PREVIEW： The Career of Stanley Kubrick： Part IV
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Summary
In this episode, we pick up where we left off with our discussion of Stanley Kubrick's iconic films, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. This time, we are joined by the excellent horror writer Chloe to discuss Kubrick's time in the 80s and the many things he achieved.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Stanley Kubrick Part 4. Unfortunately Harry can't be here
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with us, he's got to record the podcast, but he will be here once again, Rip Harry.
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And to refresh your memory, in Part 3 we discussed the controversial film A
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Clockwork Orange, we talked about the Scrap Napoleon project, as well as Barry
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Linden, which was an IRA magnet apparently, and now we're going to be
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picking up where we left off, as well as talking about the film The Shining, as
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well as Full Metal Jacket, two of my favourite films and I'm really looking
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forward to talking about them. And I'm of course joined by proper horror show, Chloe,
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and thank you very much for taking the time to join us today and I'm really
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looking forward to what you're going to tell me about this stuff because you
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know all of these details about the process of the filmmaking and Kubrick as
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a man and what he was doing behind the scenes that I just don't know. I sort of
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know a lot about the films and the director himself, but not much else really.
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Where else can I talk about his numerous speeding tickets? Some people have the
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gall to describe that stuff as irrelevant minutiae. Here we deal in irrelevant
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minutiae. No, it's an absolute pleasure and we are getting onto the period that I
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really enjoy his 80s films and since we are talking about 80s filmmaking I thought maybe we could do it in,
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in proper style, you know, if you want. Oh well thank you very much. Carl will tell
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me off for smoking it but it's here. Well no, it is 80s filmmaking so if you... Oh okay, a little pick me up as well.
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Yeah, I know. I don't know if you're on a Notre Dame. Oh it's a dib-dab. Oh okay.
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What do you think it was? It was powdering my face. I'm obviously too swarthy. Remember it's the 80s so...
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Oh yes, of course, of course. That's what it is but here you are then.
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Oh well, later, later. Perhaps, yeah. If we're flagging after The Shining.
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Yeah, so as you said, Kubrick had just done Barry Lyndon which, you know, you've usually heard of a
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box office bomb and well all the bomb stuff came before it hit the box office. He had to flee Ireland,
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which was not particularly great. But following that, Stanley was at a bit of a crossroads. He was
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in a bit of a dilemma because he had just had a very difficult run of films, especially with Barry
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Lyndon not bringing any money in. That was a challenge for him, you know. He was... I find there's a bit of a
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duality there. He is extremely confident in himself but Kubrick is also aware that he's not Spielberg
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and he's not bringing in the box office smashes and that kind of haunts him. He's... I don't know if
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you've seen any of the critical responses to him but there's a consistent thing in that the critics
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don't get his films or almost none of them get his films and they come back to them a decade later and
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say, actually, this is a masterpiece. Why did we slander it? Yeah, I've always found it strange
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because there's so obviously something there in his films, even if you don't get it at first. I
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remember watching, for example, 2001 A Space Odyssey at first and thinking, what on earth was all that?
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There's obviously... you can sort of get the feeling of depth but you might not actually understand it.
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But I think that also I think that film critics probably were... there was perhaps an incentive
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for them to say these sorts of things beyond an objective reading of the art. Yeah, that's very
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fair. Someone like Pauline Kael, I think, made a career for herself out of being excessively harsh.
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You know, she was famous for deriding the sound of music as the sound of mucus. Just... she was needlessly
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harsh and she hated Kubrick's films. A lot of them would do the thing of saying, well, Kubrick was
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obviously trying to do this and he failed. What a bad filmmaker. And the answer would be more,
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Stanley wasn't trying to do that. Well, a lot of people say this Stanley Kubrick film is about this.
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And I'll probably catch myself out by saying, oh, I think the film's about such and such. But actually,
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there might be a dominant theme in a film. However, I think that Kubrick, being the man that he was,
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layered it with lots of other ideas. He wasn't content to just discuss one idea in isolation.
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His films, part of the reason I enjoy them so much is because they're so rich with various ideas,
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concepts and phenomena and things. Because he was very interested in the world. One of the things
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for my research for this conversation, I found out is just how obsessively he tried to find out things
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about the world and represent them in film. And this is, of course, reflected in his well-earned reputation
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for numerous takes. But his obsessiveness towards his art and his perfectionism,
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which I'm sure will come up quite a lot, is so evident. But I think it also pays off.
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I'm, you know, I'm less sympathetic for the whining actors. And, you know, I like to look at the outcome
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and say, actually, it shows that he cared. You have a Kubrickian outlook. He didn't like
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actors either. They were very troublesome. They were the worst part of filmmaking to him.
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Well, I see a bit of Kubrick in myself. You know, I too want a nice English country
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estate where I can lock myself away. Lots of boxes of information and just work on a masterpiece
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in private. Really emerge when I have to. You've given me about the best segue you could there.
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I don't know if you intended to, but one of the things I was going to start with was we discussed
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how when he moved to England, which was for the quick check. It was for Lolita in 62 or 61. And he
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moved into a place called Abbotsmead. I was going to lead in with one of the unintended, highly
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influential things that he did just after Barry Lyndon was he moved house to, well, where the Kubrick
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family resides today, which is a place called Chillickbury. For Americans, that's spelt
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Childwickbury, because we have to do these things to catch foreigners out, you know?
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Yeah, that's why it's Worcestershire, by the way.
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I was going to go for that example, yes. Yeah, so he moves to Chillickbury, which has a much,
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it's much bigger, it's got far more room for him to work with. He was able to make this place,
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which was actually fairly maltreated, underused, not in a great state. I wouldn't say dilapidated,
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but it needed a lot of care. It wasn't being lived in when they bought it and he moved his whole family,
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he and Christiane and their three daughters, Katerina, Vivian and Anya in, as well as his assistants.
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And that might sound a bit odd, but Stanley was not very good at separating work and family life,
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or rather he was so committed to his work that he didn't want the problems of going to a film studio
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if he could avoid it. He wanted to do as much as he could when he needed to do it, which meant
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having his research at home, having his editing suites at home, which was a practice he'd started
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in Abbotsmead, where he'd got the massive Moviola editing decks in the converted stables. In Chillickbury,
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he set up another editing suite. He converted the stables into storage for his massive,
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ever-expanding archive you hinted at. Christiane had to fight to get a few of the rooms for her art,
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although I get the sense of her as someone who is very confident and isn't ashamed to
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tell Stanley, no, you can't have this room. Yeah, I got the impression that although Stanley was very
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dedicated to his sort of art, he didn't let it necessarily consume him in terms of, you know,
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his interpersonal relations. He wasn't necessarily a diva in his own home, although many actors and
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actresses report him being so on set with some of the recordings being particularly insistent and
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pushing them to their limits. But I found it quite interesting that, you know, one of Stanley's daughters
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said, oh no, he was never like that with me. And so it sort of speaks of a certain duality that
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he brings a very different attitude to his work than he brought to his personal life at home. And I think
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sort of empathising with Kubrick here, that's part of the reason he liked his working from home style
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approach, is that it kept him more grounded, perhaps. That's just my armchair psychologising.
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Yeah, you can read a lot where he's portrayed as this absolute hermit. And it's fair to say there's
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a certain amount of paranoia in him. But at the same time, I think he sees it as just good to have family
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around and that he knows the attention his work needs. But if he's working at his house, he can
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attend to his family, he can just drop in and out of things. And there's also a clear segregation.
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This room, this area is for business, this room is for family. And I think with that he manages to
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keep it separate. Although sometimes it did run over. There's an incident where the former clock tower
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room is taken over for script drafting for Full Metal Jacket. And Christiane has to sort of very
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tactfully, once people have been moved out, immediately fill it with art equipment to stop
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it being taken again. But one of the maybe unintended aspects of moving into Chillicberry,
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as well as getting the additional space, is that it gives Stanley a much greater amount of privacy,
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particularly because Chillicberry is surrounded by hedges. And he actually takes the time to increase
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the height and thickness of hedges. These big, thick hedges surrounding everything, while you could
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almost get lost in them, you might say. I'm not being very subtle, but I just figured I would lay that
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groundwork early. I believe that did have quite an impact on The Shining. But there's a fair old
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while before he even knows that The Shining is going to be his next project. As I was saying,
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he was kind of haunted by the fact that he didn't have... Maybe haunt is too strong. He was bothered by
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the fact that he hadn't had a big box office hit. And I think consciously after this, especially with
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the financial failure of Barry Lyndon, he is thinking, I need a hit. And weirdly enough, one of
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the things he starts looking at is the sci-fi direction again. And he hits up a chap called Brian
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Aldis to adapt a story called Super Toys Last All Summer Long. This is the film that he would never
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actually get to make. It would eventually become AI, artificial, sorry, bungle that completely.
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Artificial intelligence brought fully into making by Steven Spielberg after Stanley's death.
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But this was one of the first places he went. It was very troubled. He was picking up with all this
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over and over again. Can we try it this way? Can we adapt it that way? He couldn't really make it work.
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I don't want to fully go into it here, because a lot of work carries on after Full Metal Jacket,
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so I'll probably save that for the next part. But it's a direction he's trying. And when Star Wars
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comes out in 1977, even though negotiations with Aldis have broken down, and broken down rather badly,
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I would say. Kubrick sees Star Wars make a lot of money and says, Brian, can we try and do that sci-fi
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story again? He really is concerned that he wants a big hit. I should say for continuity's sake,
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one of the reasons I sort of described things breaking down unfairly is Kubrick, as I said every
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time. We're not doing hagiography here. We're just trying to paint a complete portrait of the man.
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Kubrick totally screwed Aldis. He wrote the court contract himself, and one of the clauses he wrote
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in was that if Aldis were to leave the country for any reason, then he would void the contract. And
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they had completely stopped working on Super Toys for a while. Stanley was actively working on other
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projects. And so Aldis then went to a convention in America when he was invited. He then gets back
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and finds Stanley's written him a letter saying, you've voided the contract, so you won't be paid.
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That is a very slimy thing to do, really. Yes. Michael Hare, who was co-author of, or I should
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say maybe co-writer for Full Metal Jacket, sort of notes this tendency as well, notes that Kubrick
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tried to get him with that, with writing the contract, and said, he's almost disappointing,
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like, Stanley, did you have to try? Come on. His book's quite short, but it's quite a
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loving and interesting and more personal treatment of the man. You get a picture of his character,
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because Stanley very much is a businessman. Ever since he's moved to England, he's really trying to
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be as outside the studio system as he can be. And you'll probably recall from the troubles he had
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with Spartacus and so on. He wanted to avoid working with Hollywood if he could.
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It would continually give him problems. So he saw himself as having to be, I think,
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quite canny in the business realm. Something else that gave him trouble in that area was
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something that would maybe make any businessman shake in their boots was the election of a Labour
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government. I thought I would cram this in. But yes, the election of the Wilson government was not
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Yes, of course, because around that time, the top band of tax was ridiculously high, wasn't it?
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Yes. They were talking about a proposed wealth tax as well.
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And he was, you know, the usually politically disengaged Kubrick actually started a little
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campaign among US filmmakers who were in Britain to sort of write to the government and say, look, if you
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raise the taxes, these are going to really hit us. It's going to hit the industry. We are going to leave.
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There's going to be a huge exit of US filmmakers.
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I think he actually changed in the draft exit to Exodus. Interesting word choice.
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And many US filmmakers did actually leave, but Kubrick ended up staying.
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Reasons we can speculate, but I think he did find himself, how can I say?
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I don't think he ever integrated into Britain, but he did remain fond of the place.
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So he was very comfortable. One thing I did notice is that a lot of his senior members of staff were
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very traditionally English people. And I think he appreciated the way in which we conducted ourselves.
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We sort of were a bit more standoffish perhaps, and then left him his space, which he appreciated.
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Yes, certainly that sort of more reserved character really worked for him.
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He may have hated our tea breaks, but so does every US director.
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Yeah, I remember hearing an audio clip of him arguing about tea breaks.
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Quite excessively, I thought, wow, this is really going on. No wonder you alienate people, Stanley.
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Absolutely. Yeah, so let's see. His letter writing campaign in panic about the Wilson government,
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we've covered that. We still got him searching around what's he going to do, what's his next project
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going to be. And I think something very interesting was that he considered doing a war movie and he was
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looking at various things. He was looking at, could I adapt the Iliad as a war movie? He looked at some
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World War II material and he'd considered doing a project with John Milius, director of Conan the
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Barbarian, which I find absolutely fascinating. You wouldn't expect that crossover, would you necessarily?
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No, no, not at all. That's fabulous. But I think one of the keys to explaining what he did next was that he
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was given the draft copy, a galley draft of The Shining from Stephen King before it went out into general
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print when it was still called The Shine and he got this in 1977. And I think in Stanley's brain there
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was a sort of memory of 1973 and The Exorcist. Now he had been offered The Exorcist and he had turned it down
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And that had gone and scooped up a whole load of Oscars, which Stanley had not managed. When he had won
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an Oscar for his work, it was actually attributed to someone else. So that happened on Spartacus
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because he'd taken over the role of the DP. And then unfortunately, because of union rules,
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the credit was still on the guy who then ended up scooping that Academy Award. So kind of unfortunate.
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So I think another example of unions causing problems. Oh, is there any end?
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So I think that was in Stanley's mind a bit, seeing it as a way of, okay, I can do a horror movie.
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It can be commercially successful and critically successful. And so I think that probably made him
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quite interested in taking on The Shining. So this is an area that I don't really know much about,
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but I don't know whether Stephen King had as much of a name for himself by that point. I don't,
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that's a genuine question because it would strike me as a good move from Kubrick's end to
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take a novel from a well-known writer and adapt it because then you've got two different draws to
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that same movie of two sort of different forms of brand recognition, if you will.
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Yeah. Well, it was early in King's career, certainly, and the adaptations had only started
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rolling off. So the first one that really got attention and possibly the first one overall was
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1976 Carry by Brian Palmer. And after that, they were just rushed out. So there was a bit of a feeding
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frenzy. And King didn't actually have that many novels out at that point. Hence this one being snapped
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up in its galley draft form. And Kubrick was quick to get on it, but I wouldn't say he was the juggernaut
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that he would become. Okay. But he was still sort of an up and coming name, which would have been
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probably enough for Kubrick, I think. Although he certainly didn't do a faithful adaptation of the novel.
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No, no, he was commercially extremely canny. Just as you said, there was name recognition,
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but there wasn't so much power. But also, we've already touched on Kubrick and his contracts.
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He was a smart guy. This is kind of well-known, but Stephen King is not happy with the Kubrick
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version of The Shining. We will cover this more, I'm sure. But he thought, okay, well, I can still shape
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this. So he'd got it written that he was contractually allowed to provide the first draft
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of the screenplay. And so he thinks, okay, I can shape this. I was like, that's great.
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You can write your screenplay. Stanley doesn't have to use it. So walked into that one. We talked about
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this before. Kubrick never writes anything fresh after, you know, killer's kiss. After that, it's
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all adaptations. He is preferring someone to do the blueprint. And then he will adapt extremely freely,
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almost hollow out. And in fact, there's a really good kind of visual metaphor for that in that when
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he's adapting it, he and the co-writer, Diane Johnson, were literally just tearing the pages
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out of the book and cutting it up and then sticking it into envelopes for, you know, this is this scene.
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They really broke it down to the bare bones and moving parts and then built it up again. But just,
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I like this image of them just cutting the book apart. If you go into the Stanley Kubrick archives book,
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you can see quite a few of these annotated pages, which are quite fun to look at, I think.
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There's also a good analogy in the film itself. I'm not sure if we're going to get onto this, but
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the Torrences drive a Volkswagen Beetle, but a yellow one. And Stephen King, because he often wrote
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himself into his books, had a red Volkswagen Beetle, which we see crushed under a lorry. And I think that's
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an excellent metaphor for the original screenplay and book that Stephen King wrote. It was sort of
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a subtle middle finger that only he would be able to pick up on, I think.
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Would Stanley go out of his way to do that 100%?
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100% he would. I love that. You know, talk about writing yourself in. I do find it quite amazing
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that Stanley, he would struggle to know what to adapt. He would look around for ages until he
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found something that had a good core that he could relate to, even if it was quite buried in the story.
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But I do find it really interesting that after really struggling to know what to do,
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he picks up The Shining, which is all about this guy isolated away in a big house with his family,
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struggling to write, you know. Funnily enough, the table that was in the grand lobby
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in the Overlook Hotel set is now in Chillicbury itself, used by Christiane.
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It's a fantastic little detail. So I pulled that straight from this new biography that's out
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just this year with a very stern looking Kubrick on it.
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Yeah, he looks like he's scowling into the distance there.
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Yeah, like some kind of stern academic, like you don't know whether he's going to lecture you on
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Evola or 80s TV rodent mascots. It could be anything, but it's a striking image of him.
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But yeah, I find that maybe that's something he could relate to. But I don't know, did you want to
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maybe talk about some of those tensions with Stephen King? Because I find that quite fun territory.
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Well, I don't know too much about it other than I think that from what I can decipher,
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Kubrick basically used Stephen King and Stephen King left with a sour taste in his mouth, even though
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the film that comes out of it is excellent and a great bit of promotional material for his book,
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because it's also different. One of the problems for an author, I think, when their book is being
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adapted into film is it removes an incentive to read it. But if the film is very different,
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but dealing in similar themes to the book, it can actually act as an advert. So in many ways,
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Kubrick had done him a massive favour, but just in a way in which seemed insulting to Stephen King,
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I think. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's a fair take on it. Certainly. And
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I wouldn't say he was sort of 100% disparaging of the film. But when he talked about it, he would say it's,
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you tend to say it's sort of like maddeningly perfect or a maddening film. Generally, you would say that
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it's a great film, but it's just not his. It's made wrong. It's infuriating. So there'd be sort of
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admiration mixed in with consternation. Well, I think it was sort of in the uncanny valley between
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what King wrote and what Kubrick adapted. It was sort of in that sort of zone. I'm sort of putting
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myself in King's shoes here, his cocaine filled shoes. And it's sort of close enough to being an
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excellent adaptation of his film that it's frustrating. But he's also glad that the film
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is good and not insulting to him because it's linked to him. I think that would be how I would
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feel in King's position, perhaps. Yeah. He did end up having to sign a non-disparagement clause
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about the Kubrick film in order to get the rights back to make his own version in 1997,
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about which, let's just say, it's more faithful to the books. But I mean, if you want the real cherry
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on the cake, what really sat the man in the chair in the hotel room, you know the chair.
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When Warner Brothers went and adapted King's sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep,
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I mean, can you picture the guy's face? Imagine being in the meeting and they say,
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Stephen, we're adapting your novel, but we are going to have to make it follow Kubrick's The Shining.
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So we're going to change your novel so it follows that movie, you know, the one you hate.
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It is wonderful. I haven't actually seen the follow up, but I was going to watch it after
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this, this evening. Because I didn't want to actually, I deliberately haven't watched it
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in preparation for this because I didn't want it to taint my view on the original film,
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as it often could. Because it does, from what I've read, seek to provide answers to some of the
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questions in The Shining, which I don't think actually needs them. I didn't go away from The
00:28:07.900
Shining saying, I wish this had been answered. But I'm sure we'll get onto that in due time.
00:28:14.140
Yeah. No, that's fair. I will be interested in what you thought of Doctor Sleep. I'm going to have
00:28:18.540
to ask you after you, we'll talk after you've watched it. Sure.
00:28:23.420
Yeah. So in terms of, I don't know, maybe if we pull back to sort of
00:28:30.780
why it enraged Stephen King so much, maybe one aspect I thought about is,
00:28:36.140
I sort of see it as a total conflict of visions where, because of Kubrick's personality,
00:28:41.980
how can I say? Essentially, the horror of The Shining in Kubrick's version is a sort of intrinsic
00:28:51.420
view, a Jungian view, in that the horror, the threat is within the person, whereas,
00:29:00.780
and maybe inherent to the person. So there's that Jungian shadow side, the part of you that can
00:29:06.460
always be violent, be oppressive. That's part of the reason that I use it as the sort of premier
00:29:13.180
example of a psychological horror. Because in many ways, the scary aspects of The Shining
00:29:24.940
Totally. But that's probably my very biased lens looking at it. But there's not necessarily
00:29:34.780
a big scary monster that's chasing people around the house like Scooby Doo.
00:29:40.940
There's no hedge animals coming alive and stalking people or haunted fire hose.
00:29:47.420
King's version is that. It's extrinsic horror. It's external. Or to put it the other way, basically,
00:29:57.180
if Jack hadn't got the job, if Arthur O'Malley had ended up in the hotel, then he'd have gone crazy too,
00:30:07.180
because it's an evil hotel that makes you crazy. In King's view, that's the idea of it. He wrote sort of,
00:30:14.860
Kubrick just doesn't get how evil the hotel is. He just can't get it. Stupid Stan Lee.
00:30:20.620
The idea of it's a really evil hotel. And it's like, I don't know. I think we can get the idea.
00:30:28.540
I think it's a less interesting premise, really, that if it's something external, it's less scary,
00:30:37.580
because something external, if you're safe, you're going to remain safe in all likelihood.
00:30:45.580
Whereas if it's internal, if it's in your own head, then it can follow you around everywhere.
00:30:50.460
And that's one thing that I think a lot of horror films have picked up on.
00:30:55.980
That people move from the house, because that's the obvious thing to do if you live in a haunted house.
00:31:01.900
But then they follow them as well. And then all of a sudden, the horror is being specific to the person and the people involved.
00:31:12.940
While if you're in those characters' shoes, all of a sudden, it's more scary because it's inescapable.
00:31:18.460
And if you're dealing with psychology and the human condition, well, there's no way of escaping that.
00:31:24.380
And so it makes perfect sense that you frame it in that way.
00:31:27.660
Yeah, completely. If you can just kill the monster, if you can just burn the hotel down and then it's a happy ending, you relax.
00:31:37.260
Whereas if the monster stalking you or the curse upon you can't be easily removed, has to be, it is doubtful.
00:31:49.740
You don't relax. It's more effective horror. It's deeper horror.
00:31:53.820
And it's talking about something that feels a lot more real.
00:31:56.460
I was about to say exactly that, that if you make the horror film feel realistic,
00:32:03.900
it makes it all the more scary because it makes it feasible.
00:32:06.860
And then we empathise with the people involved more because there's less suspending of disbelief.
00:32:16.060
Hmm. And that is very important in a horror film.
00:32:19.980
When you have, you know, some of my, you know, favourites, the things like The Leprechaun, for example.
00:32:27.660
Yes. There's a massive need to suspend disbelief.
00:32:31.500
Although I think it's sort of a bit on the nose, they know what they're doing.
00:32:36.140
But part of the reason you have these horror films that are so bad, they're good, is that they haven't done this properly.
00:32:42.620
And I think if you want to take a film seriously and see it as a piece of art outside of comedy, obviously,
00:32:53.660
And I think that that's why you get so many hit and miss horror films.
00:33:03.260
A lot of horror films aren't aiming to actually horrify you as well.
00:33:07.100
They might go for a quick, get a quick jump out of you, like a roller coaster.
00:33:12.060
But they're not really aiming to unsettle you and keep you awake at night, are they?
00:33:16.620
Like things like Leprechaun, Friday the 13th, the conscious intention behind them is a lot more
00:33:25.100
Whereas something like The Shining is aiming to be unsettling, to leave you coming back for more,
00:33:31.980
leaving you trying to work out what's going on.
00:33:33.900
It also doesn't watch like you're watching something that has been produced with the
00:33:43.980
And I think that some horror films do suffer that sort of, particularly in the modern day,
00:33:54.220
They've seen which films have been a hit and just emulate the stuff that works,
00:33:58.940
which, you know, isn't a terrible philosophy, but it's not particularly creative or artistic
00:34:10.300
I mean, gosh, I feel the need to come to the defense of my beloved genre.
00:34:19.100
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that is churned out.
00:34:20.860
I feel a lot of directors and artists in their genre sort of, how can I say, have to sort of
00:34:32.060
Like they were run on this brutal production schedule with almost no budget.
00:34:36.060
And still people try to find a way to smuggle something interesting in.
00:34:42.620
You know, unlike, well, unlike The Shining, which is one of the big overruns of production.
00:34:49.340
That's another thing we saw as a sort of continuity for Kubrick here is
00:34:53.500
we get our really long overrunning production happening here.
00:34:57.660
Very notably on this one, burning the set down did not help.
00:35:05.100
People saying that the production itself was cursed and things like that.
00:35:08.540
Yeah, I mean, it's only looking into how it was made that...
00:35:15.340
It really surprised me that it wasn't on location.
00:35:19.100
In fact, almost nothing is on location there. Kubrick did not go out to America.
00:35:24.140
He had Leon Vitale and a couple of other assistants, their names escape me, I'm afraid,
00:35:29.500
go out there scouting, because by this point Kubrick really didn't want to leave Chillicbury.
00:35:37.340
You get a different impression from different biographies.
00:35:39.980
So the John Baxter has him portrayed as a lot more...
00:35:48.780
Whereas this, the Culker and Abrams really put the move on the decision onto his family,
00:35:55.740
that they weren't keen for him to go. I could go either way on it myself, to be honest.
00:36:02.700
I think also, if you're a man like Kubrick, who values precision, perfection and information,
00:36:12.700
he kind of just wanted to be where he'd centralised all of the information.
00:36:16.860
You know, he wasn't making films in the internet age where he could Google it.
00:36:21.820
He had files full of stuff, and I think that he would have justified it by saying,
00:36:26.860
well, the quality is contingent on me having access to the resources
00:36:31.260
that ensure that it's a quality film, because I portray my vision as accurately as I possibly can.
00:36:37.500
Yeah. And he'd probably already gotten... I get the feeling he'd already gotten used to
00:36:44.220
outsourcing work at that point, because he was considering so much. So why go out to Colorado?
00:36:50.700
Why go all over the United States when I've got a trusted assistant who can do this?
00:36:57.660
Also, if you're thinking like a businessman as well, it's much more efficient with your time.
00:37:03.100
If you send someone else out running errands for you effectively, then you can focus on
00:37:08.300
other things that might be more important in the grand scheme of things.
00:37:12.540
Yeah, absolutely. I'd maybe like to talk about one of those assistants, if that's okay.
00:37:20.220
So we talked about... What's his name? I've got it. Andrew Birkin was our sort of wunderkind
00:37:25.500
last time in part three. We'd sort of followed him coming to the fore in 2001 by doing some scouting
00:37:39.900
Was he the person who scouted the locations in the beginning?
00:37:45.100
Yeah, the deserts for the ape shoots. Yeah, that was him.
00:37:47.820
Because I always had my suspicions that it could have all been done in a studio or something,
00:37:53.420
knowing Kubrick. I was thinking, would he actually go out to a desert or was this all done in the
00:37:57.820
studio? Because I thought tapirs in the desert, you know, they're jungle animals, but still.
00:38:02.780
It would have been easier, but you know, this is a guy who flew in trees specifically from
00:38:07.180
safari parks. But anyway, yeah, Birkin was on the scene for a couple of movies and then moved out,
00:38:13.820
and he had replaced a chap called Anthony Fruin, who took a break after 2001 as well.
00:38:19.580
And Kubrick is joined by someone who had become a hugely important figure in his life, Leon Vitale.
00:38:28.140
Now in Barry Lyndon, which I think you haven't seen yet.
00:38:31.580
But no, I haven't. I know a little bit about it.
00:38:34.300
Oh, I really want your take on it. I'm really interested.
00:38:39.180
I don't know whether it will infuriate you or not.
00:38:41.740
Well, I'm a massive Kubrick fan, so I imagine I'll be able to get what he's going for.
00:38:51.100
An underappreciated gem by many people, although the viewing time is absolutely punishing.
00:39:00.860
Yeah. Now, Vitale is in there as a young actor. He's playing the young Lord Bullingdon,
00:39:08.140
who sort of gets the cuckoo in the nest treatment from our title character, Barry Lyndon.
00:39:15.660
He's young at that time and does a pretty good job. And Kubrick sees him helping with the shoot
00:39:22.300
when there's another child actor who's struggling, who's freaking out a bit.
00:39:25.900
Vitale is really good at talking to this kid, calming him down.
00:39:32.540
And afterwards, Kubrick says, OK, well, I need someone who can find me a child actor for Danny.
00:39:39.900
And from that, he asks Vitale to do this. And Vitale is inspired by it. He gives up acting,
00:39:47.260
basically, and then decides to just become Kubrick's assistant, starting with this role of going out
00:39:53.820
and scouting for a Danny. And he would carry on working with Kubrick long past his death. In fact,
00:40:03.820
he'd be interesting enough to get his own film made about him, which is Film Worker, if anyone wants
00:40:09.180
to see a bit more of him. But he's a really interesting guy. He's got a very unusual look.
00:40:15.260
He'd wear a bandana most of the time. And picturing him, he's got this long hair, sort of rough stubble,
00:40:22.540
and this guy working with a very straight-laced Kubrick. I love that picture.
00:40:30.060
But Vitale goes out to do scoutings very well. He auditions about 5,000 children for the role of Danny.
00:40:39.180
Yeah. Although Hollywood executives are very good at finding... Actually, I'm not going to continue that.
00:40:47.100
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. He sends a few hundred videotapes back to Kubrick and saying,
00:40:55.500
you might like these kids. And from them, they get five and a half year old Danny Lloyd,
00:41:00.140
who's never acted before, and is able to come aboard as Danny Torrance.
00:41:05.340
Well, he didn't have to change his first name. That's already a good start.
00:41:09.180
It's weird how that happens, isn't it? You've got Danny Lloyd playing Danny Torrance. Jack Nicholson
00:41:15.660
plays Jack Torrance. So it's a little weird. And yeah, after doing that, Vitale helps with the
00:41:23.740
scouting of hotels. Kubrick also sent one of his daughter's boyfriends abroad to do that as well.
00:41:31.260
Well, get away from her. Go and look at hotels. A few hundred of them.
00:41:36.220
Sounds like a good gig, going from hotel to hotel.
00:41:39.580
It's not bad. He wasn't allowed to take the daughter with him, I gather.
00:41:47.660
Yeah. So, Vitale stays with the production after that, and then will stay on feature productions
00:41:52.940
and sort of effectively take up a role with the Kubrick archive. Vitale passed away in 2002,
00:42:01.740
still assisting with the screenings and transfers of Kubrick films. He's got these really striking
00:42:08.860
blue eyes. It's like he's had the spice from Arrakis, you know?
00:42:14.380
Yeah. Yeah, so they've gone and done the scouting. That's all done. Kubrick stays
00:42:19.900
in England and has everything built at Elstree Studios.
00:42:27.980
So, the huge exterior of the hotel, which to me looks absolutely lifelike. I would have just
00:42:33.260
thought it was location. No, that's all a set. Some of the aerial shots though make it look so
00:42:40.300
convincing. Well, yes, the aerial shots are real. They're done by the second unit, but they also
00:42:46.620
give us a clue to one of the really interesting theories about The Shining.
00:42:53.820
And I'm going to try and focus on stuff that I haven't talked about already. So, on my own channel,
00:43:01.180
I've got an audio commentary for the whole US version of the film, so the two hour 35 minute version.
00:43:09.180
So, I'm going to try and bring in stuff that I haven't talked about on that, but you can't go
00:43:13.820
without mentioning the fact that the external aerial shots of the hotel are impossible to match with the
00:43:24.540
sets. Of course. I get the impression that this was deliberate, or at least that's what people
00:43:31.020
say about it. Yes. This book says we're paranoid tinfoil hat wearers.
00:43:37.900
Okay. I don't go with that. I think a film about someone doubting their sanity, about different
00:43:46.460
versions of events. I think, to me, it's very clear that the continuity errors in it are deliberate
00:43:56.620
to mess with you. Just as the set, which is designed to be physically impossible, is designed to confuse
00:44:04.140
you and get you lost so you don't know where you are in the hotel, how things join up. When a maze is so
00:44:12.460
integral to the plot, I think it's deliberate. It's very obvious that the hotel is a maze. The maze is
00:44:21.100
a symbolic representation of the, I guess, uncertain sanity status of our protagonists.
00:44:29.260
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