by Michael Herr
The world outside the gates of Stanley Kubrickâs English manor house may have seen the legendary director as cold, arrogant, even a bit crazy. But to those who entered the citadel of Kubrickâs obsessive, often brutal devotion to filmmaking, his life made pure and perfect sense. At the premature end of a career that spanned Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, Lolita, The Shining, and this summerâs Eyes Wide Shut,the author, who co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, pays unsentimental homage to his longtime friend, remembering the humor, the cleanly burning intelligence, the outrageous sanity of a 20th-century master.
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Kubrick was a friend of mine, insofar as people like Stanley have friends, and as if there are any people like Stanley now. Famously reclusive, as Iâm sure youâve heard, he was in fact a complete failure as a recluse, unless you believe that a recluse is simply someone who seldom leaves his house. Stanley saw a lot of people. Sometimes he even went out to see people, but not often, very rarely, hardly ever. Still, he was one of the most gregarious men I ever knew, and it didnât change anything that most of this conviviality went on over the phone. He viewed the telephone the way Mao viewed warfare, as the instrument of a protracted offensive where control of the ground was critical and timing crucial, while time itself was meaningless, except as something to be kept on your side. An hour was nothing, mere overture, or opening move, or gambit, a small taste of his virtuosity. The writer Gustav Hasford claimed that he and Stanley were once on the phone for seven hours, and I went over three with him many times. Iâve been hearing about all the people who say they talked to Stanley on the last day of his life, and however many of them there were, I believe them all.
Somebody who knew him 45 years ago, when he was starting out, said, âStanley always acted like he knew something you didnât know,â but honestly, he didnât have to act. Not only that, by the time he was through having what he called, in quite another context, âstrenuous intercourseâ with you, he knew most of what you knew as well. Hasford called him an earwig; heâd go in one ear and not come out the other until heâd eaten clean through your head.
He had the endearing and certainly seductive habit when he talked to you of slipping your name in every few sentences, particularly in the punch line, and there was always a punch line. He had an especially fraternal temperament anyway, but I know quite a few women who found him extremely charming. A few of them were even actresses.
Some Americans move to London and in three weeks theyâre talking like Denholm Elliott. Stanley picked up the odd English locution, but it didnât take Henry Higgins to place him as pure, almost stainless Bronx. Stanleyâs speech was very fluent, melodious even. In spite of the Bronx nasal-caustic, perhaps the shadow of some adenoidal trauma long ago, it was as close to the condition of music as speech can get and still be speech, like a very well-read jazz musician talking, with a pleasing and graceful Groucho-like rushing and ebbing of inflection for emphasis and suggested quotation marks to convey amused disdain, over-enunciating phrases that struck him as fabulously banal, with lots of innuendo, and lots of latent sarcasm, and some not so latent, lively tempi, brilliant timing, eloquent silences, and, always, masterful, seamless seguesââLemme change the subject for just a minute,â or âWhat were we into before we got into this?â I never heard him try to do other voices, or dialects, even when he was telling Jewish jokes. Stanley quoted other people all the time, people in the industry whom heâd spoken to that morning (Steven and Mike, Warren and Jack, Tom and Nicole), or people who died a thousand years ago, but it was always Stanley speaking.
When I met him in 1980, I was not just a subscriber to the Stanley legend, I was frankly susceptible to it. Heâd heard that I was living in London from a mutual friend, David Cornwell (b.k.a. John le CarrĂ©), and invited us for dinner and a movie. The movie was a screening of The Shining at Shepperton Studios a few weeks before its American release, followed by dinner at Childwick Bury, the 120-acre estate near St. Albans, an hour north of London, that Stanley and his family and their dogs and cats had just moved into. Stanley wanted to meet me because heâd liked Dispatches, my book about Vietnam. It was the first thing he said to me when we met. The second thing he said to me was that he didnât want to make a movie of it. He meant this as a compliment, sort of, but he also wanted to make sure I wasnât getting any ideas. Heâd read the book several times looking for the story in it, and quoted bits of it, some of them quite long, from memory during dinner. And since Iâd loved his movies for something like 25 years by this time, I was touched, flattered, and very happy to meet him, because I was of course fairly aware that it was unusual to meet him. Stanley wasnât someone you ran into at a party and struck up a relationship with.He was thinking about making a war movie next, but he wasnât sure which war, and in fact, now that he mentioned it, not even so sure he wanted to make a war movie at all.
He called me a couple of nights later to ask me if Iâd read any Jung. I had. Was I familiar with the concept of the Shadow, our hidden dark side? I assured him that I was. We did half an hour on the Shadow, and how he really wanted to get it into his war picture. And oh, did I know of any good Vietnam books, âyou know, Michael, something with a story?â I didnât. I told him that after seven years working on a Vietnam book and nearly two more on the film Apocalypse Now, it was about the last thing in the world I was interested in. He thanked me for my honesty, my âalmost blunt candor,â and said that, probably, what he most wanted to make was a film about the Holocaust, but good luck putting all of that into a two-hour movie. And then there was this other book he was fascinated byâhe was fairly sure Iâd never heard of itâArthur Schnitzlerâs novella Traumnovelle, which means âDream Novel,â meaninglessly called Rhapsody in the only English edition available at that time. Heâd read it more than 20 years before, and bought the rights to it in the early 70s (itâs the book that Eyes Wide Shut is based on), and the reason Iâd probably never heard of it (he started to laugh) was that heâd bought up every single existing copy of it. Maybe heâd send me one. I could read it and tell him what I thought.
âYou know, just read it and weâll talk. Iâm interested to know what you think. And Michael, ask around among your friends from the war, maybe they know a good Vietnam story. You know, like at the next American Legion meeting? Oh, and Michael, do me a favor, will you?â
âSure.â
âDonât tell anybody what weâve been talking about.â
The next afternoon a copy of the Schnitzler book arrived, along with the paperback edition of Raul Hilbergâs enormous The Destruction of the European Jews, delivered by Stanleyâs driver, Emilio, who whether I realized it or not was about to become my new best friend.
I read the Schnitzler right away, and thatâs when I had my early inkling of how smart Stanley really was. Traumnovelle, published in Vienna in 1926, is the full, excruciating flowering of a voluptuous and self-consciously decadent time and place, a shocking and dangerous story about sex and sexual obsession and the suffering of sex. In its pitiless view of love, marriage, and desire, made all the more disturbing by the suggestion that either all of it, or maybe some of it, or possibly none of it, is a dream, it intrudes on the concealed roots of Western erotic life like a laser, hinting discreetly, from behind its dream cover, at things that are seldom even privately acknowledged, and never spoken of in daylight. Stanley thought it would be perfect for Steve Martin. Heâd loved The Jerk.
Heâd talked about this book with a lot of people, David Cornwell and the novelist Diane Johnson among them, and since David and Diane and I later talked about it among ourselves (and out of Stanleyâs hearing, I think), I know that his idea for it in those days was always as a sex comedy, but with a wild and somber streak running through it. This didnât make a lot of sense to us; we were just responding to the text as a work of literary art, and not a very funny one. Maybe Traumnovelle is a comedy in the sense that Don Giovanni is: attempted rape and compulsive pathetic list-keeping, implied impotence, and the don dragged down into hell forever, the old sex machine ignorant and defiant to the end. A pretty severe and upsetting comedy, not very giocoso, and not the essence of Traumnovelle, which more than anything else is sinister. The way we writers saw it, it was as frightening as The Shining. Now I think we were all too square to imagine what Stanley saw in Steve Martin, because this was not The Jerk. This could have turned out to be another one of those stories you heard so many times about him, usually from cameramen and other high-echelon crew: Stanley said we should try to do it this way and I said itâs never been done this way, and it canât be done this way, the wrong stops on the wrong lens on the wrong camera, and he did it anyway, and he was right.
We talked about it for years, starting that afternoon, because I donât think Emilio could have made it back to St. Albans before Stanley called. âDidja read it? What do you think?â After about an hour, he asked if Iâd had a chance to look at the Hilberg book yet. I reminded him that Iâd only just gotten it.
When he sent you a book, he wanted you to read it, and not just read it, but to drop everything and get into it. John Calley, who was probably Stanleyâs closest friend, told me that when he was head of production at Warners in the 70s and first working with him, Stanley sent him a set of Frazerâs The Golden Bough, unabridged, and then bugged him every couple of weeks for a year about reading it. Finally Calley said, âStanley, Iâve got a studio to run. I donât have time to read mythology.â âIt isnât mythology, John,â Stanley said. âItâs your life.â
I picked the Hilberg up many times and put it down again. I finally read it only a few years ago, when I knew there was no possibility that Stanley would ever use it for a film, and I could see why Stanley was so absorbed by it. It was a forbidding volume; densely laid out in a two-column format, it was nearly 800 pages long, small print, heavily footnoted, so minutely detailed that one would have to be more committed than I was at the moment to its inconceivably dreadful subject. I could see that it was exhaustive; it certainly looked like hard work, and it read like a complete log of the Final Solution. And every couple of weeks, Stanley would call and ask me if Iâd read it yet. âYou should read it, Michael, itâs monumental!â This went on for months.
Finally I said, âStanley, I canât make it.â
âWhy not?â
âI donât know. I guess right now I just donât want to read a book called The Destruction of the European Jews.â
âNo, Michael,â he said. âThe book you donât want to read right now is The Destruction of the European Jews, Part Two.â
You know, Michael, itâs not absolutely true in every case that nobody likes a smart-ass,â Stanley was saying.I once described 1980â83 as one phone call lasting three years, with interruptions. This serial call had many of the characteristics of the college bull sessionâlong free-form late-night intellectual inquiries, discursions, conversations, displays, and Iâd think, Doesnât this guy get tired?âlike talking to a very smart kid in a dorm room until three in the morning. But then Stanley never went to college; he was only a stunningly accomplished autodidact, one of those people we may hear about but rarely meet, the almost-but-not-quite-legendary Man on Whom Nothing Is Lost.
âHey, Michael, didja ever read Herodotus? The Father of Lies?â or âFrankly, Iâve never understood why Schopenhauer is considered so pessimistic. I never thought he was pessimistic, did you, Michael?ââlaughing at the four or five things he found so funny in this, with a winsome touch of self-deprecation, half-apologetic… Itâs not my fault Iâm so smart. And Iâd think, Doesnât he have anything else to do? But this is what he did. These calls were about information. They were about Stanleyâs work.
Weâd be talking about something, like why âmost war movies always look so phony,â or why we thought this movie or that book was such a hit, and weâd be suddenly off across 2,000 years of Western culture, âfrom Plato to nato.â He was just an old-fashioned social Darwinist (seemingly), with layer upon layer of the old, now vanishing Liberal Humanism, disappointed but undimmed, and without contradiction; if he made no distinctions between Art and Commerce, or Poetry and Technology, or even Personal and Professional, why should he make them between âPoliticsâ and Philosophy?
Stanley had views on everything, but I wouldnât exactly call them political. (âHey Michael, whatâs the definition of a neoconservative? A liberal whoâs just been mugged, ha ha ha ha.â) His views on democracy were those of most people I know, neither left nor right, not exactly brimming with belief, a noble failed experiment along our evolutionary way, brought low by base instincts, money and self-interest and stupidity. (If a novelist expresses this view, heâs a visionary, apparently, but if a movie director does, heâs a misanthrope.) He thought the best system might be under a benign despot, although he had little belief that such a man could be found. He wasnât exactly a cynic, but he could have passed for one. He was certainly a capitalist. He believed himself to be a realist. He was known to be a tough guy. The way I see him, essentially, he was an artist to his fingertips, and he needed a lot of cover, and a lot of control.
For the most part we talked about writers, usually dead and white and Euro-American, hardly the current curriculum. Stendhal (half an hour), Balzac (two hours), Conrad, Crane, Hemingway (hours and hoursââDo you think it was true that he was drunk all the time, even when he wrote? Yeah? Well, Iâll have to find out what he was drinking and send a case to all my writersâ), CĂ©line (âMy favorite anti-Semiteâ), and Kafka, who he thought was the greatest writer of the century, and the most misread: People who used the word âKafkaesqueâ had probably never read Kafka. Iâd read The Golden Boughand didnât have to go through that again, but he urged me to check out Machiavelli, and The Art of War (years before Michael Ovitz slipped him a copy), and Veblenâs The Theory of the Leisure Class. He had a taste and a gift for the creative-subversive, and he dug Swift and Malaparte and William Burroughs, and was interested that Burroughs was a friend of mine. I got him to read Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; he thought it was incredibly beautiful, but âthereâs no movie in it. I mean, whereâs the weenie, Michael?â Then heâd be into something else, the âinevitableâ fiscal and social disaster lurking in the burgeoning mutual-fund market, or how heâd like to make a movie about doctors because âeverybody hates doctorsâ (his father was a doctor), or the savage abiding mystery of Mother Russia, or why opera was âquite possibly the greatest art formâ except, oh yeah, maybe for the movies. Then heâd dish about the movies.
âAlways thinking, huh, Stanley?â I said after one of those exhausting (for me) rooftop-to-rooftop riffs of his. I felt that these calls were starting to take up most of my time, yet I knew they didnât take up most of his, that he was doing other things, âmany many of them.â I acquired a sense of awe at the energy that had coincided so forcefully with my own. You really needed your chops for this; youâd feel like some poor traveler caught in a ground blizzard, 3 to 30 times a week and usually after 10 at night, when he usually started wailing. Sometimes Iâd duck his calls.
We talked this way, with occasional visits to his house, dinners and movies, until he found Gustav Hasfordâs The Short-Timers bought the rights, wrote a long treatment of it, and asked me to work on the script with him. Then we really started talking. By then I knew Iâd been working for Stanley from the minute I met him.
Stanley could never be accused of breaking any sumptuary laws. He may have been the master of Childwick Bury, but he dressed like a cottager, and it was very becoming, too. He wore the same thing every day, beat chinos, some sort of work shirt, usually in one of the darker shades of blue, a ripstop cotton fatigue jacket with many pockets, a pair of running shoes, so well broken in that you almost might think he was a runner (and not a man who liked to be seated), and an all-weather anorak. He had something like a dozen or so sets of this outfit in his closet, so he changed his clothes every day but never his wardrobe. When his daughter Katharina got married in 1984, he went to the Marks & Spencer in St. Albans and bought a dark-blue suit for ÂŁ85, and a white shirt and a tie, and from one of the High Street shoe shops a pair of black shoes that he told me were made of cardboard. But he had never been admired for his dress sense. Even back in the late 50s, when he was working in Hollywood, the insouciance of his attire was remarked upon by many producers and actors, who thought that he dressed like a Beatnik. Body-blocked, uncomfortable in physical contact, even Stanleyâs handshake was a bit awkward. The last time I saw himâwe hadnât seen each other in four yearsâhe actually put an arm around my shoulder, but I think he felt he might have gone too far, and quickly withdrew it. I donât mean to suggest that Stanley was not a warm person, only that he didnât express it in kissing or hugging or even touching, except with his animals. Apollonian not DionysianâI couldnât see him on the dance floor breaking hearts. He hated being photographed, and the few glimpses of Stanley on film, in his daughter Vivian Kubrickâs documentary The Making of âThe Shining,â show a man who clearly doesnât want to be there at all. He never had the impulse to slip around to the other side of the camera like Orson Welles or John Huston or Hitchcock. I think he felt that he impressed quite enough of himself on his films without that.
Heâd once been a chain-smoker, and would mooch the odd cigarette, but very rarely. He wasnât especially appetitive, except where information was concerned. He ate temperately, almost never took a drink, and was drug-free. Stanley had a lot of self-control, to put it mildly a hundredfold.
He had small fine hands that he seldom used when he talked, with slender white fingers, expressive even in repose, although they were often in his beard, or up to his glasses for a compulsive adjustment. He had an odd habitual gesture, a stiff sweeping movement of the arm, indicating some low-rent real estate of the mind, âOver there, where we donât want to be.â He had small feet, rather dainty, and they moved him along very quickly and smoothly. When I saw him on a set after years of only seeing him in his house, I was amazed at how fast he moved, how light he was, darting around the crew and cameras like one of the Sugar Rays, grace and purpose in motion.
He was totally contained physically, but everything else about him, all the action going on behind the forehead, was in constant play, and it showedâblack beard and black hair horseshoeing back from his high brow to the crown of his head; he looked like he took care of his teeth; and although his mouth wasnât particularly sensual, he had an interesting repertoire of smiles, expressing a wide range of thought and irony and amusement.
As for his famous eyes, described as dark, focused, and piercing, he looked out from a perceptibly deep place, and the look went far inside you, if you were what he happened to be looking at. Only extremely startled people ever get their eyes open that wide. I know that quite a few people, mostly actors, have unraveled when they got caught in Stanleyâs beams, even though there was rarely much anger in them. Stanleyâs look was just so deliberate, as cool as functioning intelligence itself, demanding satisfaction, or resolution, some kind of answer to some kind of problem before the next problem arose, which it would. Life was problem solving, and to solve a problem you have to see the problem. The eyebrows, especially when arched, were the coup de grĂące.
After I moved back to America in 1991, the calls fell off a bit to something like once a month. Usually heâd open with âNow, Michael, donât ask me anything about what Iâm doing, O.K.?â I knew, but not from him, that heâd optioned the rights to a book Iâd had sent to him in bound galleys, a possible way to make a two-hour Holocaust film, Louis Begleyâs Wartime Lies, which Stanley adapted and called Aryan Papers; I heard heâd talked to Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman about it. Heâd also been working with Brian Aldiss and a couple of other writers on A.I., a cyber-age version of âthe Pinocchio myth,â which he scrapped because he thought it would be too expensive to make, until he saw Jurassic Park and started calling Steven Spielberg every 20 minutes to talk about the technology heâd used. I heard about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and Eyes Wide Shut. Then about three years ago he called.âHey, Michael, what do you charge these days for a wash and a rinse?â
He was four or five months away from shooting Eyes Wide Shut, with a script heâd written with Frederic Raphael. The story was set in New York in the 90s, and he felt it needed âa little colloquializing.â
âYou know, like, when someone says âHelloâ it should read âHi.â [Laughing.] It needs your ear, Michael. Itâs perfect for you.â
âHow long?â
âAt the very most, two weeks. But it isnât about how long. Itâs about the magic.â He was laughing, but he meant it.
Naturally, he wouldnât send the script he wanted âcolloquializedâ to me to read. Iâd have to go to England and read it in his house, and once you walked in that door, it wasnât always so easy to walk out again. I didnât want to leave my family or my work and get into that kind of involvement with him again without some assurances. I said Iâd do it only as a member of the Writers Guild, and that heâd definitely have to talk to my agent, Sam Cohn, at ICM. I told him that Sam was extremely intelligent and discreet, and besides, this was a Tom Cruise movie, and I felt that agents were appropriate, even required. I knew heâd never call Sam, and he never did. He wanted this to be between us, for a complex of reasons involving money and secrecy, affection and control, respect and pathology and old timesâ sake. Stanley tried over the next few weeks to get me to change my mind, just drop everything and come over, but I couldnât. When I think of all the ways he had of getting people to do what he wanted them to do, and of how much I liked him, I surprised myself.
âCome on, Michael,â he said, âitâll be fun.â
And that was the problem. If you had anything even resembling a life, time and money and Stanleyâs will could be a deadly infusion. I think I hurt his feelings. Over the next two and a half years, as I read about the ever expanding shooting schedule, I pictured myself chained to a table in his house, endlessly washing and rinsing for laughs and minimum wage, strenuous unprotected intercourse, and I had no regrets. Now, of course, I have a few.
I can hear my previous agent now all the way from 1983, when heâd just received Stanleyâs appalling offer for my writing services on Full Metal Jacket. Rendered almost inarticulate by representational indignation, he taunted, âLittle Stanley Kubrick wants his Bar Mitzvah moneyâ (a Jewish man talking to a Jewish man about another Jewish man), adding, âAnd it isnât even his money!,â obviously impressed, as we all were, by the nerve of the guy.Stanley was a good friend, and wonderful to work with, but he was a terrible man to do business with, terrible. His cheapness was proverbial, and itâs true that in the matter of deal-making, whether it was his money or Warner Bros.â money, it flowed down slow and thin, and sometimes not at all, unless you were a necessary star, and even then: it bugged him for years that Jack Nicholson made more money from The Shining than he did. If, I feel I should add, Nicholson really did.
Stanleyâs money pathology was one of the most amazing behavioral phenomena Iâve ever witnessed. In spite of the care he took, and the tremendous price he paid, to distance himself in all ways from the brutal, greedy men who ran Hollywood, a piece of him was always heart to heart with them, elective affinity, and he would sometimes use their methods. Itâs possible that a few of Stanleyâs ships sailed under Liberian registration, that his word was not necessarily his bond; and itâs true, if you were only in it for the money, I can see where you would feel undercompensated, some have said ripped off.
Stanley was the Big Fisherman. He played everybody like a fish, but all different fish, from the majestic salmon to the great white shark, from the agile trout to the sluggish mudfish, each to be played in its particular way according to the speed of the current and the fighting capacity of his adversary, and obviously his desire and even need for the fish. Sometimes there was just more fight than play, and heâd cut bait, but much more often there were the ones who couldnât wait to jump right into his boat and knock themselves out, because after all he was Stanley Kubrick.
And he knew it, had every reason to know it. It really was Stanleyâs feeling that it was a privilege to be working with him, and it wasnât remotely the way it sounds, it was a reality that existed far beyond any question of arrogance or humility. I agreed with it then, and nothing ever happened to make me feel any different. Still, it made him happy, knowing that I would never make more than the lamest pro forma difficulties over what he loved to call âemoluments.â Probably somewhere he pitied me for being so careless with my âprice,â for offering him my soft white throat like that, knowing as Iâdid that he would never find it on his pathological screen not to take advantage of it.
âGee, Michael, youâre such a pure guy,â almost drooling with sarcasm.
âAre you calling me a schmuck, Stanley?â And my agentâs words would pop into my head.
Stanley hadnât really been Bar Mitzvahed. He was barely making it in school; he couldnât do junior-high English, let alone Hebrew, and besides, Dr. and Mrs. Kubrick werenât very religious, and anyway, Stanley didnât want to. He was not what anybody would have called well rounded. From the day he entered grade school in 1934, his attendance record had been a mysterious tissue of serial and sustained absences, his discipline nonexistent or at least nonapparent, his grades shocking. Heâd received Unsatisfactory on âWorks and Plays Well with Others,â âRespects Rights of Others,â and, inevitably, âPersonality.â He did all right in physics, but he graduated from high school with a 70 average, and college was out of the question. At 17 he was already working as a freelance photographer for Look magazine, and he joined the staff, and he played a lot of chess, and read a lot of books, and otherwise arranged for his own higher education, as all smart people do.
Stanley always seemed supernaturally youthful to his friends. His voice didnât age over the almost 20 years that I knew him. He had a disarming way of âleaveningâ serious discourse with low adolescent humor, smutty actually, sophomoric, by which I mean a sophomore in high school. (Think of Lolita, with its cherry-pie, cavity-filling, and limp-noodle jokes, so blatantly smutty, without shame, subversive, which was the idea. Heâd set the lyric-erotic Nabokovian tone and captured an essence of the novel in the opening credit sequence, the tender and meticulous painting of Lolitaâs toes, and then begun the comedy. What a fabulous shiny moral barometer that movie looked like in 1962, when it was new, and how we loved which way we thought the wind was going to blow.) Everybody brings his adolescence forward through life with him, but Stanleyâs adolescence was like a spring, not necessarily rising pure, but always fresh, and refreshing, and touching, because youâd get a glimpse at times of someone like Little Stanley in there, an awesomely intelligent teenager in a lot of pain keeping his courage up. Sometimes I imagined that I could see his actual adolescence in all its devious complexity.
In Vincent LoBruttoâs biography Stanley Kubrick, thereâs a photograph of this socially challenged, academically reviled phenom, taken when he was 12 or 13, around the time he would have been Bar Mitzvahed, if heâd been Bar Mitzvahed, like a normal person. As a piece of evidence in some kind of Citizen Kane scavenger hunt to establish the character of a legend, itâs convincing in suggesting how this possibly dweeb-like little Jewish kid from the Bronx came to identify so intimately yet so appropriately with Napoleon.
Itâs as striking and unsettling as photographs he used later in his movies: the late Mr. Haze in Lolita, âthe soul of integrity,â whose mean, calculating eyes look down from his widowâs bedroom wall (his ashes are displayed on the bureau) upon the sexual train-wreck-waiting-to-happen, or Jack Torrance in The Shining, who has âalways been the caretakerâ at the Overlook, smiling like One Possessed in a picture on the hotel wall taken a generation before he was born. Only just pubescent and already temperamentally if not yet tactically beyond the possibility of compromise; secretive but frank, focused, willful, serious and seriously amused, not looking at you so much as past you, at what Iâd be reluctant to say. I would call it a picture of a very powerful boy, a handful (as Iâm sure someone in the house must have called him at least once), maybe not certain of what he wants but unusually clear about what he doesnât want, and wonât stand still for; very refined features, delicate but tough, Stanley on the trembling lip of manhood, a pre-teen face enveloping an ancient soul, like heâs already seen them come and seen them go, and so what?
(This photograph could also suggest why, when he came to make his âyouth movie,â actual youth was completely absent from it. A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971 to unprecedented controversy, odium even, revealing presumptions in the critical âcommunityâ about the high order of our so-called civilization that Stanley was affronting here, a condemnation of the ambiguity that has always been the sign of the first-rate. I think he scared himself with that one, which speaks well for any artist, art and life riding so close together and out of control here that there was no time for one to imitate the other, it was pouring from the same fount. The copycat beatings and killings started as soon as it was shown in England, and he permanently withdrew it from release there. Right-minded people couldnât believe that he was aware of what a repellent film heâd made, because if heâd been aware he could never have made it. But certainly he was aware, and perfectly sincere; he didnât care that it was repellentâit was meant to be repellentâas long as it was beautiful.)
He disliked the usual references to his having been a âchess hustlerâ in his Greenwich Village days, as though this impugned the gravity and beauty of the exercise, the suggestion that his game wasnât pour le sport or, more correctly, pour lâart. To win the game was important, to win the money was irresistible, but it was nothing compared with his game, with the searching, endless action of working on his game. But of course he was hustling, he was always hustling; as he grew older and moved beyond still photography, chess became movies, and movies became chess by other means. I doubt that he ever thought of chess as just a game, or even as a game at all. I do imagine that a lot of people sitting across the board from him got melted, fried, and fragmented when Stanley let that cool ray come streaming down out of his eyesâtalk about penetrating looks and piercing intelligence; here theyâd sat down to a nice game of chess, and all of a sudden he was doing the thinking for both of them.
A high-school friend, the director Alexander Singer, went with Stanley to see Eisensteinâs Alexander Nevsky around this time. âAnd we hear Prokofievâs score for the battle on the ice and Stanley never gets over that. He bought a record of it and… played it over and over and over again,â until his kid sister couldnât stand it anymore and broke it. âI think the word âobsessiveâ is not unfair.â
Itâs fair only as far as it goes; just as he was multidisciplined, he was variously obsessive, and not fastidious about picking up information, and not afraid of whatever the information might be. Nobody who really thinks heâs smarter than everyone else could ask as many questions as he always did. He was beating the patzers in the park, working for Look magazine, sometimes using a series of still photos to tell a story, sometimes taking pictures of people like Dwight Eisenhower and George Grosz, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio (and, Iâm sure, keeping his eyes and ears open), reading 10 or 20 books a week, and trying to see every movie ever made. There was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing. As a kid heâd been part of the neighborhood multitude that poured ritually, communally, in and out of Loewâs Paradise and the RKO Fordham two or three times a week, and now he haunted the Museum of Modern Art and the few foreign-film revival houses, the very underground Cinema 16, and the triple-feature houses along 42nd Street.
Reportedly he was already careless, even reckless, in his appearance, mixing his plaids in wild shirt, jacket and necktie combinations never seen on the street before, disreputable trousers, way-out accidental hairdos. He started infiltrating what- ever film facilities were in the city in those days, hanging around cutting rooms, labs, equipment stores, asking questions: How do you do that? and What would happen if you did this instead? and How much do you think it would cost if…? He was jazz-mad, and went to the clubs, and a Yankees fan, so he went to the ball games too, all of this in New York in the late 40s and early 50s, a smart, spacey, wide-awake kid like that, itâs no wonder he was such a hipster, a 40s-bred, 50s-minted, tough-minded, existential, highly evolved classic hipster. His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruceâs than to any other directorâs, and this was not merely a recurring aspect of his. He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.
Just look at the credits of Killerâs Kiss to see what the 27-year-old director thought of himself even then. Story Byâno screenplay credit is givenâProduced By, and Edited, Photographed and Directed By Stanley Kubrick. But get a load of the film too. He made it under severe time and money limitations, which he addressed like a soldier, and not a boy soldier either, making virtues out of limitations, so that even though itâs only 67 minutes long itâs not really a small movie. You can see in 10 seconds how infatuated he was with the medium, and how incredibly adept, every scene packed with ideas, ambition, with tribute, hommage, even the odd tributary theft (what he started calling âsouveniringâ later, when he began picking up on the Vietnam grunt vernacular), mostly from the Europeans who had given him so much pleasure and inspiration: Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, Vsevelod Pudovkin, Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, and, always, Max OphĂŒls, with that fluent, rapturous, delirious camera of his. It also has a strange ending, a painful travesty of a happy ending, where the couple go off together even though weâve seen both of them cravenly betray and desert each other to save their own lives. Itâs the kind of touch that would come to be called Kubrickian.
II
Money well timed and properly applied can accomplish anything. âThackeray and/or Kubrick, Barry Lyndon.
We were driving toward Beckton, an abandoned gas- works in far East London, near the London docks. It was a late masterpiece of the 19th-century Imperial Industrial Style, and Stanley had arranged to blow it up for his Vietnam film, let the pieces fall exactly where he wanted them to fall, even if it meant countermanding the laws of physics, and re-create Hue, which it already uncannily resembled, built about the same time as the industrial district of the Vietnamese city, and out of the same grand, doomed cultural assumptions. (He never got the thin light of the Southeast England skies to match the opulent light over Vietnam, but whatever could be dressed was dressed Ă la Kubrick, Stanley studying photographs of palm trees that heâd had taken in Spain, individually choosing from the thousands of trees which ones he wanted in his movie. Very meticulous guy, Stanley.)
Beckton (or Bec Phu, as it was called after its Vietnamization) was about 40 miles from his house. He drove us, and he drove the white Porsche that he supposedly used only to tool around his driveway in. He handled the stick with great proficiency. He drove at speeds above 60, and neither of us wore a crash helmet. It may be true, as has been reported so many times, and is in all the books about him, that he wouldnât let anybody driving him go above 35, and would not get in a car without a helmet. Itâs not unbelievable. His whole hard drive was up there; it would only be prudent to protect it, to say the least. Maybe by the time I knew him heâd grown reckless.
As we approached the gasworks, Stanley pointed to a row of small, grimy houses across the road from the plant.
âIâll bet they were owned by the company,â he said. âTheyâd rent them out to their laborers and their families. They had them coming and going. It reminds me of the old studio system.â
I looked over at them. They were so marginal, so dark.
âI wonder who lives in them now.â
âPoor people,â Stanley said.
Stanley liked to quote the songwriter Sammy Cahn, who was asked in an interview which came first, the words or the music. âThe check,â Sammy said. (Stanley called him âSammy.â He had never met him, but they were in the same business.)Heâd say that when he was younger and people used to ask him why he became a movie director, heâd tell them, Because the pay was good. He was excited by the roar of the propellers as big money took off and went flying through the system, circulating and separating into fewer and larger pockets, even if those pockets were not always his own; he just liked knowing that it was going on out there. He had great respect for the box office, if not the greatest respect, and found something to admire in even the most vile movie once it passed a hundred million. For him, that kind of success always produced some kind of wonderful/horrible aura, vox populi, a reflection of a meaningful fragment of the culture that he contemplated so ardently. Stanley never was one of those middle-class American Jewish men who are afraid of success.
He loved the biz, the industry, the action he observed day and night from his bridge; all those actors and directors and projects, all the dumb energy endlessly turning over in the studios and the P.R. that came with each new product; he loved being a part of it from his amazing remove, and in terms of being a player, he didnât see himself as better or worse, higher or lower, than any of them, all of them in play together, playing toward commerce and art, big expensive art and works of art for the cash register or, as Iâve sometimes thought in his case, art films with blockbuster pretensions.
He wasnât exactly Show People, but he knew a lot about the procedures and protocols: if I mentioned some moment Iâd liked in one of his films, heâd say, âShowmanship, Michael,â with more irony and levels of irony than you can imagine, with so much amusement, and affection, and respect. And modesty.
Iâm not claiming that Stanley wasnât self-absorbed, but I donât think that just because he was obsessive-retentive he was a monomaniac, or even any more egocentric than anybody else in the movies. And I suppose that he was âselfish,â which doesnât exactly make him a freak in the Directors Guild (or the Writers Guild either), nor was his particular selfishness uncharacteristic of artists in general, especially when theyâve acquired the reputation for genius. A powerful vision can be very fragile while itâs still only in the mind, and people have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect it. He didnât think he was the only person in the world, or the only director, or even the only great director. I just think that he thought he was the greatest director, although he never said so in so many words.
III
Just because you like my work doesnât mean that I owe you anything. âBob Dylan
Itâs been said by critics that he was misogynistic, although he photographed some women beautifully: Jean Simmons in Spartacus, Sue Lyon in Lolita, Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon, Susanne Christian in Paths of Glory, and, judging from the 90-second trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman. There are some wonderful women in Stanleyâs movies, and some of them he had enough respect for that he made them as dangerous as any of the men. And they say he couldnât make love stories, when what they mean is he couldnât make happy love stories, since thereâs the famously difficult love of Humbert and Lo in Lolita, and Redmond Barryâs young love for his cousin Nora in Barry Lyndon. She marries a pompous, cowardly, ugly Englishman for her convenience and the convenience of her family, turning Redmond into a fatally hard case. His films were certainly unromantic, possibly even anti-romantic.I know from dozens of articles and a few too many books that Stanley was considered cold, although this would have to be among people who never knew him. This perception devolved into cant among a lot of critics, who called his work sterile, particularly in the New York circle (what an awful time liberals have had with his movies; what convolutions of reason and belief, what sad denials of pleasure), including some of the best, even Anthony Lane of The New Yorker. Writing the week after Stanleyâs death about Killerâs Kiss, he says, âBecause Kubrick was still learning, and was hobbled by a tight budget, he couldnât help stumbling up against life; the story of his subsequent career has been the slow and maniacal banishment of that young manâs riskiness, to the point where feelings, like rainfall, can be measured by the inch.â So how many inches for Charlotte Hazeâs hunger and confusion, or for Humbertâs unending torture, in Lolita? How many for the loneliness verging on desperation of a space thatâs empty beyond conception, and even emptier for the presence of a few humans, in 2001: A Space Odyssey? How many for Lady Lyndonâs humiliation and despair, and for all of Barryâs disappointments, however well earned, or for the grief they attempt to share at the death of their child, in Barry Lyndon? What about the living hell of Jackâs madness/possession in The Shining, or the truly unbearable suffering of Marine recruit Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket? Not even Robert Bresson showed more suffering in his films. Merciless is not the same as pitiless. In 2001, even the last words of a dying, sexually ambivalent computer are pitiful. Worse, to some unforgivable, even vicious, violent Droogie Alex in A Clockwork Orange, denatured and cast out by Em and Pee and the unspeakable Joe the Lodger, breaks your heart as he walks along the river clutching his life in a parcel, and itâs not a comfortable feeling. As Stanley said when we started to write Full Metal Jacket, âWell, Michael, it looks like Iâm making another Who Do You Root For movie.â
Just as it made Stanley happy to know that all was well in the Emolumental Universe, so it upset and offended him to hear stories of profligacy among members of the industry. This wasnât simply a phobic reaction to waste and folly, it was a response to energy and intelligence that werenât burning like his own, furious and clean. I told him about a dinner Iâd had a few nights before with a director, a man whose history had set new industry standards for wretched excess, and there he was again, committing further hubris in a London restaurant, leaving ÂŁ300 worth of wine that had been ordered and opened sitting untouched on the table when we left. Stanley shook his head sadly. âYou see, Michael. These guys donât know how to live like monks.âI have to apologize for repeating this story, which Iâve told before, because I donât know how to describe Stanley to you without it. Iâd already begun to think of him that way before he said it, half joking and perfectly serious. His distance from people, his âimpersonality,â were always attributed to his supposed neuroses, his âmisanthropy,â but I think they were more probably signs of his purity. He lived a simple (outer) life, and a largely devotional one, although admittedly secular. Childwick Bury was as much a studio as a home, a double studio actually, one for him and his movies and one for his wife, Christiane, and her painting. It was a space of perpetual creative activity. He was thought by the press, and so by the public, to be sequestered there, lurking, scheming, like Howard Hughes or Dr. Mabuse or the Wizard of Oz, depending on which paper you read. This is because none of them could ever imagine living the kind of life Stanley lived. Anyway, he wasnât misanthropic, he was irreverent; and come to think of it, he wasnât irreverent either.
They say he had no personal life, but thatâs ridiculous. It would be more correct to say that he had no professional life, since everything he did was personally done; every move and every call he made, every impulse he expressed, was utterly personal, devoted to the making of his movies, which were all personal. In terms of worldly activity, since youâd have to look to the spiritual sector to find anything like it, I never knew anyone who cared so much and so completely about his work.
When we first met I told him secondhand stories about the filming of Apocalypse Now, and what a tough shoot it had been. âTheyâre all tough, Michael,â he said, and they were, at least the way he did it. Yet something drew people to it, and kept them at it, even into the part of the process where you felt like you were a slave, to it and to him, like he and his movie were inseparable, insatiable, you were trapped in it, even though the door was always open and you were technically, if not always contractually, free to walk through it at any time. People stayed, holding on to whatever piece of the prevailing obsession was going around at the moment, dragging massive blocks nights and weekends and holidays to build another one of Stanleyâs pyramids, and whether cheerful or resentful didnât matter that much to him, although he preferred cheerful.
The more highly paid you were, or the closer to the actual shooting, the more enslaved you were likely to be. If you were right there on the set with film running, the pressure could be amazing, or so I was convincingly told by many of the cast and crew of Full Metal Jacket. I wasnât the cameraman or the art director or even a grip, or, thank God, an actor. I was only even on the location two or three times, so maybe I wasnât properly enslaved at all. I may have rewritten a few scenes 20 or 30 timesâI would have done that anywayâbut I never had to go through the number of takes Stanley would require. It was everything anyone ever said it was and more, and worse, whatever it took to âget it right,â as he always called it. What he meant by that I couldnât say, nor could hundreds of people who have worked for him, but none of us doubted that he knew what he meant.
After seeing Paths of Glory, I remember walking out on the street and thinking that Iâd never seen anybody shot and killed in a movie before. I was 17, Iâd seen a few (thousand) movies, and I soon realized that Iâd been seeing it all my life: cowboys shooting Indians, Indians shooting cavalry, cops shooting robbers, good guys shooting bad guys, weak guys shooting strong guys, Japanese and Germans and Americans shooting one anotherâit was a staple of the cinema. This was the first time Iâd seen it done in this way, as calculated and pitiless as a firing squad itself, no possibility to dissociate, no way to look someplace else. Stanley had apparently wanted a last-minute reprieve for the condemned soldiers, a happy ending, because it was more commercial, and he wanted to make money. Now, 25 years later, he wanted Joker, the teenage hero of The Short-Timers and of his still-untitled movie, to die. (He also wanted a Joker voice-over.) I didnât think so. âItâs the Death of the Hero,â he said. âItâll be so powerful, so moving.â And he was genuinely moved by it. âWeâve seen it in Homer, Michael.âIâd arrived for work in the late afternoon. âReady for some serious brainstorming, Michael? You want a drink first?â I reflexively checked my watch. âHow come all you heavy drinkers always look at your watches when somebody offers you a drink?â
Jim Thompson, the toughest pulp novelist of them all, had made him nervous when they were working together on The Killing, a big guy in a dirty old raincoat, a terrific writer but a little too hard-boiled for Stanleyâs taste. Heâd turn up for work carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag, but saying nothing about itâit was just there on the desk with no apology or commentânot at all interested in putting Stanley at ease except to offer him the bag, which Stanley declined, and making no gestures whatever to any part of the Hollywood process, except maybe toward the money.
We were working that afternoon in the War Room, a large space on the ground floor, which would have been airy if it hadnât been crammed with computers and filing cabinets, long trestle tables littered with sketches, plans, contracts, hundreds of photographs of weapons, streets, pagodas, prostitutes, shrines, signs. (Heâd taken three months, an entire summer, to go through his Full Metal Jacket contract with Warners, crawling up underneath the boilerplating to make sure there were no hidden viruses, checking the esoteric meanings of âforce majeure,â calling his lawyer, Louis Blau, in L.A. every hour, because Stanley hated surprises.) There were two sets of French doors opening onto the garden, part of which was fenced off to make sure that none of the dogs got to any of the cats. He kept the cats in this section of the house and fed them himself. While we talked he cleaned their litter boxes.
The American language of the Vietnam War gave him tremendous pleasure. âMichael, I need this scene finished most ricky-tickâ (a variation on âI donât want it good, I want it Tuesdayâ), or âMichael, these pages you sent me today are Number Ten. [Laughing.] In fact, I think they may even be Number Twelve.â One scene, where a bunch of Marines sit around in the evening eating C rations and talking (titled âC Rats with Andreâ on the scene-by-scene file cards he kept), wasnât only too long but too talky, boring, and a little sentimental. âShouldnât there be some guy playing a harmonica in the back?â he said. One day we took a few of Stanleyâs guns over to a local gun club and fired at their range. It surprised him that someone whoâd spent so much time in a war could be such a lousy shot. âGee, Michael, Iâm beginning to wonder if youâve got what it takes to carry a rifle in my beloved Corps.â
The walls of his workrooms were one continuous shooting boardâlists and schedules, names, dates, equipment, locations; except for one crowded wall, which seemed to be devoted to Stanleyâs investments.
He liked the way my pages looked: open spacing, agreeable format, good font, big enough for easy reading but never obtrusive. He was very happy with the dialogue. But he wanted the scenes shorter. âTell me, Michael, did you ever see a movie that had too many good short scenes?ââa funny question from a director who loved long takes and long scenes, who was, in Anthony Laneâs opinion, âalarmingly insolent toward the demands of chronology,â which wasnât meant as a compliment but should be, and referred perhaps to the leap across three million years in a single jump cut in 2001, or the languorous protractions of 18th-century discourse held in rooms lit by candles in Barry Lyndon, every one of his films making its powerful assertion that pace is story as surely as character is destiny. Heâd watched The Godfather again the night before and was reluctantly suggesting for the 10th time that it was possibly the greatest movie ever made, and certainly the best-cast.
âYour buddy Francis really hit the nail on the head with that one…; [Because Francis was another director, and a friend of mine, Stanley affected to regard him through a long lens.] It was certainly better than One from the Heart.â
âI loved One from the Heart,â I said.
âBoy, Michael, youâre so loyal…; Anyway, what were we talking about?â
âComputers.â
It drove him nuts that I didnât use one. This was 1983, pre-laptop. There were five computers in this room alone, all running, and heâd move from station to station to feed and manipulate data while we talked.
âMichael, listen to me: itâs only a very limited, arbitrary, and simple series of commands that you just donât know yet. I mean, how hard can it be? The police use them.â
âI know, Stanley, butââ
âMichael Iâm telling you, blah blah blah,â and âMichael I swear to God blah blah blah…; At least for screenplays [a lesser form] youâre crazy not to use them.â
He gave a demonstration to soften my Luddite heart and show me that I was only making more work for myself by resisting. He went to the computer that he was using to write the script. He typed, marked, cut, pasted, while I faked interest. When he was finished with the routine, Christiane phoned to say that dinner was ready. As we left, I reminded him that he hadnât turned the computers off.
âThey like to be left on,â he said ironically, factually, tenderly.
I sometimes thought that he was ruled by his aversions; chief among themâworse than waste, haste, carelessness to details, hugging, and even germsâwas bullshit in all its proliferating manifestations, subtle and gross, from the flabby political face telling lies on TV to the most private, much more devastating lies we tell ourselves. Culture lies were especially revolting. Hypocrisy was not some petty human foible, it was the corrupted essence of our predicament, which for Stanley was purely an existential predicament. In terms of narrative, since movies are stories, the most contemptible lie was sentimentality, and the most disgusting lie was sanctimoniousness.Once a year heâd get the latest issue of Maledicta, a journal of scatological invective and insult, unashamedly incorrect, willfully scurrilous, and pretty funny, and read me the highlights.
âHey Michael, whatâs the American Dream?â
âI give.â
âTen million blacks swimming to Africa, with a Jew under each arm.â
To which he added, âDonât worry, Michael. They donât mean us.â
Since everybody talks about Stanley Kubrickâs Eye, Iâd like to say a word about his Ear: Iâve been reading lately about his âsuspicion of language,â in books and critical pieces, and in the often strangely rancorous tributes that followed his death, and yet itâs always seemed obvious to me that language was one of the most striking things about his films. Whether cunningly, crushingly banal (a couple of ânormal guys [getting] together to talk about world events in a normal sort of way,â as Quilty incognito tells Humbert agonistes in Lolita) or in manic bursts of frantic satire (inspired and encouraged, maybe childishly egged on, by Terry Southern and Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove), or starkly obscene, utterly cruel, sparing nobodyâs sensibilities, from yarblocko nadsat in A Clockwork Orange to the elaborate yet brutal locutions of the 18th century in Barry Lyndon to the vicious comedy of Full Metal Jacket, he was highly sensitive to literary mise en scĂšne, completely susceptible to it. He wasnât merely unsuspicious of language, he was a believer, he had faith in it. Without it, dialogue was just talk.
Once he became his own man, he was drawn to his projects as much by the writing of the source material as by anything else. Story was at least as alive in the voice as it was in the plot; I know this is true of Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket (and if it didnât already exist in Stephen King, Stanley and Diane Johnson brilliantly invented it for The Shining), and although I havenât seen it, Iâm sure that Eyes Wide Shut will contain the reflected, refracted, written essence of Arthur Schnitzlerâs Dream Novel, no matter what Stanley did to the âstory,â after leaving it to season for nearly 30 years in his mind. He was always looking for the visual equivalents of what heâd first responded to when he read the book, and in that way paying some real respect to it.
Stanley didnât live in England because he disliked America. God knows, itâs all he ever talked about. It was always on his mind, and in his blood. Iâm not sure he even really knew he wasnât living in America all along, although he hadnât been there since 1968. In the days before satellite TV, heâd had relatives and friends send him tapes of American televisionâN.F.L. games, the Johnny Carson show, news broadcasts, and commercials, which he thought were, in their way, the most interesting films being made. (Heâd tape his favorite commercials and recut them, just for the monkish exercise.) He was crazy about The Simpsons and Seinfeld, and he loved Roseanne, because it was funny and, he believed, the most authentic view of the country you could get without actually living there. âGee, Stanley, youâre a real man of the people,â I said, but in his way he was. He was fiercely unpretentious. He was exclusive, he had to be, but he wasnât a snob. It wasnât America he couldnât take. It was L.A.He was walking into a Hollywood restaurant one night in 1955 as James Dean came out, stepped into the Porsche Spyder that had just been brought around by the parking valet, and drove off. Stanley remarked at the time how fast he was going.
He lived in Hollywood for three or four years and made two movies, The Killing, which got him a lot of attention, and Paths of Glory, which got him a lot of respect. He and his partner, James B. Harris, formed a small company. He went to a thousand meetings with Harris, tummled and hondled, read and wrote scripts, watched the big changes as star power, in the form of independent production companies, started breaking down the old studios, and wished all the time that he was in New York.
Harris told me that when they were making Paths of Glory Stanley came to him with a new final scene, something to follow the execution of the three soldiers and make the ending less grim. A young German girl has been captured by the French, and they force her to sing for them in a tavern. They intend to humiliate her, but when she sings, her innocence and the suffering that theyâve all been through move them to tears of shame and humanity.
Stanley had just met a young German actress, Susanne Christian, and was going out with her. âShe was his girlfriend,â Harris said. âHe was really crazy about her, and he came to me with this scene heâd just written, and I said, âStanley, you canât just do this scene so your girlfriend can be in the movie.ââ But Stanley had his way, and gave the film an unforgettable ending. The actress was incredible. Then she and Stanley got married, and the marriage lasted 40 years. Harris laughed. âBoy, was I wrong.â
Stanley could hardly fail to notice that very few directors had anything close to autonomy on their pictures. He said the way the studios were run in the 50s made him think of Clemenceauâs remark about the Allies winning World War I because our generals were marginally less stupid than their generals. He was determined to find some way to succeed there, because he didnât know where else he could make movies. His ambition was spectacular; he had talent and confidence, a steely brain and huge brass balls. He saw clearly that on every picture someone had to be in charge, and figured that it might as well be him.
He told me that he owed it all to Kirk Douglas. Douglas once called Stanley âa talented shit,â and this may be one of the nicer things he said about him. Heâd starred in Paths of Glory, and even though heâd done himself a lot of good by it, I imagine that he felt Stanley owed him, and would be grateful and pliant when he hired him to replace Anthony Mann after three weeks of shooting on Spartacus. The script had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who was still blacklisted in 1958, and when the producers agonized over whether they dared give him the writing credit or not, Stanley suggested that they solve the problem by giving the credit to him. (Douglas says that Stanley never wrote one word of that script, but I doubt this. Laurence Olivierâs Crassus is the most complex character ever to appear in an epic-genre film, almost Shakespearean, and Iâm sure Stanley wrote and otherwise informed a lot of those scenes. I donât think he wrote lines like âGet up, Spartacus, you Thracian dog.â) Kirk Douglas (and this is rich) was offended by Stanleyâs chutzpah.
But specifically, conclusively, it was Kirk on horseback and Stanley on foot, just about to shoot a scene and having yet another of their violent disagreements. Kirk rode his white freedom-fighter stallion into Stanley to make his point, which was that he was the star and the producer, turning his horseâs flank against Stanley, pushing him back farther and farther to drive it home again, then riding away, leaving Stanley standing in the dust, furious and humiliated, as one of the wise guys on the crew walks by and says, âRemember, Stanley: The playâs the thing.â
The only other two places he knew of to make movies in were New York and London, and New York was too hard, and too expensive. Thatâs how he became English Stanley, and why he made all his movies there, most of them within an hourâs drive from his house. The English work ethic drove him nuts. The crew would call him âSquireâ on the set, and he got so pissed off at their endless tea breaks that he wanted to film them surreptitiously when he was shooting Lolita there in 1961. He said, âEnglandâs a place where itâs much more difficult to buy something than to sell something.â He once asked me if Iâd mind moving with my family to Vancouver for a year to check it out for him, and he heard Sydney was a great place, maybe I could try that out for him too, but he liked England, it suited his family and it suited him, living and working and making telephone calls in his great house, his multi-gated manor, his estate, his park. And anyway, if heâd lived in America, it would have been in such a house, used the same way, as a studio, a citadel, a monastery, a controlled Stanley Kubrick environment, so what difference did it make which country it was in?
IV
Gentiles donât know how to worry. âStanley Kubrick
I donât want to give the impression that I didnât get extremely irritated, that I never thought he was a cheap prick, or that his lack of trust wasnât sometimes obstructive and less than wholesome, that his demands and requirements werenât just too much. Nothing got between the dog and his meat, somewhere it was that basicâI only just hesitate to say primitive. It was definitely unobstructed; youâd have to be Herman Melville to transmit the full strength of Stanleyâs willâMy Way or the Highwayâyet he rarely raised his voice. It was hard to know whether he was just supernaturally focused or utterly fixated. âWhat is it they say, Michaelâif something can go wrong, it will?â Vigilance wasnât enough, pre-emption was the only way to go. Donât think just because youâve known a few control freaks in your time that you can imagine what Stanley Kubrick was like.Tony Frewin and Leon Vitali, whoâd been working as Stanleyâs assistants for years, said there was a staff joke about the one phrase you would never hear at Childwick Bury, and a week after Stanleyâs death someone actually said it to them. It went, âUse your own judgment, and donât bother me with the details.â His concerns ran from the ethereal-aesthetic through the technical to the crudely logistical, no detail too prosaic, all the way down to stationery and paper clips.
We know that even though he had a pilotâs license heâd stopped flying almost 40 years ago, allegedly after monitoring the air-traffic controllers at La Guardia Airport. I used to kid him about oversubscribing to the germ theory, and heâd go on various health kicks as long as they didnât require any effort, like an aspirin a day, and vitamin C in the form of Redoxon, an English fizzy tablet in various flavors, âvery pleasant-tasting,â upgraded to âdelicious,â then invoking scientific opinionââI mean, Michael, itâs Linus Pauling. He certainly ought to know what heâs talking aboutââfiguring, anyway, âat the worst, youâre only wasting your money.â
He had more compartments in his head than anyone else I have ever known, and he would open or close them selectively to the people he was working with, or to each of his friends; the one with the money in it, the one where he kept all his toys, the one where he kept his most personal things, like his hopes and his fears, that sort of thing, and whatever he loved most besides work, his family and friends, his dogs and cats. And however adroitly he manipulated the doors to those compartmentsânow open, now closedâessentially Stanley was a very open guy. Still, none of those compartments ever sprang open accidentally.
Beyond those compartments, and governing them, was a capability to take his intelligence up or down as circumstances required, without ever being either obscure or patronizing, a rather beautiful quality of mind.
I once told Stanley William Burroughsâs line âA paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out whatâs going on,â and he took it to his heart. âWait a minute, wait a minute. Iâve gotta write that down.â He put it into wide release, telling it to everyone he knew, and I think it was mostly because he was so pleased to find himself of one mind with someone he admired as much as Burroughs. âWhat is it they say, Michael: What one has thought so often, but never said so well?â
Stanley would have said it was cash, but I think the most perishable element in the making of a movie is reverence. On most pictures it rarely survives the first day of shooting, but in Stanleyâs case it had a life of its own. You can follow its career over the course of a series of interviews, usually but not always with actors, normally spanning a couple of years: Theyâre so honored to be working with Stanley, theyâd do anything in the world to work with Stanley, such a privilege theyâd work with Stanley for free. And then they work with Stanley and go through hells that nothing in their careers could have prepared them for; they think they must have been mad to get involved, they think that theyâd die before they would ever work with him again, that fixated maniac, and when itâs all behind them and the profound fatigue of so much intensity has worn off, theyâd do anything in the world to work for him again. For the rest of their professional lives they long to work with someone who cares the way Stanley did, someone they can learn from. They look for someone to respect the way they came to respect him, but they canât find anybody. Their received, fictionalized, show-business reverence has been chastened and reborn as real reverence. Iâve heard this story so many times.
Heâd been looking all day at hundreds of audition tapes sent in from all over America and England in response to the public casting call for Full Metal Jacket.âSome of them are interesting. Most of them are terrible. Oh well, I suppose I can always wipe the tapes and use them to record football on.â Like this was the first heâd thought of it.
Stanley was in his Low Road mode for Full Metal Jacket. âI only want people working on this one that no one else will hire or, if they hired them, would never dream of hiring them again.â This was of course Kubrickian misanthropic hyperbole, muttered privately to me, because he could never, would never, work with anything less than the best, even if that meant educating them all, âcorrectingâ them, as Grady calls it in The Shining. And he started in on actors and all the problems they bring, not forgetting to sing a few choruses, without much conviction, of his old song about actors being to blame for the number of takes he was always forced to do. On Barry Lyndon, Marisa Berenson had a line, âWeâre taking the children for a ride to the village. Weâll be back in time for tea.â âAnd Marisa couldnât say it. We must have done 50 on that one alone.â
We talked a lot about actors for Full Metal Jacket. He couldnât wait to find out who would play Sergeant Hartman, the demon drill instructorââItâs such a fantastic part.â We talked about Robert De Niro, but Stanley thought the audience would feel cheated when heâs killed off in the first hour. Then he was thinking about Ed Harris, but Harris wasnât interested, because âGet this, Michael. He wants to take a year off! Hey, I know! What about Richard Benjamin? Heâd be perfect, Michael, ha ha ha ha.â
He didnât exactly utter the word âactorsâ under his breath like a curse, but he definitely thought of them as wild cards, something to be overcome with difficulty. They were so lazy about learning their lines, were often otherwise âunprepared,â so capricious, so childlike, and the younger ones were completely spoiled. There was even something mysterious, and to him a little freakish, about anybody who could and would stand up in front of other people to assume and express emotions at will, sometimes to the point of tears.
âI donât know,â I said. âI have to tell you, I really like actors.â
âThatâs because you donât have to pay them, Michael.â
One of the sweetest things anybody ever said about Stanley, and one of the truest, was something Matthew Modine told Stanleyâs biographer Vincent LoBrutto: âHeâs probably the most heartfelt person I ever met. Itâs hard for him, being from the Bronx with that neighborhood mentality, and he tries to cover it up. Right underneath that veneer is a very loving, conscientious man, who doesnât like pain, who doesnât like to see humans suffering or animals suffering. I was really surprised by the man.âThis from a guy who really suffered for most of the year that he was in London shooting Full Metal Jacket, as part of an ensemble of young actors, some of them hardly actors at all, who had only the most rudimentary sense of what Stanley actually meant by âknowing your linesâ; by which he meant that you had to know them so completely that there were no other possible lines anywhere in your head, and certainly no lines of your own, unless you were Peter Sellers or Lee Ermey. They were a jolly enthusiastic crew, some very talented, some not, all thrilled to be in a Stanley Kubrick movieâI think they all saw blue skies and high times aheadâbut there was a plateau of discipline that they couldnât have known existed before. Stanley showed them, and it hurt.
Then there was a break in the shooting of almost five months after Lee Ermey smashed up his car late one night and broke all his ribs on one side. Some of the cast had other jobs lined up and had to juggle while they sat and waited in London, going to the theater five and six times a week, and tried to keep some kind of edge. Vincent DâOnofrio had gained 40 or 50 pounds to play Private Pyle, and he had to keep the weight on through all those idle months. A few of them with their wives and girlfriends would come to our apartment for dinner, and they were all flipping out. They believed that Stanley asked me to the set only on the rare days when there were no foreseeable glitches, because he didnât want me to hear the way he spoke to them. When I went to the set, theyâd come over to me between takes, search my face for a clue, confused and half-mutinous, and then Stanley would walk by and say something like âDonât talk to my actors, Michael.â
I have no idea what really went on for Stanley with actors. I do know that it was his belief, or his prevailing hunch, that actors were really working only when film was running. If he had any preconceptions about what he wanted them to be doing, he kept them to himself. Maybe actors were essentially visuals for Stanley, like Alfred Hitchcock and his blondes. Stanley said he didnât like Hitchcock muchââall that phony rear projectionââbut they had a lot in common. I was always impressed by what Hitchcock did with, or to, James Stewart in Vertigo, ruthlessly (but far more subtly than Carl Dreyer making Falconetti kneel on cobblestones all night to experience the suffering of Joan of Arc) drawing a performance out of him that was so sweaty, tortured, and unwholesome that, if Stewart had known he had any of that in him, he would have done anything in the world to conceal it. I think that Stanley did something like this with just about every actor he ever worked with.
Nor could I explain that strange irresistible requirement he had for pushing his actors as far beyond a ânaturalisticâ style as he could get them to go, and often selecting their most extreme, awkward, emotionally confusing work for his final cut. The peculiarity of it: George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange, and Jack Nicholson in The Shining, just to pick the most blinding examples; Scott complained publicly that Stanley not only directed him way over the top but also chose the most overwrought takes for the final cut, while Nicholsonâs performance turned The Shining into a movie that largely failed as a genre piece but worked unforgettably on levels where it didnât matter that there was a huge movie star and great actor on the premises or not. (Nicholson did some of his greatest work, and his very worst, in The Shining, and the same could be said of the director.) âThat was much more real,â Stanley told him after a take, âbut it isnât interesting.â Even the biggest stars knew what it was like to be a pawn in Stanleyâs game: âThat was really great. Letâs go again.â
Theyâd come to him for direction, and heâd send them back to work to find out for themselves. On A Clockwork Orange, when Malcolm McDowell asked, he told him, âMalcolm, Iâm not rada. I hired you to do the acting.â He was preparing a scene for Spartacus in which Laurence Olivier and Nina Foch are sitting in their seats above the arena waiting for the gladiators to enter and fight to the death, and Nina Foch asked him for motivation. âWhat am I doing, Stanley?â she asked, and Stanley said, âYouâre sitting here with Larry waiting for the gladiators to come out.â
The usual M.O. was for him to become incredibly close to actors during shooting, and then to never see them again. A lot of actors were terribly hurt by this. Thereâs no question that the affection he felt for them and the inspiration he extended to them were genuine, and this made the break even more painful. For Stanleyâs part, I never heard him speak of an actor, even ones who had given him a hard time or been âdisloyalâ once the film came out, with anything but affection, like a family member whoâd gone off, dispelled into some new career phase, even if it was oblivion.
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He told me once that if he hadnât become a director he might have liked being a conductor. âThey get to play the whole orchestra, and they get plenty of exercise,â he said, waving his arms a bit, âand most of them live to be really old.â
As I write this, the release of his last film is two months away. Only a few people have seen it, and already the entertainment media is holding itself ready to be shocked and offended, or pretending to. âWhatâs new?â Stanley would have said, as if it hardly warranted the question mark. Heâd begun planning the publicity campaign before he completed the final cut of the film, but Iâm sure that heâd thought about it for years. Some people seem to think that heâs controlling it from the grave. Itâs inconceivable to anyone who knew him that an energy like that could stop just because death has occurred, that it isnât going on in some form, circulating. This very piece is evidence of that, since it was his idea that I write about him, and specifically for this magazine.In the two and a half years between the time I declined to wash and rinse for fun and the moment he finished editing, we talked only a few times. He was shooting for most of it; he said it was going great, no matter what I might have heard. He was crazy about his stars, impressed with their professionalism and their energy; he said they energized the whole crew and made his job a lot easier. The only other actor I ever heard him speak quite that way about was James Mason, and that was on the day after Mason died.
In the beginning of January my wife and I received a gift from him, a book of photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue. It was a Seasonâs Greetings present, the first weâd had in three years, since heâd gone into production.
âThat was nice of him,â my wife said. Sheâd always liked Stanley.
âYes, it was,â I said, thinking, I wonder what he wants.
The calls started up again, every couple of days, longer and longer. He sounded terrific; it was great to be on the blower with him again. For the first time in all the years Iâd known him, he actually asked me if there was some time of day that was better for me than others, so we did most of the talking in the mornings, his afternoons: Did I happen to see Norman Mailerâs piece in The New York Review of Books about Tom Wolfe? Brilliant. He must be pretty old now, Michael, but what passion, and I hear your buddy Francis just won a bundle from Warner Bros. in a lawsuit, and Somebody ought to write a book about Bill Clinton and call it âHeâs Gotta Have It.â
Then, one morning, âHey Michael [already laughing], Iâve had a great idea! Howâd you like to write the exclusive piece on Eyes Wide Shut for Vanity Fair?â
I didnât know. I was working on something, and besides, I hadnât written a magazine piece in 20 years.
âListen, itâll be fun.… You come over for a week, Iâll show you the movie, you can talk to Tom and Nicole, interview me. Wouldnât you like to do that, Michael?â
âI wouldnât know what to ask you.â
âThatâs all right, Iâll write all the questions… Itâll be the only piece about the movie, you know, Michael, a really classy piece of P.R.â (yuk yuk yuk), and âYouâre the only one who can do it right,â and âItâs perfect for you,â and âItâll be fun.â
I said that since it was him Iâd think about it, look into it. I decided to do it, and called him.
âGee, thatâs terrific, Michael. That makes me very happy.â
âMe too, Stanley. Now youâll find out what I really think of you.â
Problems arose, as Iâd told Graydon Carter, the editor of this magazine, they would. Stanley called to ask me what I meant by the word âexclusive,â and I told him Iâd never used the word, he had; what did he mean by âexclusiveâ? Then he called in extreme distress and said that he couldnât possibly show me the movie in time for my deadlineâthere was looping to be done and the music wasnât finished, lots of small technical fixes on color and sound; would I show work that wasnât finished? He had to show it to Tom and Nicole because they had to sign nudity releases, and to Terry Semel and Bob Daly of Warner Bros., but he hated it that he had to, and I could hear it in his voice that he did. But once that screening was over, and the response to it was so strong, he relented.âAll right, Michael. Let me see.â Then we talked about Hemingway, how you could never break that prose down into components that could be studied and examined and qualified and expect it to tell you how it worked in the magical way that it did.
On the Friday before he died, I was driving to Vermont on the New York State Thruway when my phone rang.
âMichael, can you drive and talk?â
âYes, Stanley. And chew gum.â
âNo, I mean, is it legal?â
He told me it would be all right if I came over in two weeks to look at the movie and âinterviewâ him. When I asked him if this was his last word on the subject, he laughed and said, âMaybe.â
Then he told me about a friend of his, a studio head whoâd just bought an apartment in New York. He told me how much heâd paid for it, and said that he was the first Jew ever admitted to the building.
âCan you believe that? What is it, 1999? And they never let a Jew in there before?â
In Holland, heâd heard, there was a soccer team called Ajax that had once had a Jewish player, and ever since then Dutch skinheads would go to all the teamâs matches and make a loud hissing noise, meant to represent the sound of gas escaping into the death chambers. âAnd thatâs Holland, Michael. A civilized country.â Laughing.
We talked for 90 or 100 miles, from before Utica until my exit at Albany. I told him I needed both hands now, and that Iâd call him when I got home on Sunday.
All the things that people believe they know about Stanley they get from the press, and the entertainment press at that. Almost none of these reporters ever met him, because he thought you had to be crazy to do interviews unless you had a picture coming out, and even then it had to be very carefully managed. It wasnât personal with him, but I think it became personal for a lot of them. They work hard, much too hard, the belt is moving faster and faster, carrying increasingly empty forms, silly and brutal and thankfully evanescent entertainments. You canât go to the movies anymore without slipping in all the Pavlovian drool running down the aisles, big show business Manifest. This is the world that Stanley chose to become a master of, and one of the ways he did it was by keeping himself to himself. So I can see, in a time when so many celebrities are so eager to hurl themselves into our headlights, where anyone who doesnât want to talk with the entertainment press might seem eccentric, reclusive, and misanthropic; crazy, autocratic, and humorless; cold and phobic and arrogant.
But I must say that a lot of people took it hard; people heâd known, some of them for 40 years, or people he hadnât seen in a decade; certainly his family, since heâd been a loving husband and fatherâamazing, the number of people who loved him, and the way they loved him, and the size of the hole he made in our lives by dying. He was so alive to us that it was hard to believe, and then there was that other thing (âWeâve seen it in Homer, Michaelâ), people regarding their dead heroes and thinking, If it can do this to him, imagine what it can do to us.
Heâd never talk about his movies while he was making them, and he didnât like talking about them afterward very much, even to friends, except maybe to mention the grosses. Most of all, he didnât want to talk about their âmeaning,â because he believed so passionately in their meaning that to try to talk about it could only spoil it for him. He might tell you how he did it, but never why. I think that he, an arch-materialist (maybe) and an artist of the material world, made the single most inspired spiritual image in all of film, the Star Child watching with equanimity the timeless empty galaxies of existence-after-existence, waiting patiently once again to be born. Somebody asked him how he ever thought of the ending of 2001. âI donât know,â he said. âHow does anybody ever think of anything?â
Vanity Fair, April 21, 2010