Kubrick: A shining example of genius
AS A NEW EXHIBITION CELEBRATES THE GENIUS OF DIRECTOR STANLEY KUBRICK, LUKE RIX-STANDING LOOKS AT HIS CAREER
STANLEY KUBRICK was on the set of Eyes Wide Shut in the late 1990s – a divisive, erotic drama that would be his final film.
One scene required Sydney Pollack, an experienced actor, to walk across a room and open a door. A first-time collaborator with Kubrick, he made the grave mistake of asking the director how he wanted this done. “I don’t know Sydney,” he replied, “you tell me.”
Two whole days and hundreds of door openings followed, after which the exhausted and exasperated actor asked what else he could possibly do. “Well Sydney,” said Kubrick, “I didn’t think it would take this long, but don’t you want to get it right?”
The episode is typical of a man widely considered a genius, mostly for his film-making, but also for personifying the public image of what a genius is expected to be.
Extraordinarily secretive, agonisingly perfectionist, and fabulously enigmatic – Stanley Kubrick required total control over script, style and sound, and disavowed every production in which this was denied.
He never gave interviews, was so afraid of flying he would not film abroad and spent his days behind the electronically locked gates of his mysterious Hertfordshire mansion.
He made his first film partly with his winnings from a chess competition, and thereafter released just 12 features in 45 years.
A new exhibition on his life can now be seen at the Design Museum in London and celebrates one of cinema’s most visionary directors.
As a film-maker, Kubrick did not take inspiration from the great practitioners of his art. Indeed, he took greater encouragement from incompetence. “I believed that I couldn’t make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing,” he once said. “Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie.”
Though many of his works now regularly appear in lists of the greatest films of all time, his career had a rocky start. He roundly derided his first feature – 1953’s Fear And Desire – as “a bumbling, amateur exercise”, and later went to great lengths to ensure it was not seen. A Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, and Paths Of Glory followed, finding favour with critics but not with the paying public.
In 1959, he helmed swords-andsandals epic Spartacus, at the request of its A-list star Kirk Douglas, who denied him the control to which he was already accustomed.
Next came a wildly ambitious adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, the story of a sexual relationship between a middle-aged professor and a pubescent girl – which was savagely cut by the censors. For Kubrick, both projects were tainted by frustration, and both were promptly disowned.
Young British actors and directors are often enticed across the pond by the bright lights of LA, but for it was the other way round for Kubrick. Disillusioned with Hollywood, he fled America for the English countryside in 1962,.
Finally safe from the tycoons of Tinseltown, Kubrick set about making movies his way. His style switched from naturalistic to
obliquely surreal, while his storytelling began to betray a marked pessimism about the human condition.
He picked up visual trademarks – long corridors; Steadicam tracking shots; geometric, frame-by-frame composition – and pioneered new methods for shooting in low light.
In 1964 he marked the triumphant release of Dr Strangelove, a jet-black cold-war farce that spat at the popular Hollywood narrative that adversity brings out the best in people.
Four years later came 2001: A Space Odyssey, a vastly overbudget sci-fi epic spanning the whole of human history. It was not wholly appreciated in its time and many of the audience walked out at the New York premiere, others jeered, and one prominent critic declared it “the biggest amateur movie of them all”.
In a strange quirk of history, cinephiles may have hippy culture to thank for the film’s success. Stoners flocked to the film in droves, and for a while John Lennon claimed to catch a showing at least once a week. The marketing execs soon caught on, and the second round of promotionals bore an extra tagline: “The ultimate trip”.
Career chameleon Kubrick was developing an uncanny habit of filming the un-filmable. After the exorbitance of 2001, he wanted to prove he could handle a low budget, and decided to do so with the Beethoven-fuelled ultra-violence of A Clockwork Orange.
Based on the eponymous novel, the film was a box-office hit, but gained unwelcome notoriety after it was cited by defendants in several rape and murder trials. Kubrick promptly pulled the film from UK cinemas, and it was not theatrically re-released until after his death at the age of 70 in 1999.
His next offering was costumed period piece Barry Lyndon in 1975, but he still managed to land in trouble. Kubrick unwisely shot scenes in Ireland featuring uniformed British redcoats. Following death threats from the IRA, he fled to England by ferry under an assumed name.
Giving others responsibility was not something Kubrick did if he could avoid it, a “No matter what it is,” said A Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell, “even if it’s a question of buying a shampoo, it goes through him.”
Kubrick, temporarily blinded Malcolm McDowell shooting the infamous Ludovico Technique scene in A Clockwork Orange and insisted on green tabletops in Dr Strangelove, despite filming in black and white.
The demands he placed on his actors were legendary, and often interfered with their wellbeing. Most famous is his treatment of Shelley Duvall on the set of 1980 film The Shining. He exhausted and belittled her so systematically that her on-screen hysteria was barely put on.
In the notorious ‘staircase scene’ (in which she can be seen backing away from an advancing Jack Nicholson weakly swinging a baseball bat), her bloodshot eyes, pathetic whimpers and feeble swipes come mostly from the fact that it was take number 127.
In his later years, productivity slowed to a crawl. 1987 brought Full Metal Jacket – best-remembered for R Lee Ermey’s fabulously foulmouthed drill sergeant, and Eyes Wide Shut followed 12 years later in 1999.
Kubrick died a few months before the film went on general release. He once said: “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition runs at The Design Museum, London, until September 15. Advance booking recommended. Go to designmuseum.org for ticket details and further information.