The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： The Career of Stanley Kubrick： Part V

00:00:00.160 Hello and welcome to the fifth and final episode of our retrospective of the life and career of Stanley Kubrick.

00:00:07.440 I'm your host Harry, joined again by our wonderful guest Chloe, Proper Horror Show, and Josh is here too.

00:00:14.020 Hello!

00:00:14.720 As you can see, they've broken out the bubbly, a little bit of the bubbly, in the celebration of Stanley Kubrick and the end of our series.

00:00:21.800 And today we're going to be talking about his final film that he released before he died.

00:00:26.860 Well, he didn't release, he finished before he died, Eyes Wide Shut, which is an interesting film.

00:00:33.700 This was the first time that I had ever watched it.

00:00:36.260 It's got a somewhat of a mixed reputation.

00:00:38.940 It's a little bit notorious.

00:00:40.540 And supposedly people, when it first came out, thought that Stanley Kubrick had somehow managed to rope Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman,

00:00:47.700 who were married at the time, into making a full-on porn film for him. 0.78

00:00:51.560 So, shall we discuss a bit of that then?

00:00:53.220 Let's talk about the making of the film, the actual film itself, and the reaction to it, and then the final days of Stanley Kubrick, I suppose, and his legacy.

00:01:03.740 Oh, that would be lovely.

00:01:05.040 But, I mean, what series is this?

00:01:06.640 We've got to blue-ball people for a while. 1.00

00:01:08.540 We've got to talk about technical specifications and advertising campaigns.

00:01:12.680 Well, you know, wherever the story starts, start.

00:01:15.740 Fair enough, fair enough.

00:01:17.660 So, we finished off part four talking about the end of Full Metal Jacket, how it had been rather delayed by some production issues,

00:01:27.620 some by Stanley's approach to filmmaking, which by that time was still with him in full control, but also him wanting to experiment.

00:01:37.880 We talked about he would try things, he would improvise, he'd get actors to go over things and change things, update the script over and over.

00:01:44.860 And he would try and give himself lots of room to find the film in amidst the edit.

00:01:51.520 Well, yeah, this was the period of his career where the gaps had become longer and longer each time.

00:01:57.220 So, five years from Barry Lyndon to The Shining, seven years from that Full Metal Jacket, and then 12 years.

00:02:03.560 Oh, yeah.

00:02:04.300 Until you get to Eyes Wide Shut.

00:02:05.820 So, many people, I'm sure, outside of those who worked with Kubrick and knew what was going on, probably thought he'd just retired.

00:02:14.180 Oh, yeah.

00:02:14.700 I mean, this approach is a major cause of those gaps.

00:02:19.640 But the other one is him not knowing what to do.

00:02:24.320 Like, what is that next project?

00:02:25.740 We've talked about some of the projects that were started and didn't come to completion.

00:02:30.300 We raised a little bit of, you know, Napoleon.

00:02:33.080 We talked about the ongoing attempt to make Arthur Schnitzler's Traum Novella, which he would finally accomplish with Eyes Wide Shut.

00:02:41.240 But there are a few others that came in the way, quite a few that were in the middle and didn't make it to production, but sort of delayed him getting to Eyes Wide Shut.

00:02:51.240 And those aren't looked at very often, so I'd like to just sort of cover those.

00:02:54.800 A lot of people don't know about them.

00:02:57.760 So, in this period, we've got a, no joke, his porn movie.

00:03:03.620 Kind of. 0.53

00:03:04.760 Kind of.

00:03:05.740 All right.

00:03:06.360 So, back in the Doctor Strangelove days, he had worked with a guy called Terry Southern, who was more of a, you know, a Texan comedy writer, very dark, bawdy sense of humour.

00:03:19.200 Sleazebag?

00:03:19.800 I would not be unfair.

00:03:22.220 He was, he was convincing Stanley that, you know, the future of cinema, it's, it's a hardcore pro one.

00:03:30.420 And you could be the guy to make the first Oscar winning.

00:03:35.000 I mean, he's about 10, 12, 13 years, a bit too early.

00:03:38.900 When was it Deep Throat came out?

00:03:40.860 Oh.

00:03:41.220 Sometime in the 70s.

00:03:42.440 Yeah.

00:03:42.740 But sadly, that was able to become quite a cultural phenomenon.

00:03:47.100 Yeah.

00:03:47.940 Thanks, Al.

00:03:48.880 Great stuff.

00:03:50.500 Yeah.

00:03:50.680 He tried to sell Stanley on this and Stanley was considering it and screened some hardcore in his house to people to say like, can you see the merit here?

00:04:01.220 What do you think?

00:04:01.900 Now, okay, this is a tad misleading because he never took, he never took Terry Southern up on that.

00:04:08.880 Although I would suggest that the interest in the erotic feeds through into Eyes Wide Shut, his idea of, I can have extreme eroticism in an arty movie.

00:04:21.660 And I think he got that idea out in Eyes Wide Shut, but Terry Southern himself was able to develop it in a story called Blue Movie, which is effectively.

00:04:32.500 Which is a blue movie, I bet.

00:04:33.920 Yeah.

00:04:34.180 Well, it's about the attempt to make that movie.

00:04:37.500 And it has a guy who's basically a Stanley Kubrick stand-in.

00:04:42.060 I don't know if Stanley appreciated that, but you can look out that little oddity on your own if you want, guys, purely for the articles.

00:04:48.260 But the more substantial one that everyone is expecting is AI, artificial intelligence.

00:04:56.200 Which ended up being completed by Spielberg.

00:04:59.560 Yes, exactly, exactly.

00:05:01.380 They had had somewhat of a contentious relationship, sort of clashing a bit over Spielberg not appreciating that Stanley doesn't do schedules.

00:05:10.220 So when he's like, oi, you know, I'm booked in the studio to film Raiders of the Lost Ark, stop filming The Shining, shut it down.

00:05:19.360 Kubrick wasn't going for that.

00:05:21.320 And his daughter Vivian reported Spielberg for animal welfare violations.

00:05:27.560 But after this, they sort of bonded.

00:05:30.680 Stanley sounded Steven Spielberg out over a couple of story ideas.

00:05:36.940 Seeing a bit of, seeing something he could respect in the guy.

00:05:43.260 But long before they had that collaboration, in fact, he sounded him out over artificial intelligence.

00:05:47.840 Because this is a story he was absolutely stuck on.

00:05:51.640 It was announced numerous times, this is Stanley's next movie.

00:05:54.880 He's going to make artificial intelligence next.

00:05:57.020 He had been working on it since, I think, 76.

00:05:59.040 He had approached Brian Aldis, who is a science fiction author, who'd done a great story called Super Toys Last All Summer Long.

00:06:09.700 And Stanley, standard Stanley here, take the story and then change everything about it.

00:06:17.060 He was convinced that this story could effectively become a new version of Pinocchio.

00:06:23.880 And that it was really about how you explore the mother and child relationship, the mother and young son relationship.

00:06:33.080 And he was convinced that was the heart of the story.

00:06:36.100 And he wouldn't go any further until he had the heart of that story.

00:06:41.680 But he could never nail it down.

00:06:44.320 He brought in Aldis a bunch of times.

00:06:46.900 I think we discussed previously how he wrote the contract for him and absolutely screwed him.

00:06:52.920 You're like, they'd stopped working on it.

00:06:54.320 Stanley said it wasn't going anywhere.

00:06:56.180 Aldis went on holiday.

00:06:57.580 And Kubrick says, you left the country.

00:06:59.340 Breach of contract.

00:07:00.520 I don't have to pay you.

00:07:01.520 I know.

00:07:03.560 And Aldis came crawling back, you know.

00:07:05.600 I shouldn't say crawling back.

00:07:06.600 That's a bit harsh.

00:07:08.020 Kubrick brought in many people to work on this.

00:07:10.940 I think there's about five or six different authors mentioned who had a go at trying to get his vision.

00:07:17.020 And they just couldn't do it.

00:07:19.040 He brought on artists to get the visuals of it.

00:07:22.660 And that helped.

00:07:23.840 But he couldn't nail the core of the story.

00:07:27.100 He could never get that quite right.

00:07:28.780 And it eventually got, you know, parked and Spielberg would pick it up.

00:07:33.620 So I won't go into too much more of it.

00:07:36.040 But I think the details of that core of the story, the mother and the son relationship that he really wanted to nail down, is really important.

00:07:45.480 Because that relationship is the core of the other film he tried to do, which is Aryan Papers.

00:07:52.320 So he's picking up and putting down artificial intelligence.

00:08:03.320 We talked in part three about some of the various options he'd tried.

00:08:06.820 He'd been looking at this since 1976.

00:08:08.440 He had his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, a guy who had become his executive producer and legacy manager, approach a guy called Isaac Singer, who was living in New York.

00:08:22.980 And he thought would be the guy to write the novel.

00:08:25.160 Right before we started this recording, I flipped through the Stanley Kubrick archives, which we had right here, which you actually had the dust jacket on the page where it talks about this.

00:08:38.880 And I like the little story.

00:08:39.960 I put that there, actually.

00:08:41.100 Oh, did you actually?

00:08:41.680 I did, yeah.

00:08:42.240 Yeah, I like the little story that it gives where he was approached, he had a meeting with Kubrick's assistant, and they spoke about, you know, writing a story for Kubrick, everything he wanted.

00:08:54.460 And then he said, and it's going to be a Holocaust film.

00:08:57.500 And he went silent.

00:08:59.220 And he said, well, I can't do that.

00:09:01.420 Well, why not?

00:09:02.720 I don't know the slightest thing about it.

00:09:05.180 And apparently he told Kubrick, who said, I know how he feels.

00:09:08.460 Yeah, it's, I guess, that sort of uncertainty kept with him.

00:09:17.980 It's such a huge subject.

00:09:19.980 And Kubrick, for all of his reading, I think we've spoken, did he have a copy or had read a copy of Raoul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews?

00:09:29.620 He absolutely did.

00:09:30.940 And if you read Michael Hare's tribute to him, Kubrick, he discusses it a lot.

00:09:36.360 And that novel sort of really captured, sorry, I should say that book.

00:09:40.420 I was going to say, that's not a novel, it's a study.

00:09:43.580 The book really held Kubrick's attention.

00:09:46.740 There's a great little anecdote where Kubrick is saying to Michael Hare, who is also Jewish, just, you've got to, have you read it?

00:09:56.360 We could make, we could use this for the movie.

00:09:58.880 And Michael Hare says, Stanley, I don't want to read that book.

00:10:03.420 And Stanley Kubrick says, no, the book you don't want to read is The Destruction of European Jews Part Two.

00:10:10.360 So, it was on his mind, and he's looking at this from 1976 onwards, which is around the time that the Holocaust becomes sort of a cultural idea, and it gets a sort of, it sort of takes a sort of cultural form.

00:10:27.040 Around then you start to get, wasn't there the first TV series under that name?

00:10:31.300 In the late 1970s, yes, there was the Holocaust series.

00:10:35.260 Prior to that series, it had been more a subject of academic study and discussion.

00:10:42.740 You had, even in the 1950s, Jewish philosophers and authors like Hannah Arendt didn't really want to touch the subject.

00:10:51.460 Because it was so big, and because they kind of wanted to put it behind them.

00:10:56.660 That was an event of the past that was a horrifying tragedy, but we don't want to linger on it and we want to move on.

00:11:05.800 Then you had Raoul Hilberg do his studies, and it was in the 70s, really, that it went from a thing of academic discussion to becoming more of a media phenomenon.

00:11:14.780 Where you have things like the Holocaust series, and then later by the 1990s, speaking of Steven Spielberg, you get things like Schindler's List.

00:11:24.380 So it goes more from, again, an academic study to a media industry.

00:11:31.860 And a very, very controversial thinker, but what's his name?

00:11:36.700 Finklestein.

00:11:37.280 Norm Finklestein has a book called The Holocaust Industry, where he doesn't talk about the media aspect of it, but he does talk about how the State of Israel has basically used it to blackmail Switzerland and other countries to get money out of them.

00:11:51.260 So the media has a lot to do with the emotive aspects of it.

00:11:55.320 Yeah.

00:11:55.880 Yeah.

00:11:56.260 So it's interesting that Stanley Kubrick was interested in making that film as well.

00:12:01.040 But, yeah, as you may predict, Nathan Abrams gives a lot more attention to it than any of the other books.

00:12:08.480 So, you know, how sort of important a project it was to Stanley Kubrick is hard to tell.

00:12:17.260 Every biographer has their own sort of focus.

00:12:20.720 But he was looking at different ways to do it.

00:12:22.880 He sort of, he was suggested one that would, I think, fairly closely resemble The Pianist as Roman Polanski would make it, but he decided not to do it.

00:12:33.000 That was based on, and I'm going to mispronounce this, so apologies to any Polish viewers, The Wartime Diaries of Adam Czerniakow, Prelude to Doom.

00:12:44.080 And that was about a chap working in the Warsaw Ghetto and collaborating with the Third Reich.

00:12:52.680 But he didn't want to do that because he thought that might be viewed as anti-Semitic.

00:12:57.080 So he dropped it then.

00:12:58.500 But he found what he could work with in 1991 with Lewis Bagley's Wartime Lies.

00:13:08.120 And that was something he thought he could do.

00:13:10.080 There's a long lead-in, but what worked for him about Wartime Lies is probably the mother-son relationship or mother-young-boy relationship.

00:13:20.360 Again, it's this core theme that he returned to.

00:13:24.160 He decided that was a story he could make.

00:13:27.680 As, again, is typical with him, he takes that, he changes a lot.

00:13:31.420 He decides he will still use huge numbers of researchers to summarise other books and attach sort of lines of logic from them to the story.

00:13:42.620 Little bits from that into it, just like with Full Metal Jacket, basically.

00:13:46.560 He has Gustav Harsford's The Short Timers as the skeleton.

00:13:51.620 And then he picks other stories and puts little bits onto that skeleton.

00:13:56.000 But The Short Timers gives the framework.

00:13:58.220 He was doing a similar thing here.

00:14:01.460 But he gets quite far into production.

00:14:05.440 He's scouting locations.

00:14:07.060 He's booking troops.

00:14:08.100 He's got actresses settled.

00:14:10.620 He's got a working script.

00:14:12.420 But he doesn't go through with it.

00:14:15.920 Now, one version is, and this is about 1993, by the way, one version is that he sees Steven Spielberg is working on Schindler's List and thinks,

00:14:28.860 well, when I did a Vietnam movie, I got crowded out and so all the momentum had gone.

00:14:37.020 I would be overshadowed by Steven Spielberg.

00:14:39.560 And we've got to remember that Stanley was constantly looking for the hit.

00:14:45.680 The art was important to him, but he absolutely wanted recognition in a way that he never really got while he was releasing films to the masses.

00:14:55.300 Which is a real shame.

00:14:56.980 Oh, absolutely.

00:14:58.020 Absolutely.

00:14:58.560 I can understand as well because Spielberg, obviously Schindler's List is a very unique film amongst Spielberg's filmography.

00:15:08.880 You can kind of put that alongside Saving Private Ryan for how gritty the filmmaking is at points, which is unlike most of his other films.

00:15:21.480 But he's still a very sentimental filmmaker.

00:15:23.740 He lays on a lot of the schmoozing, the schmaltz, whatever you want to call it, in all of his films. 0.96

00:15:30.120 Whereas Kubrick is, for everything that we've done to recognise him as a much more emotional filmmaker that many would give him credit for,

00:15:37.980 he is still a bit more detached than that and would view things from a bit more of an objective lens.

00:15:44.980 Emotional but not sentimental, maybe?

00:15:46.800 Yes, less sentimental.

00:15:48.140 And I don't think that's what people would have been looking for from that style of film.

00:15:53.880 Especially if Spielberg had already come out with Schindler's List by this point.

00:15:57.660 Yeah, exactly.

00:15:58.480 Well, he was producing it, it hadn't come out.

00:16:02.600 And so maybe one version is Stanley got a bit psyched out.

00:16:07.700 But the other version is, at this point, he'd become hesitant to start.

00:16:15.960 He was delaying things, basically.

00:16:20.440 And he was sort of, I mean, this is from the Abrams, and I did find it quite convincing.

00:16:27.320 Telling a lot of stories about how Stanley liked to do as much pre-planning as possible.

00:16:32.380 But in a way, he was sort of delaying starting the film, because if he didn't think it could be perfect, he didn't want to start.

00:16:40.400 And some of the stories about him grabbing random books off the shelves in bookstores to find random inspiration.

00:16:49.580 That's sort of the period where you get this from.

00:16:53.060 Hoping that inspiration will strike, but in a way, possibly delaying it.

00:16:57.080 And I suspect that might be the case here, that he was a bit intimidated out of handling the topic, and that's why he shelved it.

00:17:06.720 It's such a huge, controversial and emotive topic.

00:17:11.080 I'd be worried to make a film about it.

00:17:13.160 I'm sure most people would be.

00:17:14.680 And Kubrick, at times in his career, can seem uniquely skittish.

00:17:19.380 He's quite easy to scare off, it seems.

00:17:23.580 Unless he's really fixated purely on one thing, it's easy for him to change his mind on something.

00:17:30.540 I think he just had to make sure he could completely commit himself to doing something.

00:17:36.600 If he had second thoughts, I think he rightfully understood that this would affect the quality of the film that he would produce.

00:17:43.200 And I think part of Kubrick's charm, in a way, is that he knew exactly what he wanted to make.

00:17:49.040 And if he didn't have that feeling, he would probably link that to the quality in which his final output had.

00:17:58.860 And I'd imagine that still a lot of that goes back to Spartacus, where he was so out of control of a lot of the aspects of that film.

00:18:05.540 And it's not one that he was particularly happy with, as far as I remember.

00:18:08.460 And so, yeah, I can understand that perfectionist impulse in him was a driving force there.

00:18:15.900 Yeah.

00:18:16.560 So it would have been a story about a mother and I believe possibly her nephew.

00:18:23.980 I apologise, I can't remember exactly.

00:18:25.960 Trying to make their way through Nazi-controlled territory.

00:18:29.800 And the title comes from, well, Wartime Lives was thought to not be specific enough.

00:18:34.720 The whole thing is they're going with these forged papers of German ancestry, Aryan papers. 0.67

00:18:42.280 And they're using that to try and get out of the territory.

00:18:45.940 That was going to be the centre of the story, but it was never made.

00:18:50.600 But I find it interesting that the germ of it, the emotional heart, is still that mother-young child relationship that was clearly on his mind at the time.

00:19:01.920 I mean, it pops up a lot in some of his later films.

00:19:06.100 There's a bit of it in Barry Lyndon, Shining.

00:19:10.520 It's a big focal point of the story.

00:19:12.220 There's even a bit of it in Eyes Wide Shut.

00:19:14.880 At least in the way that there's responsibilities of a parent depicted in Eyes Wide Shut that necessitate the mundanity of the married life of parents.

00:19:28.760 Yeah.

00:19:30.020 Yeah.

00:19:32.800 I forgot where I was going to go with that.

00:19:36.020 He ended up not being able to make the film.

00:19:38.260 Exactly.

00:19:38.880 Exactly.

00:19:39.820 It was shelved, alas.

00:19:41.580 But if you want lots of details on that, predictably, the Abrams goes into more details than anything else on it.

00:19:48.240 But there is a lot of really interesting detail in it.

00:19:51.100 But at the same time, the distance had sort of grown.

00:19:57.160 And I think there's another factor in here that we ended part four talking about how it was a very transitional period in Kubrick's life, having made Full Metal Jacket.

00:20:07.460 Over the course of making that film, all three of his daughters had left the home, left Chilipuri, and also both of his parents died.

00:20:18.940 So Gertrude and Jack Kubrick passed away fairly close to each other.

00:20:25.040 And in both cases, Kubrick did not go to the funeral.

00:20:28.380 He buried himself in his work.

00:20:32.940 He didn't want to travel over, I think.

00:20:35.120 His paranoia about traveling was there.

00:20:37.060 So it was just because they were in America.

00:20:39.020 Yes.

00:20:40.360 But, I mean, this is one thing that's sort of hard to really justify.

00:20:44.960 They visited him whilst he was making Barry Lyndon.

00:20:49.700 And he didn't really free up much time for them.

00:20:52.920 He made his driver, Emilio, show them round London and said, treat them like they were your parents.

00:20:59.800 And it's sort of, you know, it's not great.

00:21:05.580 Artists can often be cold-hearted.

00:21:07.960 Yeah.

00:21:08.420 I mean, he's a guy who, when he was working on a film, would work on it totally.

00:21:12.220 It would consume him.

00:21:13.100 There are some great quotes in the Stanley Kubrick archives about how he just, his wording is something like, you care or you don't.

00:21:20.760 And if you care, then the only limits are how much sleep you need and how much money you can spend.

00:21:28.320 But otherwise, you just try and get it right.

00:21:30.500 And I can't moderate like that, is an approximation of what he said.

00:21:36.320 But, yeah, I think it's notable.

00:21:37.940 He didn't travel for the funeral.

00:21:39.600 He kept working.

00:21:40.560 He buried himself in his work.

00:21:41.720 He locks himself away for a couple of days to mourn privately and, like, totally privately and then gets back to working.

00:21:51.360 But I think that may have sort of figured in why a parental theme, a family theme, was so close to his mind and why he really wanted to focus on it.

00:22:02.920 But, ultimately, as we've covered, he didn't directly approach it.

00:22:07.940 He returned, finally, to something that was brewing since the early 70s at the latest, which is his fascination with a particular novel, Arthur Schnitzler's Traum Novella, Dream Novel.

00:22:24.020 Or is it Traum Roman?

00:22:25.780 I think it's Traum Novella.

00:22:27.340 I think you're right about the Traum Novella.

00:22:29.320 But, yeah, and that's an odd one.

00:22:33.520 It's his desire to update it.

00:22:36.020 He knows that the core of the story, I mean, classic Kubrick, the core of the story is what's important and you can change everything else.

00:22:44.300 So he's updating it from very old Vienna and encountering scandalous monks to, you know, modern New York.

00:22:52.960 But it's the emotional core, the psychological core of the story that he wants to maintain.

00:22:57.980 He switches genres a lot.

00:23:01.180 He had tried with our good friend Terry Southern.

00:23:04.440 Can we do it as a hardcore porn directly?

00:23:07.840 He goes back to Terry.

00:23:09.000 Can we do it this way? 0.98

00:23:11.360 Can we make it a bawdy comedy with lots of explicit sex? 0.91

00:23:16.100 No, that doesn't work.

00:23:17.720 Can we make it as a straight up comedy with Steve Martin, with Woody Allen?

00:23:22.020 Can we do that?

00:23:23.340 He tries it.

00:23:24.060 He can't manage that.

00:23:25.580 Steve Martin and Woody Allen, I'm trying to picture in my mind what that would have looked like and I'm coming up a blank.

00:23:33.100 It's bizarre to think of, isn't it?

00:23:35.240 It would not be able to hold a candle to the actual film that was made.

00:23:39.140 You know, there's a certain visual of Tom Cruise in a tuxedo, an enormous party in high society Manhattan that does not fit with Woody Allen in his place.

00:23:53.900 No. 0.94

00:23:54.660 Even Steve Martin could clean up a bit for some of his roles, but even he's just a bit too silly looking as well. 0.59

00:24:00.140 I suppose that's why it would have been a comedy then.

00:24:04.000 Yeah, we've got to remember it would have been delivered completely different.

00:24:07.400 But again, I think that's really key to Kubrick is that the genre and the tone can be switched out, but there is still an idea that he wants you to get, which is almost telling us when you watch the Kubrick, look for that idea.

00:24:21.660 Don't be distracted by other stuff. Don't look at Dr. Strangelove and say, it's a silly custard pie fight comedy.

00:24:29.240 There's no there's no message in this.

00:24:31.200 You know, he goes back to a few people to try and convert the film into Eyes Wide Shut.

00:24:39.820 He tries Michael Hare, who had helped script Full Metal Jacket.

00:24:45.340 Michael Hare wisely knows that Stanley's trying to screw him.

00:24:49.820 He basically, Stanley tries the old, I'll write the contract for your work trip.

00:24:56.840 It'll be two weeks, Michael. Come and polish the script, Michael.

00:24:59.680 And Michael Hare is not having it.

00:25:02.560 And so it's almost, he doesn't begrudge Stanley trying to do these tricks, but he's like.

00:25:07.200 At this point, that's just Stanley.

00:25:10.100 Such is, such is the business, you know.

00:25:12.720 Kubrick learned how Hollywood operated and he needed to make sure that he was successful financially.

00:25:19.160 So he used a lot of the same tricks.

00:25:22.640 A man called Frederick Raphael had a contentious relationship with Kubrick, but was able to produce a script he was happy with.

00:25:31.320 Was doubtful whether he would actually get screenwriting credit.

00:25:34.320 We'll remember that the screenwriting credits have been a constant source of contention.

00:25:38.840 What can you do?

00:25:42.340 But eventually they have something they can work with.

00:25:44.660 And so Eyes Wide Shut goes into production, serious production, about 1996.

00:25:52.240 Although we should note that the studios were still announcing that AI would be his next feature film.

00:25:58.620 Like, well into that time.

00:26:01.120 It could have also been somewhat intentional, I imagine, because Kubrick, of course, not averse to the old smokescreen to hide what he's doing.

00:26:09.560 Oh, exactly.

00:26:10.660 Just briefly.

00:26:12.340 I've never watched AI.

00:26:15.880 Quick review.

00:26:17.080 Very, very quick review.

00:26:18.180 Like 30 second review.

00:26:19.600 What would you say of it?

00:26:20.740 I would have to re-watch it myself because, like any Kubrick film, it benefits from the re-watch when you can look in the ideas.

00:26:30.080 But I think it's something with, how can I say?

00:26:37.880 I think there are deep truths in there about what it means to be human and the value of life.

00:26:44.600 In a similar way to Barry Lyndon, like there's an authenticity diagram.

00:26:48.420 I don't believe that Kubrick is actually on the side of us believing that robots are meant to be of equal value.

00:26:58.460 And I think the film always plays a game with you to try and make you believe that.

00:27:03.860 But there's some really good stuff in there about where consumerism can take you.

00:27:11.820 And, yeah.

00:27:12.620 And obviously because it had to be picked up by Spielberg, quality-wise, obviously all of that's in there, which is the thematic stuff.

00:27:20.120 But in terms of the actual quality of the film, is it something that Kubrick would have been happy with, you think?

00:27:27.500 Kubrick would not have been happy with anyone finishing a film that wasn't him.

00:27:31.260 Oh, that's true.

00:27:31.840 That's true.

00:27:32.260 From, like, the level of autistic control, like having people check random theatres to make sure they were displaying things properly.

00:27:41.400 Or that they'd, what was the case with, was it 2001 that he sent someone to check a theatre and make sure that they'd painted the backdrop properly so that it wouldn't disrupt the image?

00:27:54.540 Which, no, he would want total control, but probably his strongest idea in there, very relevant to A Clockwork Orange, very relevant to Full Metal Jacket, is the idea of how a system comes to gain control over you.

00:28:08.960 So humans program the robots, but then the robots start to alter humans to serve them.

00:28:15.920 It's a quite subtle idea in there, but it's sort of like how any system we make will ultimately end up adjusting us to serve it.

00:28:24.320 Well, it could even be compared with the very brief themes that are touched on in Barry Lyndon with the middle class bureaucracy within the aristocratic estate slowly beginning to take charge of a few more things and manage them.

00:28:41.020 And you see the managerial class begin to emerge who then, in our own time, have their own desires and goals and motivations that tend to override things.

00:28:50.360 Yes, the middle class are basically AI. 0.91

00:28:53.040 Yeah, basically NPCs, as we know at this point.

00:28:56.480 Remember, George Orwell had the middle class's number.

00:29:00.440 You know, isn't that the whole point of the middle section is, like, you've got to watch them.

00:29:04.980 They'll try and shank you.

00:29:06.300 Still never read either of those books.

00:29:08.220 Animal Farm War, 1984.

00:29:10.160 Really?

00:29:10.520 Because I'm not a boomer.

00:29:12.540 Oh, come on. 0.87

00:29:13.800 Fair play.

00:29:14.280 Well, let's just say, after this, like, I do want to revisit AI, but I think I'd just be quite frustrated trying to work out what Spielberg has added in.

00:29:24.760 Yeah.

00:29:25.800 But, so, AI, that's a quick diversion there.

00:29:29.900 So, AI is being advertised, and actually he's working on Eyes Wide Shut from 1996 onwards.

00:29:38.420 So, did it take the three years until the film released to make, because as far as I know from this film, it was quite a strained production, and Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise had signed onto it with completely open-ended contracts.

00:29:54.480 So, they basically belonged to Stanley Kubrick until he said they were done with the film.

00:30:00.640 Yeah, I think that was very canny of Stanley Kubrick.

00:30:05.040 At this point, he knew himself.

00:30:07.300 His overrunning productions were now kind of legendary.

00:30:10.000 So, he'd got this written in.

00:30:13.400 It did cause friction.

00:30:14.520 Luckily, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, they were keen to stay on.

00:30:17.480 They wanted the challenge, I believe.

00:30:19.300 Well, it must have been an incredibly challenging set of roles for the pair of them, given that they were married at the time, as well.

00:30:27.380 Did this have anything to do with the falling apart of their marriage?

00:30:31.480 That is...

00:30:32.100 I wouldn't be shocked, because the kind of emotions that they would have had to be drawing from, as well as the themes of the film explicitly being about the kind of underlying sexual jealousy that lies beneath any happy marriage.

00:30:47.540 That being brought straight to the top for them to play out on screen, I can imagine they couldn't help but take a bit of that home with them.

00:30:56.260 No, it's Stanley Kubrick merrily mixed reality and the films.

00:31:04.620 He knows that you will carry your real-world associations of someone into the film.

00:31:10.500 So, for instance, Malcolm McDowell, known for playing a young schoolboy in If, so he knows that sort of innocent schoolboy idea is carried through to his character of Alex.

00:31:22.260 Jack Nicholson had been implemented in quite an awful scandal prior to The Shining, so shall I detail that?

00:31:30.840 I was not aware of this.

00:31:32.480 Had he murdered a family out in the mountains?

00:31:35.440 No, not at all, but you'll recall good old Mr. Polanski.

00:31:39.520 Oh, yes.

00:31:40.640 He wasn't good friends with Roman Polanski, was he?

00:31:43.540 Because they had worked together on Chinatown before.

00:31:45.460 I'm afraid so. 0.94

00:31:46.240 So, the house where Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old. 0.87

00:31:52.080 Yes, that was Jack Nicholson's. 0.73

00:31:54.320 Oh, yes, I remember now.

00:31:56.040 I have read about that.

00:31:58.320 Yeah, so he had had that sort of scandal around, so the ideas of him were sort of, I think it was a very tough time for Jack Nicholson in that and he was associated with that.

00:32:12.980 So, bringing him in as a father then sort of brings in that sort of dangerous reputation.

00:32:19.620 Especially given that there are some underlying themes in The Shining.

00:32:23.080 Has Jack done anything to Danny in the past?

00:32:27.040 You know that he's hurt him.

00:32:28.220 Has he gone further than that?

00:32:29.240 So, that's very, very clever of him.

00:32:31.900 Very cynical.

00:32:33.320 Exactly.

00:32:33.680 But, if you're trying to get the best performance out of somebody, then you do have to be a bit cynical that way.

00:32:38.640 Exactly.

00:32:39.620 And Eyes Wide Shut, absolutely he wanted to play on the tension.

00:32:43.400 The idea that this is a real-life couple and it's Tom Cruise cheating on Nicole.

00:32:47.820 He was aware of that.

00:32:50.220 He also knew that he could get a huge buzz around the film, get the, draw people in, get that heat generated around the real-life couple and how much they're going to do.

00:33:00.320 And there's a lot of speculation, quite rabid speculation, furthered by how little information he gave anyone.

00:33:08.000 Some of the stories around it are that he did want them, you know, he wanted them to actually have sex on camera.

00:33:13.560 This is obviously false.

00:33:14.700 But he had wanted them to genuinely get high and also take ecstasy.

00:33:20.340 If you would like to see the full version of this premium video, please head over to lotuseaters.com and subscribe to gain full access to all of our premium content.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 17, 2024

PREVIEW： The Career of Stanley Kubrick： Part V

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