Remembering Stanley Kubrick: Steven Spielberg (Paul Joyce 1999)

i was aware of the power of kubrick as a director when i first saw for the first time dr strangelove which was when i was standing in line in san jose i was in high school we lived i was in my last year of high school as a matter of fact and uh i was starting a very long line when my father jumped out of a car he had found me in line it was a rainy day in san jose ran over to me with a letter from the selective service that's our version of when you're drafted into the army and handed me this letter and waited until i opened it i opened it and basically said you must report for your army physical and that's when i kind of became aware that my life could be over in a year and my dad was completely aware of that my dad said let's go home and i said no i want to watch the film so i sit there in line alone with this letter and i went into the theater and strange love began i had a letter in my back pocket and when strange love was finished and i left the theater and i stood on the curb waiting for my father to pick me up i had totally forgotten that i had a letter threatening to draft me into the united states armed services and that's when i first became aware of the power of stanley kubrick it was a very bizarre film to see with a draft letter in your back pocket though wasn't it it was for the first 45 minutes that picture i was completely haunted by the juxtapositioning of of the threat of an end to the world and the threat to you know you know the the threat on the end of my life and and and but but the ethos of that picture so caught me up and i so got into the black comedy and into george c scott's character and all the great peter sellers performances that it really utterly made me forget you know that i had to perhaps be facing the same conflict someday i'm wondering you've mentioned black comedy and certainly as a kid that's what i responded to and i'm wondering if kids are as cynical as old old people more cynical i think and maybe that is one facet of kubrick's great ability to bring out the black comedy that appeals to a younger audience well you know i think cooper has done that with many of his films you know he has uh you know i always thought he he was a very wry guy and a very dry rye guy and had a way of getting his message across by making it even more painful by making you defensively almost to protect oneself you know laugh at the antics on the screen at the same time you were utterly chilled to the bone that what you were really laughing about was you were whistling as you passed the cemetery and i think stanley so often whistled as he walked past the graveyard the first time i saw uh 2001 i believe it was in hollywood the pantages theater and i was a a student at cal state long beach and i'd gone in in a car with my friends to see strange love i mean to see 2001 and and we were stuck in line we were stuck in the ticket line and we got to the point where we got to the booth and the show had been sold out so we had to buy tickets for the next show so we basically just waited in line for three plus hours until the crowd let out and they cleaned up the theater and then we got in there so our anticipation by the time we found our seats was basically to the threshold of beyond i mean i was ready even before stargate i was stargate at that point i was so desperate to see that picture and of course i was desperate to picture because it was stanley kubrick and a lot of my friends have seen it before me and the entire campus was talking about strange talking about 2001 they were talking about the you know the the fact that it was it was a drug movie now that was kind of strange for me because i never took any drugs and so never having experimented with anything i didn't understand why they kept calling it a drug movie and and they were saying well the idea is you take drugs and then you go to the movie and it just heightens the experience the drugs that you've taken heightened the experience of the film but i came out the other end of that picture i know personally speaking much higher than any of my friends who had taken you know you know you know mind altering substances i went in there you know clean as a whistle and i came out of there altered myself that film was the drug he took you into space for the first time i mean since 2001 no documentary no other movie um no imax experience being on the shuttle and looking down the earth has ever really put me in space as much as 2001 did it made me fear it and made me want it so desperately i want to be part of that great mystery want to be at the forefront of the pioneers that would discover you know the monolith and stargate and what lies beyond so i mean my god that was maybe for me his most realistic movie that he had ever made and i think his second most realistic movie that he ever made for me was was um clockwork orange the clockwork orange is a depiction of of grotesque violence but it also has utter contempt for violence and and when you put on singing in the rain during that sequence where he's kicking that person to death it is utterly contemptuous and it is almost like saying why isn't somebody doing something about this where's the world when these acts of man against men are happening all over the world you know every 30 seconds you know you know where's justice where's order you know you know why do we allow this chaos to happen of course the great morality play that is clockwork oranges that after all of this you know you know deprogramming and uh and uh and a kind of proselytizing of the malcolm mcdowell character through science and theory he comes out the other end more charming more witty and with such a devilish wink and blink at the audience that i am completely certain that when he gets out of that hospital he's going to kill his mother and his father and his partners and his friends and he's going to be worse than he was when he went in and so in a sense i've always felt the clockwork orange was stanley's most defeatist movie the film where he appears to totally give up on society and the film that maybe justifies why he lives in saint albans in the safety of the british countryside because he was afraid of that i'll tell you a quick story when we first met which was 1980 when he was just finishing the construction of his sets for the shining and we met for the first time um we talked a lot about movies and i was about my greatest lost ark and i was actually moving on to his stages when he finished i was moving in and of course when his stage burned down to change my schedule we had to go to france first to start shooting to give stanley a chance to finish strike and let us build the well the souls where the overlook main hotel you know lobby was the main room where jack nicholson did the the infamous typing um when it was all over the movie was done i saw stanley again went to his house for dinner in london and and st albums and and he asked me uh quite you know he said how did you like my movie and i only seen it once and i didn't love shining the first time i saw it i have since seen shining 25 times one of my favorite pictures kubrick films tend to grow on you have to see them more than once but the wild thing is i defy your name in one kubrick film that you can turn off once you started it's impossible he's got this fail-safe button or something it's impossible to turn off a kubrick film but i didn't like it the first time i saw it and and and i i told i was i was telling him all the things i liked about it and he saw right through me and he said well well stephen obviously he didn't like my picture very much and i said well there's a lot of things i loved about it says yeah but there's a lot of things you did and probably more you didn't that you didn't so tell me what you didn't like about it and i said well the thing that i i thought jack nicholson who is a great actor i thought it was a great performance but it was almost a great kabuki performance it's almost like kabuki theater he said you mean you think jack went over the top and i said yeah i i kind of kind of did and he said okay quickly without thinking who are your top favorite actors of all time and i want you to think just name off some names so i quickly you know went spencer tracy you know henry fonda jimmy stewart you know cary grant clark gable he said stop he stopped me he said okay where was james cagney on that list and i didn't have i thought well he's he's up there high he's i said ah but he's not in the top five he said you don't consider james cagney one of the five best actors around you see i do this is why jack nichols performance is a great one i really wanted to be scared by it number one i wanted to be frightened by it in a kind of carnival fear i wanted things to pop out at me i wanted to jump out of my seat i wanted shocks i wasn't expecting a psychological shock storm i was hoping for a kind of visceral visual assault on all of my senses and instead it was about the descent into madness and he very inexorably pulled the entire audience down with him so at that moment where sh you know you know you know shelley is reading the last three months of what he has been writing and we see the litany of what he has written you know you know all work no play make jack a doll boy um that is the biggest shock of the shining and that is the greatest genius of the shiny that he could so traumatize us slowly but surely with this with these images and and and this dread just waiting for you around the corner when you're dolling behind a child on a tricycle um that you would be shocked by that you know that was the equivalent of the chair turning around the psycho and the sudden reveal of mrs bates and it's more shocking than the sudden reveal of mrs bates if you get into the protoplasm of that movie if you give yourself over to it you'll be more shocked by what he's written over the last four months at one point i heard a story that he phoned stephen king in the middle of the night in maine and asked even i guess he had been working on the screenplay for a while stanley had and he asked even do you believe in god and stephen said yes i do and senate said that's what i thought and then they hung up the telephone and that might have been the time that stanley stanley took over the project himself and had and and had decided which direction he was going to take the movie now i asked stanley that same question i said did you ever call stephen king at three o'clock in the morning and said you believe in god and so they said not to my knowledge so stanley denies that he ever ever did that but that's just one of those apocryphal perhaps or blockable stories that's out there in the world that if i if it's certainly not true it still provides a little bit of insight into stanley's choices and his approach to that specific piece of material the great thing about stanley was he was totally complimentary he'd love pictures he would call a completely unknown american director on the telephone and he'd say hi at stanley kubrick i love your picture and he'd want to talk to you about it and he shocked people i'm sure several people hung up on them they're thinking it was a crank call but stanley um loved movies and would not spare the compliments he would just he would just throw these and from kubrick to hear good things about a picture you made was the greatest gift anybody could possibly give you stanley just loved all the new toys that were coming available every couple of months and and i kind of supplied him with a lot of toys i was sort of his uh toy broker you know i'd get the sharper image catalog and i'd call stanley up and i said this is a great new cell phone at the saw on sharper image and he'd say send me the catalog and and i sent him the phone instead and it was because the funny thing was whenever i would see stanley you know all the sort of the toys of our trade were always in in in shambles but they were always all over stanley's kitchen in his work space everywhere in his in his sort of farmhouse there were uh different uh kind of uh series series toys there was the the old yeah cell phone that was this big and then and then there was another one that was this big and one that was this big and then it was it kept getting smaller and smaller stanley kept them all he never threw anything away every phone conversation was just an inspiration for me personally um stanley liked information i supplied him with a lot of information sometimes information he asked me for other information i volunteered in getting to know him i understood what the what the dynamic of the relationship was that stanley would give me advice he'd collaborate with me i tell him a story i was interested in directing as a movie and he'd ask me all the tough questions what do you find interesting about that story why do you want to make that picture gee that sounds kind of boring to me how can you make that interesting i mean he was challenging me constantly he gave me as much if not more than i feel i ever ever could possibly give him first he gave me all his movies and then he gave me his friendship which meant he gave me his time and there's no greater gift the person can give to another person i think stanley's biggest problem was he loved making movies so much he didn't want to stop making them and i think stanley was always waiting for that one take that would be the breakthrough take where the actors would surprise him and blow him away with things that he couldn't even think of and maybe that's one of the reasons they kept pushing for more takes but um i always wanted to watch him work and never had a chance to and uh and was too afraid to ask him could i come visit you on the set of eyes wide shut i was shooting saving private ryan the same time he was shooting eyes wide shut and we were in the same country and we were in the same city and i invited him to my set once a week but he never invited me to his set and i was too afraid afraid to oppose myself and ask him because i didn't want him to say no when he saw schindler's list you know he was very interested in talking to me about technique and craft we talked a little bit of theory and philosophy a little bit about the holocaust but we mainly talked about the craft of the film which he wanted to know about the handheld camera and i told him he said well who influenced you to handle the camera like that where'd you get that idea gee did you get that from the battle of for algiers or did you get that from um i said i got that from documentaries shot by the signal core real world war ii documentaries and from you he said what do you mean for me i said well don't you remember the sequence when they were trying to retake burpleson airport for space and you shot that tremendous cinema very tasty with long lenses and handheld cameras with the people shooting at the air base and the squibs going off against uh you know against uh you know sterling hayden's window and and all of that and it was all done handheld style i said yeah i said well it was the signal core cameraman and you that influenced me on how to tell the story that way and then later on how to do saving private ryan and he was not very good at taking company called gee thanks and he changed the subject when you look at all of his films even though they all have one thing in common for me anyway the craft is impeccable every film he's ever made the craft is impeccable the lighting the dolly shots the crane moves the zoom ins on buried linden the framing the lighting the hot windows as backlight you know you know there's the compositions i mean the exact compositions you had to hit your mark precisely to please stanley so he'd get his painting the painting he was putting on canvas for you to appreciate it had to be perfect uh his choice of lenses his steadicam work in in in latter year films impeccable the best in history nobody could shoot a movie better than tally cooper in history um that was impeccable but the way he told stories was sometimes antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories and i think sometimes stanley just did that because he didn't want to be like everybody else and he had a very specific way of telling a story it's not that he wanted to show up i'm so different than you but he said why does every story have to be told the same way he would tell me the last couple years of his life and we were talking about the form he kept saying i want to change the form i want to make a movie that changes the form and i said well didn't you that was 2001 he said just a little bit but not enough i really want to change the form so he kept looking for different ways to tell stories well i think the first thing that makes sally kubrick so special was he was a chameleon he he never made the same picture twice every single picture is a different genre a different period a different story a different risk the only thing that bonded all of his films was the incredible virtuoso that he was with craft and with editing with performance and with camera placement with composition but every single story was different and every single story somehow was so mysterious in the way the story was told so kept you guessing how's this going to turn out what's going to happen next i can't even imagine and all his films are so filled with hairpin turns and story surprises and character surprises that you must see his films more than once because you yearn for those same surprises and the genius of stanley is you can look at a movie of his 15 times and even though you know what's right around the corner you'll still give up give it up and you'll be you'll be surprised all over again and i don't know anybody else who possesses that kind of magic stanley predicted that the internet was going to be the next generation of filmmaking filmmaking and filmmakers and when i woke up on sunday morning i do what i do every day i go out i click onto america online i get my headlines and i clicked on american online on sunday morning and it said kubrick dead at 70. and um and it was only days later that the irony that that's how i would discover that stanley had moved on was going to come from the technology the stanley sort of both with giddiness and excitement and also with profound caution told me was going to be the next generation that might change the form of cinema and that's how i discovered he had died and then 25 minutes later nicole kidman called me from new york and told me in person was it something you know where he didn't know him had the feeling that he was in a sense immortal was that your feeling as well oh yeah i thought he would live i thought he would outlive uh kurosawa i thought he would make his rant at 80. and and it was it was it was it was very hard to believe i uh my wife came in to the room and we're gonna go shopping we're gonna do grocery shopping on sunday and she said you want to go shopping and i said read this and she read it and she got tears in her eyes but i didn't have any tears in my eyes because i didn't believe the sonny was dead because i didn't believe that that infernal piece of technology was going to tell me that this filmmaker and my friend was not with me anymore i wasn't going to believe that i wasn't going to take that from that i would take it from a person but not from that machine and so i went shopping and it hit me in the grocery store that that it was probably true and then 25 minutes later when the phone rang when i got back and nikki was on the phone she was destroyed the night that i lost it and then tom called me 15 minutes after i hang with nikki and tom was devastated and then we were just all devastated together and then all the calls began coming in and then i knew it was true he'll be remembered you know as the man who made these 13 pictures i mean that's how he'll be remembered he'll be remembered through his films and he'll constantly be remembered every time we look at one of them and he'll inspire a whole new generation of film goers still too young to see his pictures but when they're old enough and they do get a chance to see him they'll be inspired to tell good stories and to tell you know some somewhat elliptical stories that are more compelling than the linear form perhaps and maybe he'll influence a lot of kids not to come out of the same hole you know twice maybe maybe maybe he'll really inspire us all to be different every time we do something and to try to reinvent ourselves every time we have that opportunity which is what i think he did his films will certainly be classics everything he he he does is an instant classic even the films that aren't as popular aren't as well loved by the by the critics and by the general you know you know uh powers to be that talk and write about film uh there's not a film in his body of work that hasn't become a classic of sorts and and i'm just sorry that the body of work was you know you know um so small but when you really look at all those movies he probably had the greatest vertical penetration emotionally and profoundly of any of us put together i'm not sure something even would have wanted a funeral but um i think one of the a couple of things that were out of stanley's control i think we all suddenly found that because stanley was so totally in control of every aspect of his films and probably his life certainly was friends it was totally in control of me these were a few of the occasions where stanley wouldn't have final cut and uh and and not having that final cut was a benefit to his friends it was a gift to all of us because we all got to you know say our piece and uh and i hope he was listening the thing that i returned to again and again in my mind was the film that i i elected to show my friends on the sunday stanley died the sunday america time stanley died when i got the news and some people came over to the house that night that they were scheduled to come over for dinner anyway and we talked the whole night about stanley and i wanted to show all of them a scene from a movie that for me represented how deep stanley's heart was and how much he could love and how much he could show emotion because he had been so often criticized for not being an emotional director i thought he was a very emotional director and so i put on the last scene from paza glory where christiana who he then married who plays the german captive girl stands up in front of all the french soldiers and sings that song and brings down the house in tears and we were all crying as the soldiers were crying we were crying watching just the last scene didn't show them the whole picture and that isolated last scene so hit a chord with everyone in the room and two people that night had never seen past the glory but were still totally affected by that sequence and that to me represented who stanley was as a human being so you

Channel: ArchivioKubrick

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Keywords: googlevideo, steven spielberg, interview, stanley kubrick, the shining, eyes wide shut, full metal jacket

Id: Rd97Og-20Yc

Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2011