New documentary reveals genius filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s secret weapon
IN THE early 1970s, British actor Leon Vitali had embarked on a promising stage and TV acting career when he saw the movie that would change his life: While in a theatre watching “A Clockwork Orange,” he turned to a companion and said, “I want to work for that man.”
“That man,” it turns out, was director Stanley Kubrick. And a few years later, Vitali’s dream would come true, when he was cast in Kubrick’s rococo period drama “Barry Lyndon.” Giving his all to the performance — including being repeatedly pummelled by former Golden Gloves hopeful Ryan O’Neal — Vitali plunged into Kubrick’s milieu behind the camera, learning as much as he could about production design, cinematography and costume construction.
This wasn’t just shooting pretty pictures, Vitali recalls in “Filmworker,” a documentary about his career. “It was filmmaking.”
Vitali emerges as an enigmatic figure in “Filmworker,” in which the 69- year-old subject reflect son his devotion to the notoriously demanding Kubrick, whose perfectionist standards Vitali executed with unquestioning loyalty. From working as a casting director — he’s the one who discovered and coached child actor Danny Lloyd in “The Shining,” and former Marine R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket” — to supervising countless restorations, transfers and translations of Kubrick’s oeuvre, Vitali came to occupy an all- encompassing, undefinable role in the world of a filmmaker who still occupies godlike status in the cinematic firmament.
Putting in 16- hour days at Kubrick’s estate before going home to keep making phone calls, Vitali managed to marry and have children, who are interviewed in “Filmworker” — along with Ermey, Lloyd and Matthew Modine. But documentarian Tony Zierra never plumbs Vitali’s personal life too deeply, leaving some unanswered questions about what must have been the profound psychological cost of giving his life over so completely to someone else’s artistic vision.
Then again, it’s just that sacrifice — and implicit sense of vocation — that propels “Filmworker,” whose title is taken for the job description Vitali would use on travel documents. Beyond what some might see as almost pathological self- abnegation, it becomes clear that Vitali’s fealty lies less with the Great Man than with the larger creative enterprise to which he is instinctively, helplessly attuned.
“Filmworker’s” greatest value lies in pulling the lens back to allow viewers to understand film as a deeply collaborative medium, one in which even the most venerated auteurs cannot accomplish their greatest feats alone. “Filmworker” is a tribute to the unsung artisans, assistants, best boys and girl Fridays whose indelible contributions make movies not just possible, but magical.
Three stars. Unrated. Contains occasional profanity. 93 minutes.