing tournaments for money that wouldn't be enough to fund an entire film." "In 1953, Kubrick's father cashed in his life insurance to help his son make Fear and Desire a film about a fictitious war." "It was Kubrick's first feature." " She'll see us." " Shut up." "He was absolutely and totally involved in the making of this movie." "He knew nothing about acting." "I probably didn't know much more." "He was not a Bohemian." "He was not an avant-garde, left-bank figure." "He was a kid from the Bronx who was smart." "I don't think he had much education." "He was a very good chess player." "The intensity impressed me." "I thought he had a vision of someplace he was going." "Fear and Desire was a youthful apprentice exercise." "Kubrick would later withdraw the film from circulation." "It got him noticed and helped to get financial backing for his next feature." "Killer's Kiss revealed Kubrick's extraordinary ability to play with light." "Stanley was making his second film and I wanted very much to be the still photographer." "I also wanted to see somebody discovering and learning." "I knew I'd be seeing that." "This was Stanley at a point where he had no physical resources at all." "On Fridays, he dismissed the company for a couple of hours went to the unemployment line and collected his unemployment check because that's what he was living on." "It was $30 a week." "He just about made it." "He was very ambitious and he knew this was gonna help him because once, there was a scene in the morning, and the crew wasn't being paid much either." "Everyone was in a bad mood." "He said:" ""Well, why don't we just take the afternoon off?"" "I was amazed he was giving us the day off." "He always drove me home." "So on the ride home, I said:" ""Why are you always so nice to everyone?"" "He said, "Honey, nobody's going to get anything out of this movie but me."" "The release of Killer's Kiss brought Kubrick to James Harris' attention an up-and-coming producer who had access to finance." "They teamed up to form Harris-Kubrick Pictures." "The only thing is, we didn't have anything to do." "We had no subject to deal with." "That night I left the office and went to a bookstore and found a book about the robbery of a race track." "I don't suppose there's dinner." "Of course, darling." "There are all sorts of things." " There's steak, asparagus, potatoes..." " I don't smell nothing." "You're too far away from it." "Too far away from it?" "You don't think I had it all cooked, do you?" "It's all at the store." "I thought he was a kid." "Both he and Jim were so very young." "I'm guessing, but I think Stanley was only 26 at the time." "I don't think anything was difficult for Stanley." "He had this tremendous confidence and if he hadn't I don't think he could have worked with Lucien Ballard as he had." "The cameraman was Lucien Ballard." "Lucien had, I believe, won an Academy Award was regarded as one of the top 12 or so photographers in the business." "He was a particularly stylish fellow, married to Merle Oberon a classic example of the old-style cinematographer." "Stanley had done his own photography on his two previous films so he knew exactly what he wanted, and I think that Ballard resented this kid from New York." "The first shot of the picture, first day, first shot Stanley set up a shot." "It was quite complex." "It was a long dolly shot." "And he's lined it up specifically with a 25 mm lens." "He set it up and turned it over to Lucien and Lucien said, "Fine" and began the elaborate business of lighting and setting a dolly track." "Stanley went over to talk to Jimmy or do something and looked back over his shoulder and noticed that the dolly track was much further away from where he had set the camera." "He said to Lucien, "What are you doing, Lucien?" "I put the camera here, you're pulling it way back." "Why haven't you put it where I've asked?"" "He said, "I haven't changed anything." "I'm using a 50 mm lens to give you precisely the same coverage that you've asked for but with the 50." "It makes my job a lot easier and it'll go a lot faster."" "Stanley listened to this and said:" ""What about the change in perspective that occurs?"" "He said, "That doesn't matter."" "That particular piece of information is dead wrong." "The perspective changes." "It's a different shot." "Stanley was aware that Lucien was simply bulling passed him but also what particularly nettled him was the assumption that he wouldn't understand this or wouldn't care about it." "Stanley said:" ""Put the camera where I told you, with the lens that I asked for or get off the set and don't come back."" "He said it very quietly, very softly and there was a look between them and Lucien changed the setup and moved the camera where it had to be and there was never an argument again, about anything." "All right, all right, check it through." "I'm sure you'll find our service to your complete satisfaction." "I suppose a lot of what Stanley is, and what he did in more complicated ways with later films is implicit in this simple movie about a meticulously planned crime." "The sense the Sterling Hayden character has that he's on top of it he really knows what he's doing." "At the end of it the little yapping dog gets loose and the money blows all over the place." "It's a brilliant and existential movie." "If existentialism basically posits that we define ourselves by doing and that chance is the one thing we can never quite fully comprehend prior to its impinging on our desires, or plans, or whatever..." "It's a brilliant statement of that." "The Killing was not a commercial success but it did succeed in building Kubrick and Harris' reputation." "When I saw The Killing I said, "My God." "Stanley's gonna make it." "This is good."" "But it's Paths of Glory that turned it all around." "We walked in the middle, as we usually did as kids Paths of Glory." "And myself and my friends, who were war-film buffs we had never seen anything quite like it, or quite like the tone of it." "We'd seen other anti-war films." "But this one was so honest particularly the trial, and scenes between Macready and Kirk Douglas." "I ordered an attack." "Your troops refused to attack." "They did attack, but they could make no headway." "Because they didn't try." "I saw it myself." "Half of them never left the trenches." "A third of them were pinned down by the intense fire." "Don't quibble over fractions." "The fact remains that a good part of them never left their own trenches." "I'm going to have ten men from each company in your regiment tried under penalty of death for cowardice." " Penalty of death?" " For cowardice." "They've skimmed milk in their veins instead of blood." "The reddest milk I've ever seen, my trenches..." " That's enough!" " I won't mince words..." "If you continue in this manner, I shall have to put you under arrest." "It was so honest that it was shocking." "What made it even more shocking was the nature of the way it was shot." "The use of the tracking camera in the trenches." "There's something that's happening." "They're trying to be objective:" ""I'm just showing you this, man, make up your own mind." "I'm telling you right now, this is what went down." "It's bad, it's a lie, it's hypocrisy."" "Maybe the attack against the anthill was impossible." "Perhaps it was an error of judgement on our part but if your men had been more daring, they might have taken it." "Why should we have to bear any more criticism than we have to?" "Aside from the fact that many of your men never left the trenches is the question of the troops morale." " The troops morale?" " Certainly." "These executions will be a perfect tonic for the division." "There are few things more encouraging than seeing someone else die." "Many artists, when they put a canvas up which is blank they start with very detailed, small, delicate pencil strokes on a canvas." "Stanley started conceptually on all of his movies from my point of view with large primary-colored brush strokes and he would just beat out these concepts that were that were pretty obvious." "In Paths of Glory every sequence hammers its points home but in every sequence the filmmaking is subtle and gentle almost." "What really hit us was the end." "There's a tendency when you want to get to that emotion or sentiment not sentimental, not sentimentality, but sentiment and just portray this aspect of humanity often you fall into sentimentality." "You really do." "It's very, very hard to pull off." "This one works like..." "You cannot see it without weeping." "He was sitting behind his desk for this interview I was to have because he was looking for an actress for that scene in Paths of Glory." "You know, I thought he looked extraordinary." "And he just sat there beaming at me, grinning at me throughout the interview and I must have grinned back." "He's been smiling at me for 43 years afterwards." "Following Paths of Glory, Christiane and her daughter, Katharina moved with Stanley to Los Angeles." "Stanley and Christiane were married in 1958 and Hollywood would be their home for the next few years where they were to have two more children, Anya and Vivian." "For its damning portrayal of the French officer class Paths of Glory would be banned in France for nearly 20 years." "The film brought its director firmly to the attention of Hollywood." "He was still only 28." "This is Stanley Kubrick." "I think that if the reigning powers had any respect for good pictures or the people who could make them that this respect was probably very well tempered by the somewhat cynical observation that poor and mediocre pictures might just as well prove successful as their pictures of higher value." "Television has changed this completely." "And I think that despite the unhappy financial upheaval it's caused in the movie industry it's also provided a invigorating and stimulating challenge which has made it necessary for films to be made with more sincerity and more daring." "If Hollywood lacks the color and excitement of its early days with Rolls-Royces and leopard-skin seat covers on the other hand it provides the most stimulating atmosphere of opportunity and possibilities for young people." "Slaves you have arrived at the gladiatorial school of Lentulus Batiatus." "Here you will be trained by experts to fight in pairs to the death." "You won't be required to fight to the death here." "That will only be after you're sold and then for people of quality." "Those who appreciate a fine kill." "A gladiator's like a stallion." "He must be pampered." "You'll be oiled, bathed, shaved, massaged taught to use your heads." "A good body with a dull brain is as cheap as life itself." "I congratulate you, and may fortune smile on most of you." "Then Kirk Douglas came to us and was having trouble with Spartacus." "He had shot for three days and wanted to replace the director who was on the film and asked if Stanley could be acquired, sort of on a loan-out basis." "We thought it'd be good for his career and for our company." "I thought he did an incredible job of taking that film which the script didn't even have battle sequences in it and sort of did some recasting of some of the parts took some of the film to Spain and did the big battle scenes and turned it into a marvelous epic film." "I was rather dreading the arrival of Stanley." "I didn't know him but I had seen Paths of Glory which I find one of the best films I've ever seen." "In spite of your vices you are the most generous Roman of our time." "Vices?" "Ladies." "Ladies." "Since when are they a vice?" "I had a high opinion of him but also had a great affection for Tony Mann." "Tony Mann directed the early parts of the film the ones in Death Valley, which I think probably the studio wanted the reassurance of an older, more routine man." "Kirk always had the idea of wanting Stanley." "It was a difficult task because we all had different acting styles." "Olivier and Laughton hated each other." "It was like two dogs." "I'll take republican corruption along with republican freedom but I won't take the dictatorship of Crassus and no freedom at all!" "That's what he's out for, and that's why he'll be back." "I think he was 30 years old when he did it." "Yeah, working with Olivier and Charles Laughton." "He was fearless." "If he was terrified, he didn't show it, because he knew he mustn't." "I think he had an extraordinary ability to concentrate on what is important he did not allow himself to be sidetracked." "And even if it was emotional turmoil and great worry he wouldn't..." "Perhaps it's a chess-playing thing..." "He wouldn't allow it to influence him." "And I think that very soon the actors noticed:" ""Oh, yeah, you know, we're quite safe."" "Traveled a long ways together." "Fought many battles." "Won great victories." "Now, instead of taking ship for our homes across the sea we must fight again." "Maybe there's no peace in this world for us or for anyone else." "I don't know." "But I do know that as long as we live we must stay true to ourselves." "Its great virtue was it was the only film of that kind that didn't have Jesus in it." "There was no trace of Christianity in Spartacus really." "There was faith, but not Christianity." "If Kirk wants to be rewarded for his courage, which I'd be the first to make a film like that without Jesus but with Kubrick is already a tremendous achievement." "I think they were both temperamental." "Neither of them would give an inch so there was tension." "But he was uncomfortable during the making of that film." "But not necessarily because of Kirk alone." "It's because he had no rights over the script." "All those things he'd got used to and fought for having he didn't have, he had no say." "Stanley was unhappy because he was dealing with the star who was the producer and in charge of the production." "There were certain instances where he felt that things should be done differently but because Kirk was in charge they were done Kirk's way." "I'm not saying that Kirk was wrong or right but nevertheless, Stanley said:" ""From now on, I want to do pictures where I really have final cut."" "The first overseas premier of UI's screen epic Spartacus is the most brilliant event on London's show business calendar." "Director Stanley Kubrick..." "Spartacus was a critical and commercial success winning four Oscars." "Despite Kubrick's youth he was now a recognized Hollywood director." "But the process had taught him he had to have full control over his films." "I had a feeling that during Spartacus he was biding his time getting on the record as the director of a big and successful film which would give him greater freedom in the future." "And he did turn his career into that of an artist whereas it could quite easily, had he surrendered at any juncture have been that of a very successful journeyman." "He felt now he had this label:" ""I'm a film director, officially." "Now I can make a story that I have a crush on."" "The interpretation of the image, where to place the camera the nature of the subject matter which at that time, everything was opening up in the early '60s and it was scandalous." "Put your head back." "Put your head back." "Open your mouth." "You can have one little bite." "I think what a lot of people forget is just what a hot book Lolita was." "Originally, Nabokov couldn't get a publisher in the States or the UK so it was published as a dirty book in Paris." "It was in 1955 that Graham Greene and The Sunday Times in London nominated it as his novel of the year." "It then took off and it very soon found a publisher." "He thought Lolita was a fantastic book because it clarified the feeling we all have that good and evil does not come in the expected package." "I guess I won't be seeing you again." "I shall be moving on." "I must prepare for my work at Beardsley College in the fall." "Then I guess this is goodbye." "Yes." "Don't forget me." "It shocks me when people say Stanley didn't make "people" movies." "He made movies about machines or..." "It's always confounded me." "Lolita is, you know, nothing like the book." "But he did draft the author to write the screenplay." "They were in collaboration with each other in another kind of version away from the novel that is much more about the human condition than the novel was." "Lolita works as the very first Stanley Kubrick film for me because I couldn't imagine anybody else making Lolita." "It's a comedy but it's got serious elements." "It's risqué." "It's in your face." "It's got big performances and it works completely." "You're a disgusting, despicable, loathsome, criminal fraud!" "Don't do that." " Can we discuss..." " Get out of my way." " Get out of my way!" " No." "I want to talk..." "Go on, get out of my way." "I'm leaving here today." "You can have all of it." "But you are never going to see that miserable brat again!" "At a time when American cinema in the early '60s was on the way down the studio system was finishing this was a man with authority making you look a certain way at things." ""When I stood Adam-naked..."" "Adam-naked!" "You should be ashamed of yourself, captain." ""Before a federal law and all its stinging stars."" "Tarnation!" "You old horn toad." "That's mighty pretty." "That's a pretty poem." ""Because you took advantage..."" "It's getting a bit repetitious, isn't it?" ""Because..." Here's another one:" ""Because you cheated me."" "Because you took her at an age when young lads..."" " That's enough!" "Say, what'd you take it away for?" "It was getting kind of smutty there." "Because of its scandalous theme the film had a crippling distribution problem." "The Catholic Church had their own censorship." "If they condemned your film, they would then send notices to their Churches, the Catholic Churches all over the country that it would be sinful to see this film." "Hum, you just touch me and I go as limp as a noodle." "It scares me." "Yes, I know the feeling." "That held up the film for six months because they did condemn it." "There was a picture of Lolita on the bedside stand so when Humbert and his wife Charlotte were in bed they felt that Humbert was using the picture for sexual stimulation." "I denied that." "I think that in all fairness they were right." "Anyway, we agreed to limit the number of looks at that picture." "To get a release, Kubrick had to re-cut Lolita." "As he later told Newsweek:" ""Had I known how severe the limitations were I wouldn't have made it."" "There is acclaim in the film world for Kubrick director of Lolita, arriving with Mrs. Kubrick." "Lolita's strong performance at the box office was boosted by the controversy." "Kubrick's next film would prove even more controversial." "Now then, Dimitri you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb." "The bomb, Dimitri." "The hydrogen bomb." "Everything wonderful about that movie is because of the way it was directed." "Otherwise, I thought there were flaws in the writing of the movie and flaws in some of the performances but the directing of the movie was so bravura and so superb that it just, it was just a knockout." "The vision and the use of music of the opening credits..." "We knew immediately anything could happen in this movie." "People remember the film because it deals with one of the darkest things of the postwar period, the idea that hanging over us was nuclear oblivion." "This is the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis." "It can't have possibly got closer than those few days where one mistake by either side could have started World War III." "This piece of satire just hit it right on the button and it was frightening." "Very, very frightening." "Well, now, what happened is one of our base commanders, he had a sort of..." "Well, he went a little funny in the head." "You know, just a little funny." "He went and did a silly thing." "Well, I'll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes to attack your country." "Well, let me finish, Dimitri." "Let me finish, Dimitri." "Well, how do you think I feel about it?" "He was able to say what we all knew about the madness of it." "He had bought the book and was trying to make it straight and realized that he couldn't, that it was so utterly insane that it couldn't be done that way." "And what he did was say that." "That this is insane, I mean who are we kidding?" "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here." "This is the war room!" "And it ever after made it very difficult to take seriously the Strategic Air Command." "I mean, they seemed like they were nuts from then on." "I think they probably were." "The most extraordinary part of Dr. Strangelove for me was that 30 years on as part of a BBC team, I investigated over a period of two years, many of the central tenets in the film." "What had happened in reality what had happened to Strategic Air Command in the '50s and '60s." "And the various elements of the film like the idea that the military would use nuclear weapons without consulting the president..." "I thought only I was in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons." "That's right, sir." "You are the only person authorized to do so and although I hate to judge before all the facts are in it looks like General Ripper exceeded his authority." "...were all, you know, seen as appalling when that film came out." "Now we know many of those elements were absolutely smack-on." "Curtis LeMay did a test run to see if you could provoke the Russians to war." "We talked to an officer who worked for LeMay's successor General Tommy Power, and they said this guy was basically psychotic." "This has not come out for 30 years, but there it is right in the core of Strangelove." "Tell me, Jack, when did you first become..." "Well, develop this theory?" "I first became aware of it, Mandrake during the physical act of love." "Yes, a profound sense of fatigue feeling of emptiness followed." "Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly:" "Loss of essence." "I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake." "Women..." "Women sense my power and they seek the life essence." "I don't avoid women, Mandrake but I do deny them my essence." "The other films that were being made at the time about these themes about the idea of nuclear war military takeover in the USA." "Films like Fail Safe and Seven Days in May they're very naturalistic and rather turgid films." "They have no longevity." "They don't endure." "They're not films that you would watch for any reason except out of sociological interest." "But people will watch Dr. Strangelove repeatedly because it's so funny." "That was the genius of Kubrick, but also his collaborators." "I mean, he had the massive fortune to be working with two of the funniest people ever involved in the film industry:" "Terry Southern and Peter Sellers." "What's happened, you see, the string in my leg's gone." " The what?" " The string." "I never told you, but, you see I've got a gammy leg." "Oh, dear, gone shot off." "Stanley was his best audience." "He spent many of the scenes just being an audience not a director." "He would simply put cameras everywhere he could so when Peter was off flying high Stanley says, "I don't want anything to be lost."" "He would just lie on his back, you know, roaring with laughter." "That egged Peter on to ever greater heights." "Also, when you go down into the mine, everyone will still be alive." "There will be no shocking memories and the prevailing emotion will be nostalgia for those left behind of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead." "One of the great things about his film is the scrupulous detail in which everything..." "You know, that's part of the power of it the detail in Dr. Strangelove, you know, you would think that he'd lived through that experience." "Survival kit contents check." "In them you will find one.45 caliber automatic two boxes of ammunition four days concentrated emergency rations one drug issue containing antibiotics morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible." "While we were shooting, somebody had invited some American service personnel to come to Shepperton." "They were terrified by the amount of accuracy we had in this aircraft and the next day I got a memo from Stanley saying:" ""You better make sure that you know where all your references came from because otherwise we might be investigated by the FBI."" "I discovered very quickly that behind this boyish enthusiasm and apparent naiveté, there was this super brain and enormous power and utter dedication to moviemaking." "It was quite demoralizing at times when he changed his mind but every time he did, it was for the better." "But I learned a great deal on that film." "Sir, I have a plan." "Mien Fuhrer!" "I can walk!" "I was kind of shocked by it at first." "It was so irreverent, and it was the height of the Cold War." "I was at NYU at the time, but my friends I saw the film with some were at a Jesuit college called Fordham, others were street kids." "We went to see this movie." "They loved it." "And they were conservative." "The word on the street was, "It's great."" "I had a kind of a giddy exhilaration at the end." "When she was singing, "We'll meet again, don't know where"" "And he's riding the bomb, I thought:" ""Man, what kind of an imagination came up with this?"" "Dr. Strangelove caused uproar." "Younger audiences loved its irreverence and anarchic humor but many people saw it as dangerously subversive." "I remember reading a review in, I think, a Beverly Hills paper where the critic said that Stanley should be physically harmed for having made that film." "Now, that's a pretty bad review, I must say." "I can't remember any Stanley Kubrick movie that was released where there wasn't controversy." "2001 I remember very well." "I remember Pauline Kael's review of 2001." "They were not good reviews." "And then ten years go by, and they're all classics." "By that time I knew that Kubrick was the one." "Yes, all these extraordinary directors around the world were making films but there was something, after you saw Lolita and Dr. Strangelove..." "I knew that Kubrick..." "We had to wait for a Kubrick film." "We knew that when we went to see it that it was extremely special." "We expected a lot from him, quite honestly, and in 2001 we got it." "By 1963, Kubrick had established so high a reputation that he could pick his next project without bowing to Hollywood dictates." "As a director whose films were popular and critically acclaimed he had won an astonishing degree of creative independence." "Stanley Kubrick now began work on a film which would establish him as one of the great film directors." "With 2001:" "A Space Odyssey the boy from the Bronx would write a new chapter in cinema history." "In the early 1960s, space exploration began when both Russia and the U. S sent men outside the Earth's atmosphere." "As the space race came to dominate the popular imagination Kubrick captured the spirit of the times by collaborating on a film with the science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke." "Behind everyone alive today stand 30 ghosts for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." "Since the dawn of time, about a hundred billion human beings have walked on this planet." "Now, a hundred billion is about the number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy." "So this means that for everyone who has ever lived there could be a star." "And of course, stars are suns, with planets circling around them." "So isn't it an interesting thought that there's enough land in the sky for everyone to have a whole world?" "We don't know how many of those worlds are inhabited and by what kind of creatures." "But one day we should know, perhaps by radio perhaps by other means, perhaps by direct contact." "The impact of that on the human race will be profound especially if we encounter creatures far in advance of our own primitive species." "It's a wonderful thing to look forward to and perhaps a terrifying one." "It may happen in our lifetimes." "It may not happen for 1000 years." "But one day, we will know the truth about this incredible and wonderful universe around us and perhaps understand our own place in it." "The extraordinary audacity, power and, I think, guts to say, "Let's screech everything to a halt, take everybody back to prehistoric times where it wasn't that fast."" "Considering the way the world was moving so quickly, this just said:" ""I want you to see something." "I'll take you through something you never thought you'd experience."" "His way of making a film was to concentrate on seven or eight, as he called them, "non-submersible units."" "And what this meant was you had a very good chunk, and you had another and when you had six good chunks, you were almost home with a movie." "It would be easy to connect them, and you can see this principle operating in particular in 2001 where I believe that the bits don't quite fit on." "And this is why there's a mystery about it that still interests people." "I just remember seeing the picture for the first time and feeling that it wasn't a movie, it was the first time that the motion picture form had been changed." "It wasn't a documentary, and it wasn't a drama and it wasn't really science fiction." "It was more science eventuality." "Hal, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by your dependence on people to carry out actions?" "Not in the slightest bit." "I enjoy working with people." "I have a stimulating relationship with Dr. Poole and Dr. Bowman." "My mission responsibilities range over the entire operation of the ship so I am constantly occupied." "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do." "Unlike many a science fiction writer including, I must say, myself he regarded the future as unknowable." "This is the first movie, the first work of science fiction that actually I think, depicts the future as unknowable." "Eighteen months ago the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered." "It was buried 40 feet below the lunar surface near the crater Tycho." "Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter the four-million-year-old monolith has remained completely inert its origin and purpose still a total mystery." "I respect in awe..." "I'm in awe of the mystery of the universe." "Something which Einstein's often said:" ""Anyone who isn't awed by the universe, they haven't any soul."" "So from my earliest days the wonder of space and time has intrigued me and Stanley and I tried to put some of this feeling into the film." "I think it made people realize that we were a rather small part of an enormous universe." "It's hard to realize when we made that film we didn't know what Earth looked like from space from any distance." "These things had to be imagined." "The special effects were a quantum leap forward for the film industry." "These looked the real thing." "Stanley had very firm and very specific ideas about how these models were to be lit." "The painstaking attention to detail the coloration, the dirtying up of the models..." "This really hadn't been seen before." "One of the best examples for my contribution is what's known as the slitscan sequence, the stargate sequence." "There was a lot of evolution to that concept of how you would be transported from one dimension to another." "It was never solved in the screenplay." "I remembered, knowing of an experimental filmmaker who was exploring this whole idea of long-time exposures and while the shutter is open, he'd move various kinds of artwork in front of the camera to scan color blocks and objects onto the film in a rather unusual way." "I thought if you took what he did, which was flat and two-dimensional and made it three-dimensional in the Z axis you could create this streak exposure." "Like a time exposure." "Car headlights on the freeway." "If you leave the shutter open the car headlight becomes a streak of light." "It occurred to me that there might be some way to apply that to the stargate sequence." "I walked that minute down to Stanley's office." "I said, "I think this is the answer to the stargate."" "And he looked at it and said, "I think you could be right."" "He said, "Do whatever you need to do, you have carte blanche to do it."" "That's an example of my whole experience on 2001 was support from Stanley to explore, experiment take risks and produce something that was different." "If you can imagine a giant Ferris wheel, and if you were to cover it with a skin." "On the inside edge of that skin imagine the set being built and imagine an endless hallway with things along the side." "Well, that revolved." "There's a scene where I come down a ladder and the other astronaut, Gary Lockwood, is eating apparently upside down, because he's on the other side of the centrifuge." "It looks like I walk upside down to him." "How that actually was done was that Gary had a hidden harness." "He was upside down, so I came in right-side up and they just revolved Gary down to me, and I just walked in place." "There was this theme of constant rotating, rotating, rotating." "The space station and the spacecraft are rotating." "Everything's in orbit." "And that established a style of intercuttable shots that ultimately later leant itself in Stanley's mind to the Strauss waltz." "I think the history of the cinema divides into two essential eras:" "Before Stanley Kubrick and after Stanley Kubrick." "Especially in relation to the use of music in films." "Before Stanley Kubrick, music tended to be used in films as either decorative or as heightening emotions." "After Stanley Kubrick, because of his use of classical music in particular it became absolutely an essential part of the narrative intellectual drive of the film." "I actually knew that piece of Ligeti he used and I remember seeing 2001 and thinking:" ""This can't possibly be Ligeti in a Hollywood film."" "But it was, and of course, it makes the sequence utterly unforgettable." "It was for me, especially the visual fantasy with the speed, with the color and light changes when the spaceship goes down on the moon of Jupiter." "And then the speed is more and more and more and it was very clear that Dr. Einstein pretended that the light velocity is the highest, you cannot go beyond." "But in this film it was suggested as it would be beyond the speed of light and then we enter in another world." "I never know whether the images arose out of the music or vice versa." "The true thing to say is that they became in his imagination, clearly and so have become in ours, totally inseparable." "When 2001 opened, like previous films of Kubrick's it split both the critics and the audience." "The opening of 2001 was very frightening because we had all the executives sitting in the audience very old, many of them." "They didn't understand the film at all and left, whole rows of them." "And we were panic stricken." "Then there was an enormous catastrophic meeting in our hotel room and Stanley was so upset he lost his voice." "We were up all night." "The next morning we went to this house and Stanley was battling on in New York." "I fell, clutching my handbag, across my bed asleep, because I hadn't slept all night." "And woke up to the sounds of a DJ saying:" ""This is the most fantastic film and people are queuing around the block."" "He was talking about 2001." "I was desperately trying to ring Stanley to tell him some people like it, it was the blue-rinse brigade that walked out." "He told me that the first exhibitor screening of 2001 had, I believe he said, 241 walkouts." "You know, I'm sure he counted them too." "When I first saw 2001, I didn't like it and I was very disappointed." "Then three or four months later, I was with some woman in California and she was telling me what a wonderful film it was." "And I went to see it again and I liked it a lot more the second time I saw it." "Then a couple of years later I saw it again and I thought:" ""Gee, this is really a sensational movie."" "And it was one of the few times in my life that I realized that the artist was much ahead of me." "A lot of people didn't get it the first time around and I'm really fond of quoting the MGM executive who said:" ""Well, that's the end of Stanley Kubrick."" "The message has got over, even though we didn't intend one specifically." "Stanley wanted to create an experience." "People will get messages from it according to their own philosophies." "2001 received a National Catholic Award for its imaginative vision of mans' creative encounter with the universe." "Some turnaround for Kubrick, who had so upset the Catholic legion of decency with Lolita." "2001 also won an Academy Award for best visual effects." "As the film's director and designer Kubrick received his only ever Oscar." "It was that kind of process of personally taking control of not only the people the technology, the art and the craft of making movies." "He was it." "He embodied the whole thing." "And he invited actors, cinematographers and production designers to come into his family and collaborate which for some was difficult." "After working with him on 2001, I swore I'd never work for anybody again." "Stanley was a hell of a taskmaster." "He was difficult and demanding." "His level of quality control was just astronomically near perfection." "I found, as a young guy, this was hard." "His mind was so insatiable and so active that he could barely sleep, he could barely stop." "I saw that Stanley Kubrick worked and lived his work seven days a week almost 24 hours a day." "And I think he had a hard time keeping up with his own intellect." "Kubrick now turned to a mighty historical character whose triumphs, failures and personality fascinated him:" "Napoleon." "Napoleon is still in his grave, waiting to be brought back to life." "I wonder what Napoleon would think of Lou Wasserman and David Picker." "Whether he would've liked to have them passing judgement on his life." "Napoleon represented for him the worldly genius that, at the same time, failed." "Stanley was fascinated by the fact that somebody so intelligent and so talented, could make such mistakes." "He liked comparing war and chess and making films, and the idea of seeing everything as a battle." "All directors like battle analogies for movies and certainly nobody planned with the mixed results." "When somebody that meticulous plans something anything that goes wrong seems to wreak havoc." "If Stanley was afraid of anything, it was of making that kind of mistake where you get carried away without checking." "There was the chess player in him." "Maybe that's why he took so long between films." "The Napoleon project was well-prepared." "We were ready to go to Romania where we could have 5000 cavalry, including commanding officers." "We had paper uniforms and everything ready and then came this film Waterloo." "It was a very well-made film with Rod Steiger but it failed at the box office, and our backers got scared and pulled out." "By 1969, the Kubrick family was living close to the film studios in Elstree, Hertfordshire." "He's always liked living here." "There were moments where he was homesick for New York but he knew that was a New York that no longer existed." "When you brought up your children here and their friends live here, and you know, you get attached." "Do you know what kind of camera that is?" " It's a home movie..." " Arriflex." "I watch the video of me as a very fresh 10-year-old being very fresh to him." "But also, him being bossy and too impatient and putting his director's hat on in an inappropriate way." "Get him off, Anya." " Anya get him off, we're shooting." " I'm trying to." "Grab him and get him off." "As a child, I remember thinking:" ""You're not supposed to talk to me like this."" " Do you often find me in a temper?" " Yes!" "Oh, I don't believe that." "I can't believe that." "You just went into a temper a couple of minutes ago." "You can't do this stupid film because everyone giggles." "And because I can't play like that." "I think I'm one of the most even- tempered people you'll ever meet." "Kubrick had found privacy and tranquillity in England but this world was about to be torn apart by his next project:" "An adaptation of Anthony Burgess' controversial novel:" "A Clockwork Orange." "There are certain parts that you have in a career that nobody else can play, that you are born to play." "That is one of the parts." "There was me." "That is, Alex, and my three droogs." "That is, Pete, Georgie and Dim." "And we sat in the Korova Milk Bar, trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening." "The Korova Milk Bar sold milk plus." "Milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom which is what we were drinking." "This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence." "I remember saying to him once, "How do you direct?" "What's your style?" And he said:" ""I really don't know." "I never know what I want." "But I do know what I don't want."" "I don't think I've ever had that much fun on a job." "I've worked with other great directors, certainly Lindsay Anderson..." "But, actually, the actual fun of doing the work was, of course, in the character of Alex too." "He was a wicked son of a bitch but the great thing that I think Stanley and I had in common is a wicked sense of humor." "It was my rabbit to help the prison Charlie with the Sunday service." "He was a bolshy, great burly bastard." "But he was very fond of myself, me being very young and also now very interested in the Big Book." "I didn't so much like the latter part of the Book which is more like all preachy talking than fighting and the old in-out." "I like the parts where these old yahoodies tolchok each other and then drink their Hebrew vino and getting onto the bed with their wives' handmaidens." "That kept me going." "He explored these extreme subjects that you kind of sometimes wanted to recoil from like in Clockwork Orange." "But they were explored in a way that was dissecting them." "Truly dissecting them to try to find out what makes that kind of evil tick." "And I think that there was a search behind all of those films to say, in a way:" "In a world where we know man is capable of the most base shockingly destructive behavior is hope and virtue possible?" "Go on!" "Do me in, you bastard cowards!" "I don't want to live anyway." "Not in a stinking world like this." "And what's so stinking about it?" "What kind of a world is it at all?" "Men on the moon." "Men spinning around the Earth." "And there's not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more." "Oh, dear land" "I fought for thee" "You'd have to say Stanley's view of human nature was, you know, really very, very bleak." "It's fairly miraculous, in this day and age to have pursued the kind of career he pursued in making these uncompromising movies." "It had been a wonderful evening." "And what I needed now to give it the perfect ending was a bit of the old Ludwig van." "Kubrick is playing around with the music with what he'd done previously." "Having taken like a real classy classical music score for his previous film now he's saying Beethoven but we'll also have the "William Tell Overture" played fast." "Kubrick's being playful in the same way as when Alex visits the record store." "There in the record rack is a copy of 2001." "Which is a great joke, but also we're also talking about a director who has given up being influenced by others." "A film director whose primary influence has become himself." "For now it was lovely music that came to my aid." "There was a window open with a stereo on and I viddied right at once what to do." "I did two weeks of narration." "It was like the purest kind of filmmaking." "You know, just a Sennheiser microphone and a Nagra, that's all he had." "No operator." "It was Stanley pushing the button, that was it." "And it was highly you know, concentrated, so I'd say:" ""I've got to stretch my legs, Stanley." And he'd say, "Ping-pong."" "He was always trying to beat me, he never did, not at ping-pong." "Chess, another matter." "So we'd have fun, we'd play, and we'd come back we'd do another piece." "The voice-over works well." "So about six months later, my agent said:" ""Malcolm, you have two weeks of voice-over you haven't been paid for."" "I went, "I'm going out to see Stanley this afternoon." "I'll mention it to him."" "Leaving, I think I said, "By the way, my agent informs me that I haven't been paid for the two weeks' narration."" "He had a slide rule in his pocket and he took it out." "He went like this, and he went:" ""I'll pay you for a week." I went, "A week?"" "He goes, "The other week was ping-pong!"" "Oh, bliss!" "Bliss and heaven!" "It was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh." "It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal." "Or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship gravity all nonsense now." "As I slooshied I knew such lovely pictures." "Stanley and Malcolm McDowell got along like a house on fire." "Stanley was very happy with the choice of Malcolm and he delivered." "We became very, very close." "I, of course, thought that this was a great friendship." "I expected to be part of his life." "I didn't understand at the time, being a young actor and not having done very many films so being somewhat inexperienced that, you know, that the way of a film life is:" "Intense relationship, separate." "Intense relationship, separate." "So I was expecting the relationship to carry on in some form but he cut it like this." "He didn't really want to know." "It was over for him." "I think the other thing is, some of the things I said about him which were perhaps unfair maybe it was a cry out to say:" ""Stanley, pick up the phone and call me."" "And of course, he never did." "I have arranged a little surprise for you." "Surprise?" "One that I hope that you will like as a how shall we put it as a symbol of our new understanding." "An understanding between two friends." "A Clockwork Orange dealt in part with media exploitation but now real life imitated art." "The film was blamed for many brutal crimes committed by youths claiming to have been inspired by the film's violence." "The reaction had a devastating impact on Kubrick and his family." "The attack on Clockwork Orange was fierce in Britain." "It was unbelievable." "He was directly accused of murder and mayhem." "Then every crime in England was because of Clockwork Orange." "Stanley was accused of inciting violence and it became very, very ugly." "He got terrible letters, you know, almost death threats." "There were some death threats." "He asked Warner's, "Can you please help me?" "I can't live here if this keeps going on." "I'm afraid to send my children to school, my house is besieged." "I don't want to show the film anymore."" "A Clockwork Orange had been playing successfully for 61 weeks but press attacks and threats of violence against him and his family drove Kubrick to withdraw the film from British cinemas." "It was an astonishing display of director power." "What came over to us was that a filmmaker should have the kind of power that he had to be able to do it." "There's no other filmmaker who could stop a studio distributing their film." "Studios are about making money." "For him to be able to do that was always astonishing to us." "I remember me as a young filmmaker thinking:" ""That's extraordinary."" "But more than that is, actually, he had the will to do it." "It hurt him financially, but he didn't care." "It hurt Warner Bros. Even more financially, but they obliged." "It wasn't worth it to them." "Having peace with Stanley, and making more films with Stanley." "Having him under contract for the rest of his life was more important than if the film played in England." "For the release of the film, Kubrick went beyond the role of a director persuading Warner Bros. About how the film should be sold." "If you've taken all the trouble with preproduction, shooting with the postproduction and trying to get the film together and approach it in so many ways why do you not be a part of it just when the public's gonna see it?" "Clockwork Orange was the second largest-grossing film in the history of Warner's after My Fair Lady." "I'd meet with the foreign distribution guys and say, "Wait a minute." "What we're doing is following Stanley's instruction and getting a great result." "We're grossing huge numbers on a picture you said would be a catastrophe because it was so inaccessible." "Is it not possible that he knows something we don't know?" "Is it not possible that his way is a better way?"" "They go, "No, he doesn't know." "He's just a pain in the ass."" "Kubrick had a unique relationship with Warner Bros:" "Complete creative control and the support of a major Hollywood studio." "We all envied that more than anything over here." "The fact that one studio would support an artist in that way is extraordinary." "It was a question of working with a master and wanting to do the movies of Stanley Kubrick." "There weren't runaway costs, it was always overblown and overestimated because he shot films for long periods of time." "But he did them at low cost." "You'd walk on a Kubrick set, which was almost never allowed, I might add and marvel at the fact that there was hardly anyone there." "Compared to most movies, there'd be crowds of people with donuts and passing coffee and people coming and going." "I saw it as an absolute priority." "Something that we were gonna focus our attention on and that continued to nurture the relationship and to enhance the relationship." "He was obviously always a step ahead of me." "He called me once I was at Warner's I think he was getting ready to do Lyndon and he said, "Do you have any of those special BNC cameras that we used for rear process?"" "I said, "Why?" He said, "For sentimental reasons I'd love to buy one from you if I could get one."" "I called the camera department and I said, "Do you have any?"" "They said, "We've got a couple."" "I called Stanley back and said, "I got a couple."" "He said, "I'd love to get those cameras." "I admire the workmanship."" "I said, "Great," and sent him one or maybe two, I can't remember." "About six months later, Gottschalk, who ran Panavision for us and who was a certified camera and opticals genius, called and said:" ""Why are you sending those rear-projection cameras to Kubrick?"" "I said, "He asked for them, they sit down there we don't use rear projection anymore."" "He said, "They're priceless, the most fantastic works ever put in a camera." "They are brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed camera works." "You couldn't build a camera like it if your life depended on it." "I want to get every one I can, because I can't duplicate them."" "Stanley had anticipated it and acquired and built his own cameras!" "He looked for the old-fashioned Mitchell BNC cameras for a very specific reason." "These were the only cameras where he had a chance of fitting these big Zeiss lenses." "Stanley sent me this lens and said, could I mount it on his BNC camera?" "I said it's absolutely impossible because the BNC has two shutters a thick aperture plate, and all that between the film plane and the rear element of the lens." "And so I explained that to Stanley and said we'd have to damn near wreck your camera and make it purely dedicated." "He said, "Go ahead and do it."" "It originally was designed, developed and manufactured by Zeiss, for NASA." "NASA was planning to use it in satellite photography." "For that reason, it's an extremely fast lens." "It's an FO.7 which is two stops faster than lenses that are available even today." "Of course, Stanley's intention for these lenses was to shoot the famous candlelit scenes in Barry Lyndon." "That being the case, he shot with the lenses wide open, FO.7." "The consequence of that, he had practically no depth of field at all." "It was quite a chore to do it, but of course the images were absolutely gorgeous." "I think Stanley would have a concept of wanting to do something in a way that it had never been achieved before." "He wanted to put himself into that century and with these characters and these settings and give you a way of seeing them as they would've been seen at the time the book was written." "Yet he used the most extraordinarily modern and daring instruments." "The fact that he used these candles." "That's part of it but also the interiors, the way sunlight came into rooms." "It was to achieve the presence in a period in a way that I don't think anybody had ever done it before." "I knew it was a costume piece, but I hoped he'd take it somewhere else." "He took it back in time." "The use of the zoom lens is interesting because you'd never think to use a zoom lens in the past." "No, the zoom lens flattens it out like the 18th-century painting." "The movement, body language and the use of music and editing how transporting that moment is when Ryan O'Neal, who's wonderful and Marisa Berenson as he meets her, kissing her on the balcony with the music and movement." "Stanley did not want the film to look like a traditional movie where period clothes look like wardrobes." "He wanted the clothes to move and have life." "He wanted to do something reminiscent of certain painters of that period." "Stanley sent me to all kinds of auction houses who were dealing with period costumes, so we were mixing some period costumes." "Stanley wanted beautiful materials, as he quite rightly said:" ""That's why in those paintings they gave those wonderful lights."" "Everybody talks of Barry Lyndon as a beautiful 18th-century movie." "It's because of the way he shot it, the way he pushed us to do our work." "You know, as an artist you very often instinctively design and to intellectually justify your creativity is very difficult." "I think the same applies to actors." "Though he knew and respected, I'm sure, the actors he would permutate their performances almost to the breaking point." "I remember going on the set one day and there were a thousand candles burning." "Outside there was a huge storm and there were men outside, who, because of the storm had to hold the big lamps." "There was a huge gale in Dublin and the rain was icy cold." "I thought "I hope they don't have to do it too long."" "And then the candles are burning down very gradually." "Stanley's just sitting there with Hardy Krüger discussing a problem Hardy had and he's just saying:" ""Well, Hardy, I think we should..."" "Krüger, I think, was getting also in a state." "It was interesting, never getting flustered, never raising his voice." "He was great working with actors because it was one-to-one." "You had a relationship with the director." "If he was working with any detail on a role with an actor the others were there, but it was just you and him." "What is your call, Lord Bullingdon?" "Heads." "It is heads." "Lord Bullingdon will have the first fire." "Lord Bullingdon will you take your ground?" "And it was the fact that Stanley was so open and so engaging." "When I asked him a question it might be about the lighting or the camera, the lenses he would take the trouble to talk about it in a really well-detailed way so that I understood what was happening and that really stimulated me." "If he came onto the floor, he didn't know how to shoot a scene." "He wasn't sure how he was gonna do it as an actor, I found it stimulating because he was saying:" ""Do whatever it is you think you're gonna do, but do it for real." "That may change how I'm thinking about the scene."" "Sir Richard, this pistol must be faulty." "I must have another one." "I'm sorry, Lord Bullingdon, but you must first stand your ground and allow Mr. Lyndon his chance to fire." "I always felt Stanley was a filmmaker most appreciated by his fellow filmmakers." "Critics were always looking for something that wasn't in the movie and then they were disappointed." "That's a little bit Stanley's fault for example, Barry Lyndon." "I think everybody was expecting a kind of raucous Tom Jones movie." "You realize as you look at the movie that it's about this slightly dim, handsome boy trying to find the clues and the cues to what's the right behavior." ""What's the behavior that's going to advance me in this society?"" "So it's a movie really about a young man defining himself in a climate that's foreign to him." "That's not at all what people were lead to believe it was about." "Barry Lyndon was released just as Hollywood entered the age of the blockbuster action movie." "With a running time of three hours, the film came in for heavy criticism." "It was labeled as tedious and boring by critics in America and Britain but in Europe it was hailed as a film of breathtaking beauty." "I remember it won four Oscars:" "Cinematography, production design costume design and the music." "I think Stanley was disappointed because in the end it wasn't a commercial success." "He was very, very, very sad and disheartened that particularly smaller papers and smaller television stations did not at all appreciate the tremendous effort that went into these films and just simply dismissed it." "Whatever movie Stanley made, what I love about his work is they are completely conscious." "You may like them, you may not like them you may say, "What about this, that or the other thing?"" "But everybody pretty much acknowledges he's the man." "And I still feel that underrates him." "Kubrick's next film looked far more commercial with Stephen King's best-selling novel, The Shining he took the chance to make a film that would satisfy him artistically and meet box office demands." "I'm asking about The Shining, and he says:" ""In reality, this is an optimistic picture."" "I said, "On what basis, Stanley?" And he said..." "As the existential, pragmatic man that he was, he said:" ""Well, in some way this movie is about ghosts." "Anything that says there's anything after death is an optimistic story."" "The Shining has images that I wake up screaming about." "That little boy in the hall." "The tracking shot..." "The boy on the bike." "...of the boy." "The sense of movement it gave that picture inside this foreboding place." "You know something is building up in this place." "And the way..." "It's the blandness, let's say, of the people." "How quiet they are." "Is Tony the one that tells you things?" "How does he tell you things?" "It's like I go to sleep and he shows me things." "But when I wake up, I can't remember everything." "Has Tony ever told you anything about this place?" "About the Overlook Hotel?" "It's holding back this emotional, powerful punch that'll happen." "You know it'll come somehow, at some time and it just creates such suspense." "Is there something bad here?" "At first I was taken aback by the performance and then after the third or fourth viewing I understood the level of intensity of what Nicholson was doing." "I'm not sure that it's intended to be what a typical horror movie is, which is a realistic portrayal of supernatural spookiness." "I think that what's going on in that movie is largely going on in Jack Nicholson's head." "Hi, Lloyd." "A little slow tonight, isn't it?" "Yes, it is, Mr. Torrance." "I like the kind of film he makes." "I don't need to be naturalistic in a film to feel satisfied as an actor." "One thing he said to me that I'll always remember was:" ""In movies you don't try and photograph the reality you try and photograph the photograph of the reality."" "I knew it wouldn't be a performance about idiosyncratic behaviorism but that it would be..." "I always thought of it as balletic in The Shining." "Another lesson was, "Here Jack the script says, 'Jack is not writing.'" "The question is, what is he doing?"" "I said, "Whenever I'm inside a big empty place that you normally wouldn't be alone in I always think of doing things that I might do outside."" "And that's where throwing that tennis ball all during the picture..." "And it wound up being a big part of staging." "It rolls into things it's thrown the length of hallways, all those kinds of things." "And it's from those little things that he would develop preconceived idiosyncrasy." "He always knew what he was going to get." "He said often that every scene, really, has been done." "Our job is always to do it just a little bit better." "Mr. Grady you were the caretaker here." "I'm sorry to differ with you, sir." "But you are the caretaker." "You've always been the caretaker." "I should know, sir." "I've always been here." "We had a good, friendly relationship." "I mean he'd turn on you in a moment and say:" ""All right, you're the big fella." "Let's see it."" "That's about as harsh as he ever got with me." "He was a completely different director with Shelley." " Roll the video?" " Two seconds." "We're killing ourselves." "Be ready!" " I'm standing right by the door." " Mood music?" " I can't hear." " When you came out like this..." " Look desperate." " They say, "Wait."" " Then you say, "Go."" " You've got to look desperate." " You're wasting our time." " I can't get the door open." "For a person so charming and so likeable indeed loveable he can do some pretty cruel things when you're filming." "Because it seemed to me at times that the end justified the means." "Don't!" "Stop it!" "Here's Johnny!" "It was a very difficult role." "It was a long shoot and I had to cry and hyperventilate and carry a little boy and run for most of the time we shot." "And that was about a year, a little over a year." "Anywhere between 3O and 5O videotaped rehearsals before we even rolled film." "I wouldn't trade the experience for anything." "Why?" "Because of Stanley." "And it was a fascinating learning experience." "It was such intense work, that I think it makes you smarter." "But I wouldn't want to go through it again." "We were working with the material in the book and trying to make music that fit the mood of an updated Gothic horror story." "Which is what The Shining is, really, as a novel, in any case." "Of course, the stylization that came out from the filming was not present in the book." "And so we failed in our attempt." "Which is why there's other music in the movie." "Danny, you win." "Let's take the rest of this walking." "A lot of the music cues are combinations of some of Ligeti's music, some of Penderecki's music." "And lots of background patterns and textures with heartbeats and sizzling, electronic, weird sounds all mixed together." "That's how he finally did what he was looking for." "When The Shining was released, the response was mixed." "Some people appreciated its riddles and ambiguities." "Others felt Kubrick had strayed too far from King's book." "When I say that the people who love Stanley's movies were mostly movie people they're just looking at what's in the frame." "What's the "movieness" of the movie." "They, of course, love Stanley in a very uncomplicated way." "Whereas the critical community tends to fuss and fidget over what Stanley did." "After The Shining, Kubrick and his family moved to a mansion in the Hertfordshire countryside." "Except when filming on location, he would do all his work here supported by a small, dedicated team." "The joke we had about Stanley was..." "This was the line you would never hear from him was, "Don't bother me with details, I've got faith in your judgment."" "Stanley would involve himself to such an extent with the detail of stuff that one thought was a bit beneath him." "He should've been doing major stuff not worrying about how you had files in your office." "I guess he saw it as a package deal." "You either cared or you didn't." "When we went to Ireland on Barry Lyndon he left this 15-page document of care instructions of how to look after the animals." "And the 37th instruction was:" ""If a fight should develop between Freddy and Leo..."" "That was a father and son tomcats that we had..." ""The only way you can do anything is dump water on them try to grab Freddy and run out of the room." "Do not try and pick up Leo." "Alternatively, if you open a door and let Freddy out, he can outrun Leo but if trapped in a place where you can't separate them keep dumping water, shouting, jumping up and down and distracting and waving shirts." "Just try and get them apart and grab Freddy."" "I remember once he had a cat that was drinking excessively and I said:" ""Perhaps you can measure how much he's drinking."" "He said, "No, that's impossible." "There are too many cats."" "Then he phoned back and said, "I could count the number of laps."" "And he said, "How much does each lap take up in terms of water?"" "I said, "I don't think there's any information."" "He said, "I'll try and find out."" "He'd go off and try and find out then he'd work it out and have a figure." "He was compulsive in that way." "He was a kind of ultimate Jewish mother." "If an animal was ill or if one of us were ill Stanley was like Superman." "I was very ill myself for quite a while and he was so sweet so kind, so loyal." "Everything you want somebody to be, he was." "He was really, really kind." "However, when you weren't ill that's when you bought it." "He very seldom praised you, because he had this obsession that if he praised you you would fall to pieces and not do the job right." "He knew how far he could push you." "That was the other clever thing." "Occasionally he pushed too far then was confused why you were angry." "Philosophically, he was just no-nonsense honest, had his view very cool view of humanity." "He was a warm guy at home, I'm sure everybody says that." "Crazy about animals but could be brutal with people he worked with." "He wasn't all that way." "Sometimes he could be generous as well." "But he felt everybody was an opponent." "No matter what, he wasn't sure they weren't..." "Didn't have an agenda of their own." "And he wasn't gonna have that on his pictures." "I'm asking the fucking questions, understand?" "Thank you!" "Can I be in charge for a while?" "Are you shook up?" "Nervous?" "Sir, I am, sir!" "Do I make you nervous?" "Were you about to call me an asshole?" "Full Metal Jacket was based on a novel The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford, a Vietnam veteran." "He collaborated on the screenplay with Kubrick and Herr who covered the war as a correspondent." "He was thinking about making a war movie." "I said, "You already made Paths of Glory."" "He said, "People think of that as an anti-war movie." "I want to make a war movie just to consider the subject without a moral or political position but as a phenomenon."" "Holy shit!" "The sniper has a clean shot through the hole!" "What he ended up doing in Full Metal Jacket he had almost the detachment of the view." "It's like a god's-eye view of combat in the second half of the film." "It seems to be so still and removed." "The cleanliness of it and the power of it." "And the beauty of it, because it was all so beautifully filmed." "And he understood that it was accepted that it was quite okay to acknowledge that among all the things war is, it's also very beautiful." "It's the only film that's ever given you a real idea what it's like also what the kids go through and how important a drill sergeant is." "That's right, Private Pyle don't make any fucking effort to get up to the top!" "If God wanted you up there, He would have miracled your ass up there!" "Get your fat ass up there!" "And also the nature of the tragedy of it." "What is your major malfunction, numb-nuts?" "Didn't Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?" "Easy, Leonard." "Go easy, man." "And then the whole movie changes and moves out." "What's interesting about Kubrick is that the structure is all." "He doesn't deal with traditional dramatic structure, which is good." "He was experimenting." "Fucking son of a bitch!" "Looked like something, didn't it?" "For a director who is perceived as being completely uptight and controlling he was very freeform, Stanley." "He'd try anything." "He'd ask the actors in for meetings and say, "There's no such thing as a stupid idea in this context." "If you have an idea just say it."" "And he'd often adopt them." "I'm not saying Stanley wasn't a control freak." "I would never say that." "But there were many ways he was not controlling." "You should probably not be..." "Should be more frightened, then get into that." "Do something brilliant." "I loved him, I enjoyed his sense of humor, but I would be lying if I didn't say there were times when he was incredibly difficult." "If you weren't willing to solve the problem as much as he was." "If you weren't as devoted to understanding what it was he was trying to go after it was really hard for him." "Sometimes you didn't know what it was he was looking for." "I remember walking around Beckton Gas Works by myself and he drove up in the jeep and said:" ""What's wrong?" "Why are you walking around?"" "I said, "I don't know what it is you want from me."" "And he said, "Are you crazy?" "Get in the jeep."" "He said, "I don't want you to do anything." "I want you just to be yourself, that's all I want."" "You put "Born to Kill" on your helmet and wear a peace button." "Is that some kind of sick joke?" "Well, what does it mean?" " I don't know, sir." " You don't know very much." "Get your head and your ass wired together or I will shit on you!" "Answer my question or you'll stand tall before the Man." "I was referring to the duality of man, sir." "The duality of man." "The Jungian thing, sir." "Whose side are you on?" "Kubrick shot part of Full Metal Jacket in London where a derelict gasworks was made into the city of Hue, Vietnam." "The four key elements were the demolition, the signage the palm trees and the smoke." "Most was shot in "magic hour."" ""Magic hour" is that delightful time of day when you're all exhausted and the light's perfect." "He's dead." "You collaborate with Stanley." "It's not easy to impress him with what you do but if you come out not ticking off about something you know you've done well." "You get very close." "You're part of the family." "It's a very close unit because you're with him 24 hours a day sometimes." "You eat, drink and sleep it." "There's no life outside of film with Stanley." "And if you enjoy it, there's no greater experience." "Everybody earned their pay when they worked for Stanley." "But nobody earned their pay the way Stanley earned his pay." "No one worked as thoroughly, deeply obsessively, as Stanley did." "And he understood when you're making a movie you often don't know what you want until you see it." "Did you try it?" "Let's give it a crack." "One way or another I felt utterly compensated for my time with Stanley." "If you're in it only for the money, you might have a different feeling." "But my feeling was that I have absolutely had no complaints." "Kubrick had started work on the idea for Full Metal Jacket in 198O." "When released 7 years later several Vietnam movies had already reached the screen." "Kubrick, the great innovator, had been overtaken by other filmmakers." "But it still appealed to a wide audience because it bore all the distinctive hallmarks of a Kubrick film." "He didn't like that he made so few films." "He always wished he could've done more." "If he had anything negative in his life I think it was that feeling that he was slow." "I suppose the other thing I noted about Stanley was there were still magnificent obsessions he never quite realized." "His fascination with World War II and with the movie industry and Goebbels during that period." "For years Kubrick had tried to find a way of portraying the appalling inhumanity of the Holocaust on screen." "He turned Louis Begley's book, Wartime Lies into Aryan Papers the story of a Jewish family trying to evade capture by the Nazis." "By the time he was ready for production Spielberg had begun shooting Schindler's List." "Feeling the similarities were too great Kubrick reluctantly shelved Aryan Papers." "Another thing, he felt it just couldn't be told." ""If I really want to show what I've read and know happened..."" "And he read everything." ""...how can I even film it?" "How can you even pretend it?"" "He became very depressed during the preparation and I was glad when he gave up on it because it was really taking its toll." "Kubrick turned his attention to another longstanding project based on a short story by Brian Aldiss." "But A.I. Evolved into such a mammoth undertaking he sought the collaboration of another director." "He said, "You ought to direct A.I. And I should produce it."" "I was shocked." "I said, "Yeah, right."" "He said, "I'm serious." "It would be a Kubrick production of a Spielberg film."" "I remember him actually giving me a title card on the whole proposal." "I said, "Why would you want to?"" "Because I knew he had been developing this from his heart for so long and had contributed so many elements beyond Brian's original short story." "And Stanley said:" ""I think this movie is closer to your sensibility than mine."" "He was so insistent he said, "When can you come out and talk in person?"" "I said, "When would you like?" He said, "Tomorrow."" "I was on Long Island, it was during the summer." "So I got on an airplane the next day and flew to his kitchen." "We, for the first time, sat down and he said:" ""I'll show you the storyboards."" "And he started to show me a plethora of work that he had done." "It was a project which needed many special effects." "He eventually postponed the project for technical reasons." "Computer technology was about to explode and he figured he would benefit enormously by waiting a few years." "So the next project became Eyes Wide Shut." "When Eyes Wide Shut was announced as Kubrick's next film celebrity columnists focused on the mysterious director who had not made a film or given an interview in 1O years." "They rehashed old stories which Kubrick had never bothered to deny." "He had been pegged:" ""Reclusive filmmaker, probably half mad."" "For a man to whom, I think, control was everything the notion that he could not, in the last analysis control this image that had grown up about who he was it must have bought him a despair, like, "The hell with it." "If that's what they want to think, I can't do anything about it."" "He dealt with it the way he had to." "I knew it was rubbish which was all that mattered." "And it mostly was all that mattered to him but the more disgusting things upset him." "He would talk about that sometimes." "I know until the end of Eyes Wide Shut he'd started to say:" ""Right, now I'm gonna do a few proper interviews and try and set the record a little straighter."" "He didn't want to shoot tourists on his lawn then give them money when they bleed." "But also because it's another thing that fits into the nerdy monster sliming around in his house and hating women." "Hating women?" "He was surrounded by them." "I think there are few men who knew as much about women as he did." "It's impossible for me to just be objective and say:" ""He should have spoken up." "He should have been more gregarious."" "Should?" "He couldn't." "He wasn't." "Why should he?" "He had a great nerve." "He'd open the door to somebody looking for Stanley Kubrick and say:" ""He's not at home."" "For a long time, nobody knew what his face looked like." "He was very, very knowledgeable about things, Stanley." "Curious and interested in the world." "I think people aren't aware of that." "They think for someone so obsessive and so committed that the rest of the world might pass him by." "He funneled the world into his life, into his kitchen." "Well, here was a man who set up his life so he was warmed constantly by his family and by his circle of friends." "He was a matter of minutes from the place that he worked." "Who among us would be anything but envious of the way he's managed to set up his life?" "The book is a tract about, you know what are the dangers of married life?" "What are the silent desperations of keeping an ongoing relationship alive and what are the choices?" "You're either in that or you're not." "And Stanley was very, very much a family man and in it." "The conjectures that he made about what it might be like outside it had a lot to do with his curiosity." "It was a theme that we both talked about a great deal." "He thought about it in many different ways." "It used to come back over the years again and again and as you see friends getting divorced and remarried the topic would come up again." "It had so many variations and so much really serious thought to it that he knew one day he was going to make it." "May I ask why a beautiful woman who could have any man in this room, wants to be married?" "Why wouldn't she?" "Is it as bad as that?" "As good as that." "Stanley's expectations of people were not really, really high." "You see it in his films." "There was human beings he loved." "Christiane was the love of his life." "He would talk about her with..." "He adored her." "That's something people didn't know." "His daughters, adored them." "I'd see that because he would talk to me about them, very proudly." "His understanding of humans was that we are very bittersweet." "But he admired, I think like passion and commitment and loyalty." "Ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut is about commitment." "It's a very hopeful film." "People see it as dark but it's very hopeful." "I must see you again." " That's impossible." " Why?" "Because I'm married." "His films are often thought to be without pity." "That's a good quality, it seems to me because he's saying, "We are like this." "We are hopeless, muddled fallible, desperate, needing-Iove human beings."" "In the end, I think that's what is the central quality of his films." "He tells us about human beings as we are not as we'd like to imagine we are." "The heart of it was illustrating a truth about relationships and sexuality." "It was not illustrated in a literal way but in a theatrical way." "People said the streets weren't like New York." "I said, "It doesn't matter." "Look at the name of the street." "No such street exists in New York." "In a funny way, it's as if you're experiencing New York in a dream." "It seems like New York, but it's not." "It seems like your wife, you know, but what is she telling me?" "And do I want to know?" "Maybe I shouldn't ask."" "Because I'm a beautiful woman the only reason any man ever wants to talk to me is because he wants to fuck me." "Is that what you're saying?" "Well, I don't think it's quite that black-and-white but I think we both know what men are like." "So on that basis I should conclude that you wanted to fuck those two models." "There are exceptions." "And what makes you an exception?" "I took that character of Bill home." "At times, that was not a nice place to be sitting, in that character for that amount of time." "It really is not the kind of person that I am, that contained noncommunicative, likes the daily routine the stability of his life." "Ignoring his wife in that relationship." "Not wanting to rock the boat." "Taking things for granted, Bill did." "Took her, his family and his life for granted." "He's just a little too smug, and she just goes, "bang."" "I first saw him that morning in the lobby." "He was checking into the hotel and he was following the bellboy with his luggage to the elevator." "He glanced at me as he walked past." "Just a glance." "Nothing more." "But I could hardly move." "When we went to rehearse that scene it was the three of us and we just kind of got in our underwear not Stanley, we got in our underwear." "And we just talked about the scene and didn't really worry about the lines." "It just slowly evolved." "We were doing take after take." "I said to Stanley, "What do you want?"" "He said, "I want the magic." "I want the magic."" "But then as the scene progressed, take after take doing it you'd feel the scene reach a level everyone felt was interesting then we'd keep working on it and it would feel bad." "It was stale." "It just didn't..." "It wasn't working" "And then suddenly we could feel it break into a place that none of us had really thought of before." "The process of the film was a discovery." "It was never about the result." "It was never about:" ""Well, we have a week to shoot this scene." "So quick, let's do it." "We may not fully explore it, but we'll get something good."" "Stanley wanted to explore every avenue and then make his decisions based on that." "And Stanley was not restricted by time, he refused to be." "That is a great luxury that only somebody like he could afford because of what he'd achieved through his career to be able to say:" ""Do you want to know what's gold with filmmaking?" "Time is gold."" "Not having to walk away from a scene before you feel like you really perfected it." "I wanted to make fun of you to laugh in your face." "And so I laughed as loud as I could." "That must have been when you woke me up." "The other thing Stanley hated doing was ever explaining himself." "So, what's the film about, Stanley?" "He'd look down, look away and not answer." "The same for a scene, "What do you really want this scene to be?"" "He'd never answer that." "Eyes Wide Shut seems to be a rake's progress story." "He goes on an adventure that could turn out any way." "It's an irresponsible adventure for him to embark on." "It's a fantasy, isn't it?" "It's a dream film." "I don't think we're supposed to believe anything that we see." "One thing that people do have a hard time with in the cinema is ambiguity." "Ambiguity is great, but in the cinema it's almost verboten." "Perhaps the most extraordinary example of how a piece of music is used to drive home something about character and story and atmosphere of a film is in Eyes Wide Shut." "Please, come forward." "I was in Stalinist terroristic Hungary where this kind of music was not allowed and I just wrote it for myself." "Stanley Kubrick understood the dramatics of this moment and this is what he did in the film." "For me, when I composed it in the year 5O it was the most desperate." "It was a knife in Stalin's heart." "He had that director's disease of really imagining the easy part of it until you get there, you know." "I'm sure he didn't go into Eyes Wide Shut expecting to shoot for 14 months." "I thought the same thing, I said, "I'll be out of here in three days."" "The first scene we did in two hours, that night at the house where they come in and say hello." "I said "What are all these things I hear about it taking forever?" "I went there, three hours later I was back at the hotel in London."" "I remember him teasing me, "What are you doing?"" "I said, "I know it's great having you here, Sydney, you're perfect."" "Because we shot it in a day." "And then, my God." "Of course, the next day Sydney comes out and he's dressed." "He's got his sleeves up." "He's in his pants." "He knows every line of this massive scene." "He says, "Let's run lines." "Let's go, Cruise." "Let's go." "I got a week." "We're gonna jam this out and it's gonna be fantastic."" "And we're doing the Steadicam shot of me coming into the room and Sydney goes, "How do you want me to do this?"" "Stanley said, "Well, let's try it and see."" ""Well, I can go to the door fast." "Let's see that."" "He says, "Now open the door." "Maybe that's a little too fast." "Okay, I'll go slower."" "We start doing the scene this way, and..." "By the third week when we're in the billiard room I'm saying, "My God." "How?" "How?"" "Of course, Stanley said, "I didn't think you would be much longer." "But don't you want to get it right?"" "I tell you, there are a lot of people in our business who are..." "Well, they label themselves as perfectionists." "That's a kind of euphemism for a pain in the ass, really." "Stanley was the first real perfectionist that I met." "I mean, there just wasn't any way for him to go one take less." "He never gave an inch on anything." "So much was expected of him every time." "He wasn't allowed just to make a movie." "It had to be an amazing movie because so many were waiting for the next Kubrick film." "It had to be an event." "I think, on his shoulders was a responsibility." "When Eyes Wide Shut was shown for the first time in New York on March 1, 1999 to Tom and Nicole and the heads of the studio the response was very enthusiastic." "Stanley was very, very happy." "A great, heavy weight was lifted from his shoulders." "I think this change of his being caused almost a physical change in his body because he had lived with this enormous responsibility for a very expensive film which was long in the shooting for two years." "And suddenly it was all gone." "He died a week later." "The enormous intensity that Stanley had with his work, he also applied to his family." "I always felt very much loved, and so did the children." "He was consistent in that he always said, "Either you care or you don't."" "Well, Stanley was always a man who never wanted to repeat himself." "He reinvented himself with every single motion picture he directed." "As a filmmaker, you know, for me he was a conceptual illustrator of the human condition." "You say, "I wish he'd made more, but these were enough."" "Because there's so much in each one, you know?" "It would've been nice for him to make more but that wasn't his process." "What he did make was so special, a different movie each time you see it." "I think, as a director I think that what we all admired the most was that it was a single vision." "It was one man's vision, and no one interfered with that vision." "The complete control he had in the making of his films that meant that whatever was in his head, was up there on the screen." "I know that he struggled a lot to get to that place." "I think it is something that all of us have benefited from." "Two major artists were Orson Wells and Stanley in terms of being, you know, genuine no-holds-barred artists." "So I would put him in the pantheon of the absolute top film directors that the world has seen." "And he was one of the people that sort of knew what was wrong with the world in a weird way and was able to turn that into art." "He just didn't grouse about it or bitch or write lousy editorials." "He converted it into something that was amazing and important for us as a species." "I always thought I'd work with Stanley again." "We kept in touch over the years and everything talked about other projects." "It's a sad thing that I won't have that great opportunity." "I miss him." "How could one not miss him?" "He was a man who was completely unique." "He's a man I loved and admired with all the difficulties he had with him." "He was not an easy person, but it didn't matter." "Obviously I worked with him for 3O years for good reasons." "Stanley is gone." "There's never gonna be another Kubrick film." "You'll never have a film that will look like this ever again because it is Stanley and he pushed everyone to the limit." "He pushed the film to the limit." "He pushed the actors emotionally." "But because we all wanted to go there with him." "Part of Stanley's legacy on my life is that if you believe in something you passionately believe in something, devote yourself to it..." "He felt extremely lucky to be in a situation where he could tell stories on such a large scale, and millions of dollars involved." "I think when he was young, he didn't dare hope he would be able to do that." "I don't think he ever took that for granted." "People would say, "How are you doing, Stan?"" "He'd say, "I'm still fooling them.""