You can’t keep a good director down, and death seems no obstacle to Stanley Kubrick. We’ve already had Spielberg turning his endless preparations for AI into a movie, and now comes news that there’s still a chance Kubrick’s long-gestating Aryan Papers may actually go before the cameras.
At the Edinburgh Festival there’s an exhibition called ‘Unfolding The Aryan Papers’, which details Kubrick’s decades long plans to adapt the book War Time Lies for the big screen. Like many things he worked on, the research for the film went on and on, but he never got around to actually filming it. Well, actually it almost went into production once in the early 90s, but the film got scrapped when Kubrick and Warner Bros. agreed it wouldn’t be worth making the movie so close to the release of the similarly themed Schindler’s List (War Time Lies follows a Polish Jew and his nephew trying to flee Nazi persecution).
However the film may not be completely dead. Kubrick’s brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who’s been helping organise the exhibition (and also exec produced AI) has been talking to The Times, saying “I regret it [Aryan Papers] never got made but it was a decision made by Kubrick and Warner Bros, probably very wisely. However the newspaper adds that Harlan hasn’t given up hope completely. Warner still owns the rights to the movie, and he hopes that they can get someone like Ang Lee to resurrect the project and bring Kubrick’s project to he big screen.
Of course that doesn’t mean it will actually happen, but we wouldn’t be shocked if someone tried to make the movie someday, as Kubrick is still quite a name to conjure with.