In the final episode of our retrospective of Stanley Kubrick's life and career, we look at the final film he made before he died, Eyes Wide Shut. We discuss the making of the film, the reaction to it and the legacy it left behind.
00:00:14.720As 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.
00:00:21.800And today we're going to be talking about his final film that he released before he died.
00:00:26.860Well, he didn't release, he finished before he died, Eyes Wide Shut, which is an interesting film.
00:00:33.700This was the first time that I had ever watched it.
00:00:36.260It's got a somewhat of a mixed reputation.
00:00:40.540And supposedly people, when it first came out, thought that Stanley Kubrick had somehow managed to rope Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman,
00:00:47.700who were married at the time, into making a full-on porn film for him.
00:00:51.560So, shall we discuss a bit of that then?
00:00:53.220Let'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.
00:01:17.660So, we finished off part four talking about the end of Full Metal Jacket, how it had been rather delayed by some production issues,
00:01:27.620some by Stanley's approach to filmmaking, which by that time was still with him in full control, but also him wanting to experiment.
00:01:37.880We 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.
00:01:44.860And he would try and give himself lots of room to find the film in amidst the edit.
00:01:51.520Well, yeah, this was the period of his career where the gaps had become longer and longer each time.
00:01:57.220So, five years from Barry Lyndon to The Shining, seven years from that Full Metal Jacket, and then 12 years.
00:02:25.740We've talked about some of the projects that were started and didn't come to completion.
00:02:30.300We raised a little bit of, you know, Napoleon.
00:02:33.080We talked about the ongoing attempt to make Arthur Schnitzler's Traum Novella, which he would finally accomplish with Eyes Wide Shut.
00:02:41.240But 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.
00:02:51.240And those aren't looked at very often, so I'd like to just sort of cover those.
00:02:54.800A lot of people don't know about them.
00:02:57.760So, in this period, we've got a, no joke, his porn movie.
00:03:06.360So, 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.
00:03:50.680He 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?
00:04:01.900Now, okay, this is a tad misleading because he never took, he never took Terry Southern up on that.
00:04:08.880Although 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.
00:04:21.660And 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.
00:05:01.380They had had somewhat of a contentious relationship, sort of clashing a bit over Spielberg not appreciating that Stanley doesn't do schedules.
00:05:10.220So 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.
00:07:28.780And it eventually got, you know, parked and Spielberg would pick it up.
00:07:33.620So I won't go into too much more of it.
00:07:36.040But 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.
00:07:45.480Because that relationship is the core of the other film he tried to do, which is Aryan Papers.
00:07:52.320So he's picking up and putting down artificial intelligence.
00:08:03.320We talked in part three about some of the various options he'd tried.
00:08:08.440He 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.
00:08:22.980And he thought would be the guy to write the novel.
00:08:25.160Right 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.
00:08:42.240Yeah, 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.
00:08:54.460And then he said, and it's going to be a Holocaust film.
00:09:19.980And 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?
00:09:30.940And if you read Michael Hare's tribute to him, Kubrick, he discusses it a lot.
00:09:36.360And that novel sort of really captured, sorry, I should say that book.
00:09:40.420I was going to say, that's not a novel, it's a study.
00:09:43.580The book really held Kubrick's attention.
00:09:46.740There'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?
00:09:56.360We could make, we could use this for the movie.
00:09:58.880And Michael Hare says, Stanley, I don't want to read that book.
00:10:03.420And Stanley Kubrick says, no, the book you don't want to read is The Destruction of European Jews Part Two.
00:10:10.360So, 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.
00:10:27.040Around then you start to get, wasn't there the first TV series under that name?
00:10:31.300In the late 1970s, yes, there was the Holocaust series.
00:10:35.260Prior to that series, it had been more a subject of academic study and discussion.
00:10:42.740You had, even in the 1950s, Jewish philosophers and authors like Hannah Arendt didn't really want to touch the subject.
00:10:51.460Because it was so big, and because they kind of wanted to put it behind them.
00:10:56.660That 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.
00:11:05.800Then 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.
00:11:14.780Where you have things like the Holocaust series, and then later by the 1990s, speaking of Steven Spielberg, you get things like Schindler's List.
00:11:24.380So it goes more from, again, an academic study to a media industry.
00:11:31.860And a very, very controversial thinker, but what's his name?
00:11:37.280Norm 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.
00:11:51.260So the media has a lot to do with the emotive aspects of it.
00:11:56.260So it's interesting that Stanley Kubrick was interested in making that film as well.
00:12:01.040But, yeah, as you may predict, Nathan Abrams gives a lot more attention to it than any of the other books.
00:12:08.480So, you know, how sort of important a project it was to Stanley Kubrick is hard to tell.
00:12:17.260Every biographer has their own sort of focus.
00:12:20.720But he was looking at different ways to do it.
00:12:22.880He 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.
00:12:33.000That 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.
00:12:44.080And that was about a chap working in the Warsaw Ghetto and collaborating with the Third Reich.
00:12:52.680But he didn't want to do that because he thought that might be viewed as anti-Semitic.
00:12:58.500But he found what he could work with in 1991 with Lewis Bagley's Wartime Lies.
00:13:08.120And that was something he thought he could do.
00:13:10.080There's a long lead-in, but what worked for him about Wartime Lies is probably the mother-son relationship or mother-young-boy relationship.
00:13:20.360Again, it's this core theme that he returned to.
00:13:24.160He decided that was a story he could make.
00:13:27.680As, again, is typical with him, he takes that, he changes a lot.
00:13:31.420He 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.
00:13:42.620Little bits from that into it, just like with Full Metal Jacket, basically.
00:13:46.560He has Gustav Harsford's The Short Timers as the skeleton.
00:13:51.620And then he picks other stories and puts little bits onto that skeleton.
00:13:56.000But The Short Timers gives the framework.
00:14:15.920Now, 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,
00:14:28.860well, when I did a Vietnam movie, I got crowded out and so all the momentum had gone.
00:14:37.020I would be overshadowed by Steven Spielberg.
00:14:39.560And we've got to remember that Stanley was constantly looking for the hit.
00:14:45.680The 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.
00:14:58.560I can understand as well because Spielberg, obviously Schindler's List is a very unique film amongst Spielberg's filmography.
00:15:08.880You 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.
00:15:21.480But he's still a very sentimental filmmaker.
00:15:23.740He lays on a lot of the schmoozing, the schmaltz, whatever you want to call it, in all of his films.
00:15:30.120Whereas Kubrick is, for everything that we've done to recognise him as a much more emotional filmmaker that many would give him credit for,
00:15:37.980he is still a bit more detached than that and would view things from a bit more of an objective lens.
00:18:16.560So it would have been a story about a mother and I believe possibly her nephew.
00:18:23.980I apologise, I can't remember exactly.
00:18:25.960Trying to make their way through Nazi-controlled territory.
00:18:29.800And the title comes from, well, Wartime Lives was thought to not be specific enough.
00:18:34.720The whole thing is they're going with these forged papers of German ancestry, Aryan papers.
00:18:42.280And they're using that to try and get out of the territory.
00:18:45.940That was going to be the centre of the story, but it was never made.
00:18:50.600But 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.
00:19:01.920I mean, it pops up a lot in some of his later films.
00:19:06.100There's a bit of it in Barry Lyndon, Shining.
00:19:12.220There's even a bit of it in Eyes Wide Shut.
00:19:14.880At 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.
00:19:41.580But if you want lots of details on that, predictably, the Abrams goes into more details than anything else on it.
00:19:48.240But there is a lot of really interesting detail in it.
00:19:51.100But at the same time, the distance had sort of grown.
00:19:57.160And 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.
00:20:07.460Over the course of making that film, all three of his daughters had left the home, left Chilipuri, and also both of his parents died.
00:20:18.940So Gertrude and Jack Kubrick passed away fairly close to each other.
00:20:25.040And in both cases, Kubrick did not go to the funeral.
00:21:41.720He locks himself away for a couple of days to mourn privately and, like, totally privately and then gets back to working.
00:21:51.360But 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.
00:22:02.920But, ultimately, as we've covered, he didn't directly approach it.
00:22:07.940He 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.
00:22:36.020He 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.
00:22:44.300So he's updating it from very old Vienna and encountering scandalous monks to, you know, modern New York.
00:22:52.960But it's the emotional core, the psychological core of the story that he wants to maintain.
00:23:35.240It would not be able to hold a candle to the actual film that was made.
00:23:39.140You 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.
00:23:54.660Even Steve Martin could clean up a bit for some of his roles, but even he's just a bit too silly looking as well.
00:24:00.140I suppose that's why it would have been a comedy then.
00:24:04.000Yeah, we've got to remember it would have been delivered completely different.
00:24:07.400But 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.
00:24:21.660Don't be distracted by other stuff. Don't look at Dr. Strangelove and say, it's a silly custard pie fight comedy.
00:24:29.240There's no there's no message in this.
00:24:31.200You know, he goes back to a few people to try and convert the film into Eyes Wide Shut.
00:24:39.820He tries Michael Hare, who had helped script Full Metal Jacket.
00:24:45.340Michael Hare wisely knows that Stanley's trying to screw him.
00:24:49.820He basically, Stanley tries the old, I'll write the contract for your work trip.
00:24:56.840It'll be two weeks, Michael. Come and polish the script, Michael.
00:26:01.120It could have also been somewhat intentional, I imagine, because Kubrick, of course, not averse to the old smokescreen to hide what he's doing.
00:27:32.260From, like, the level of autistic control, like having people check random theatres to make sure they were displaying things properly.
00:27:41.400Or 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?
00:27:54.540Which, 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.
00:28:08.960So humans program the robots, but then the robots start to alter humans to serve them.
00:28:15.920It'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.
00:28:24.320Well, 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.
00:28:41.020And 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.
00:28:50.360Yes, the middle class are basically AI.
00:28:53.040Yeah, basically NPCs, as we know at this point.
00:28:56.480Remember, George Orwell had the middle class's number.
00:29:00.440You know, isn't that the whole point of the middle section is, like, you've got to watch them.
00:29:14.280Well, 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.
00:29:25.800But, so, AI, that's a quick diversion there.
00:29:29.900So, AI is being advertised, and actually he's working on Eyes Wide Shut from 1996 onwards.
00:29:38.420So, 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.
00:29:54.480So, they basically belonged to Stanley Kubrick until he said they were done with the film.
00:30:00.640Yeah, I think that was very canny of Stanley Kubrick.
00:30:32.100I 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.
00:30:47.540That 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.
00:30:56.260No, it's Stanley Kubrick merrily mixed reality and the films.
00:31:04.620He knows that you will carry your real-world associations of someone into the film.
00:31:10.500So, 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.
00:31:22.260Jack Nicholson had been implemented in quite an awful scandal prior to The Shining, so shall I detail that?
00:31:58.320Yeah, 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.
00:32:12.980So, bringing him in as a father then sort of brings in that sort of dangerous reputation.
00:32:19.620Especially given that there are some underlying themes in The Shining.
00:32:23.080Has Jack done anything to Danny in the past?
00:32:50.220He 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.
00:33:00.320And there's a lot of speculation, quite rabid speculation, furthered by how little information he gave anyone.
00:33:08.000Some of the stories around it are that he did want them, you know, he wanted them to actually have sex on camera.
00:33:14.700But he had wanted them to genuinely get high and also take ecstasy.
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