The Film Director as Superstar: Stanley Kubrick by Joseph Gelmis “A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it’s the director’s job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible.” The most controversial film of 1968 was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It started out asa $6,000,000 science fiction movie and escalated into a $10,500,000 underground film. It polarized critical and public opinion. Most of its young admirers considered it a prophetic masterpiece. Its detractors praised the special effects but found it confusing and pretentious as drama. Despite Kubrick’s own ready interpretation of the action, the ending of 2001 was confusing to some people. The final scenes in the alien “zoo” or heaven and the metamorphosis of the astronaut into a star baby remained for many an enigmatic, purely emotional, nonverbal experience. Understanding became a function of the emotions, rather than one’s reasoning powers. Less than half the film had dialogue. It was a reorganization of the traditional dramatic structure. Process became more important than plot. The tedium was the message. It was a film not about space travel; it was space travel. “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not the think of it”, Kubrick asserted. Kubrick traces some of his fascination with the fluid camera back to Max Ophuls. His oeuvre, with the single exception of the optimistic transfiguration in 2001, is a bleak skepticism and fatalism. 2001 was Kubrick’s first experiment with restructuring the conventions of the three-act drama. It’s quite possible it started out to be something entirely different. The book based on the original screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick is literal, verbal, explicit. The film, in its early stages, had a narrator’s voice. It was cut bit by bit and then eliminated completely, by virtue of which 2001 evolved as a nonverbal experience. In his next film, Napoleon, Kubrick says he plans to return to the use of a narrator and perhaps even animation or charts to illustrate and explain the battle tactics and campaigns. Kubrick’s personal interest in the aesthetics of a well-staged campaign goes back to his days as a young chess hustler in Greenwich Village. Born July 1928 in the Bronx, Kubrick was introduced to still photography as a hobby by his father, who was a physician. He achieved a certain youthful prominence as his class photographer at Taft High School. Later, with a sixty-eight average, he was unable to compete with returning GIs for a place in college. So, “out of pity”, he recalls, LOOK magazine hired him as a photographer. Kubrick’s early training in movies was with two documentaries. At twenty-five, he made his first feature film, the 35-mm Fear and Desire, for $9000 - plus another $30,000 because he didn’t know what he was doing with the soundtrack. He didn’t make any money on his first four feature films. He has never earned a penny on The Killing and Paths of Glory, which some of his early fansstill consider his best films. The only film he disclaims is Spartacus. He says he worked on it as just a hired hand. Every other film he’s directed he has made to suit himself, within prescribed bounds of existing community standards. He wishes Lolita had been more erotic. The lag time between conception and completion of his films is now up to an average of three years. In part, this is the result of his wish to handle every artistic and business function himself. To concentrate all control in his own hands, Kubricknumero produces as well as directs his films. He originates, writes, researches, directs, edits, and even guides the publicity campaigns for his films. Though he gets his financing from the major studios, he is as independent as he was when he was raising seihis - giugnomoney 20from his father and uncle. The following interview is the outcome of meetings that took place in 1968 in New York and London and of correspondence that continued through 1969. Kubrick lives near London. His third wife is Suzanne Christiane08 Harlan, a German actress who appeared briefly at the end of Paths of Glory. 2001 took about three years to make - six months of preparation, four and a half months of working with the actors, and a year and a half of shooting special effects. How much time will Napoleon take out of your life? Considerably less. We hope to begin the actual production work by the winter of 1969, and the exterior shooting - battles, location shots, etc. - should be completed within two or three months. After that, the studio work shouldn’t take more than another three or four months. Where would the exteriors be shot? Actual sites? I still haven’t made a final decision, although there are several promising possibilities. Unfortunately, there are very, very few ctuala Napoleonic battlefields where we could still shoot; the land itself has either been taken over by industrial and rbanu development, preempted by historical trusts, or is so ringed by modern buildings that all kinds of anachronisms would present themselves - like a Hussars’ charge with a Fiat plant in the background. We’re now in the process of deciding the best places to shoot, and where it would be most feasible to obtain the troops we need for battle scenes. We intend to use a maximum of forty thousand infantry and ten thousand cavalry for the big battles, which means that we have to find a country which will hire out its own armed forces to us - you can just imagine the cost of fifty thousand extras over an extended period of time. Once we find a receptive environment, there are still great logistic problems - for example, a battle site would have to be contiguous to a city or town or barracks area where the troops we’d use are already bivouacked. Let’s say we’re working with forty thousand infantry - if we could get forty men into a truck, it would still require a thousand trucks to move them around. So in addition to finding the proper terrain, it has to be within marching distance of military barracks. Aside from the Russian War and Peace, where they reportedly used sixty thousand of their own troops, has there ever been a film that used forty thousand men from somebody else’s army? I would doubt it. Then how do you expect to persuade another government to give you as many as forty thousand soldiers? One has to be an optimist about these things. If it turnednumerosei out to be impossible I’d obviouslygiugno have no other 2008 choice than to make do with a lesser number of men, but this would only be as a last resort. I wouldn’t want to fake it with fewer troops because Napoleonic battles were out in the open, a vast tableau where the formations moved in an almost choreographic fashion. I want to capture this reality on film, and to do so it’s necessary to re-create all the conditions of the battle with painstaking accuracy. How many men did you use in the trench battle of Paths of Glory? That was another story entirely. We employed approximately eight hundred men, all German police - at that time the German police received three years of military training, and were as good as regular soldiers for our purposes. We shot the film at Geiselgesteig Studios in Munich, and both the battle site and the chateau were within thirty- five to forty minutes of the studio. If you can’t use the actual battle sites, how will you approximate the terrain on the sites you do choose? There are a number of ways this can be done an it’s quite important to the accuracy of the film,since terrain is the decisive factor in the flow and outcome of a Napoleonic battle. We’ve researched all the battle sites exhaustively from paintings and sketches, and we’re now in a position to approximate the terrain. And from a purely schematic point of view, Napoleonic battles are so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets, that it’s worth making every effort to explain the configuration of forces to the audience. And it’s not really as difficult as it first appears. How do you mean “explain”? With a narrator, or charts? With a narrative voice-over at times, with animated maps and, most importantly, through the actual photography of the battles themselves. Let’s say you want to explain that at the battle of Austerlitz, the Austro- Russian forces attempted to cut Napoleon off from Vienna, and then extended the idea to a doubleRapporto envelopment and Napoleon countered by strikingConFidenziale at their center and cutting their forces in half - well, this is not difficult to show by photography, maps and narration. I think it’s extremely important to communicate the essence of these battles to the viewer, because they all have an aesthetic brilliance that doesn’t require a military mind to appreciate. There’s an aesthetic involved; it’s almost like a great piece of music, or the purity of a mathematical formula. It’s this quality I want to bring across, as well as the sordid reality of battle. You know, there’s a weird disparity between the sheer visual and organizational beauty of the historical battles sufficiently far in the past, and their human consequences.