How Important Is Stanley Kubrick? – Part 2 – Movie-A-Day: Eyes Wide Shut

Starring: Tom Cruise, Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field Director: Stanley Kubrick Year Of Release: 1999 Plot: After a Christmas party where both Doctor Bill Harford and his wife Alice are hit on by different people, Bill embarks on a journey in dark sexuality, where he discovers his wife’s fantasies of having sex with other men, nearly sleeps with a prostitute and then attends a masked party that he hasn’t really been invited to. Once there he discover that is pretty much an orgy and he is in danger, as may be the woman who ‘selects’ him from the throng of men.

The Move-A-Day Project is a series of articles based on a multiude of subjects inspired by a different film each day. To find out more about the project click here, or for the full list of previous articles and future movies we’ll be covering click here.

If you haven’t read the first part of this article, which looks at the genesis of Kubrick as a filmmaker, I’d suggest you go back and take a look at that first, before we continue with his life and importance post-1964. CLICK HERE to read it.

After the success of Dr. Strangelove, unsurprisingly it took four years to get his next movie on the screen, partly because it was inevitably going to be expensive and unlike anything anybody had ever seen before. Kubrick approached renowned sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke about making the proverbial ‘good science fiction movie’. Clarke said a story he’d written in 1948 for a BBC competition (but which hadn’t even been shortlisted), called ‘The Sentinel’, might be a good starting point. From there an unusual collaboration occurred, with Kubrick writing a screenplay and Clarke simultaneously writing a novel. They’d regularly compare their efforts, so bits of the novel would get transferred into the screenplay and vice versa. The result was 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick didn’t just want his movie to be unusual in the way it was written, he wanted it to look different too. For example, most sci-fi used dodgy models being flown around and which looked obviously fake. He wanted his spacecraft to have a veneer of reality. There were also practical considerations, such as the fact that despite virtually all sci-fi depicting otherwise, there is no sound in space. Another thing Kubrick wanted to get rid of was fake sci-fi lighting. In most films, even when a ship is in deep space (and therefore not receiving much light from any source), it still basks in an all over glow. As 2001 is set in our solar system, things would be lit by the sun, but that means all lighting has to come from only one direction.

These restrictions and Kubrick’s renowned attention to detail demanded new technology. Having seen the documentary, ‘To The Moon And Beyond’ at the 1964 World’s Fair, Kubrick hired Douglas Trumbull to do the effects on 2001. Trumbull helped revolutionise the effects industry by creating a process where you could essentially do the exact same shot over and over again, allowing greater complexity, layers of effects and detail. Although laborious, the process created some of the most epic and seemingly realistic space vistas anyone had ever seen.

Kubrick’s obsession with realism went into the sets too. Obviously in space there’s no gravity, so rather than faking people floating all the time or pretending they had a (possibly impossible) gravity device on their spaceship, Kubrick used real scientific principles about how people thought you’d be able to live in space. The idea was that if you have circular living and working quarters that are constantly rotating, that will create centrifugal force, which can give astronauts a sense of gravity. This idea resulted in the massive, circular, main Discovery set, which was a $750,000 creation built by Aircraft manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong. It was 12 metres high, two metres wide and revolved at 5km an hour, in order to create an almost unique visual experience.

Filming began in 1965 and with reshoots, new scenes and alterations, didn’t finish until early 1968. Keir Dullea, one of the main actors, had time to make another movie and star in a Broadway play between when he started his role and when he completed it. While Kubrick was always known as a stickler for detail, it was with 2001 that he first came to the public’s attention as a cinematic obsessive, who would shoot endless takes until it was perfect. There was also a feeling emerging among some that while his background as a photographer meant his visual sense was often astonishing, his ability to create human stories and get the best out of actors (who occasionally seem to be treated as much like props as people) was under debate.

While now seen as a masterpiece, at the time many people in the audience didn’t know quite what to make of 2001. The ‘New York Times’, despite being fairly positive, seemed to think it was almost the wet dream of a child from the 1950s, and “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” They might have been right on the last score, as even Kubrick chopped 20 minutes out of it after its first New York run. ‘Variety’ was even less effusive, saying, “2001 is not a cinematic landmark. It compares with, but does not best, previous efforts at science fiction; lacking the humanity of Forbidden Planet, the imagination of Things to Come and the simplicity of Of Stars and Men.”

Next up Kubrick went back to controversial material (which also allowed him to show off his interest in taboo sex and violence) with A Clockwork Orange (initially he’d wanted to make a movie about Napoleon, but for various reason couldn’t). Like Lolita, many considered Anthony Burgess’ novel unadaptable, but Kubrick took it and created a unique, brutal, slightly surreal movie that many loved and others hated. Its status in Britain has long been surrounded in myth over whether it was banned or not, and you can find out more about that in the Movie-A-Day article on A Clockwork Orange.

While A Clockwork Orange was one of Kubrick’s most quickly made movies (he worked with a low budget, used few sets and fairly simple lighting and got it all done and released in around a year), his next film was far more grandiose. An adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, the movie is astonishing to look at, with immense detail being paid to period costume and décor. One of the most famous innovations was using high-speed cameras developed by NASA, which allowed some scenes to be lit only by candles, something that would have been technically impossible beforehand. However the movie had a mixed response, with Pauline Kael (who never liked Kubrick’s films) saying it was cold, slow and lifeless. Despite this, it became his most successful film with Oscar voters, getting nominated for seven and winning four. Martin Scorsese has said it’s his favourite Kubrick film and Spielberg has also praised it, although both seem more in awe of it technically than story-wise.

After this, Kubrick’s work pace significantly slowed, with each subsequent movie becoming more and more of an ‘event’. While Barry Lyndon debuted in 1975, The Shining didn’t emerge until 1980. As with many Kubrick films, the movie has become as legendary for what happened off screen as on. Kubrick’s obsession with shooting things over and over had gotten to epic proportions, making it an exceedingly trying experience for the cast. It’s believed that for one scene, Kubrick demanded Shelly Duvall do 127 different takes.

70-year-old Scatman Crothers found it particularly difficult, with a shot that simply involved the camera moving slowly towards him having 120 takes. At one point Scatman even broke down in tears because he didn’t feel he had more to give or know what Kubrick was looking for. While three takes for the scene where the lift doors open and blood rushes out doesn’t sound too bad, the fact that the crew had prepared for it for nearly a year and each time it took nine days to set up, meant Kubrick’s comment that it ‘didn’t look like blood’, ensured no one involved in the production was going have an easy time. However it did allow Kubrick to continue his legacy of innovation, by using one of the very first steadicam rigs to create shots that glided through the Overlook Hotel.

Again the movie didn’t get a great critical reception (and Stephen King always disliked it because of the changes it made to his novel – hence the faithful but tedious, King approved 1997 mini-series). ‘Time Out’ said, “Kubrick’s unbalanced approach (over-emphasis on production values) results in soulless cardboard cutouts who can do little to generate audience empathy,” while ‘Variety’ decided, “With everything to work with, director Stanley Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King’s bestseller.” Even so it became one of Kubrick’s biggest commercial successes and is now seen as a classic, classed by some as the greatest horror movie ever made.

It was another seven years before Full Metal Jacket made its debut. It was perhaps an odd choice for Kubrick, who’d been living in Britain during the Vietnam War and who had no desire to film anything outside the UK. The result was that a dockyard on the Isle Of Dogs in London and the disused Beckton Gas Works became the ruined city of Hue, parts of the Norfolk Broads doubled for the paddy fields of Vietnam, while Dorset, Bassingbourn Barracks in Cambridge and Epping Forrest also played their parts, with interiors shot at Pinewood. Again critical reaction was mixed, with many saying the first half, where the recruits are being trained, was far better than when they all went off to Vietnam.

Kubrick’s final movie didn’t appear until 1999, when Eyes Wide Shut was released. While the mix of Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Stanley Kubrick seemed potent (the initial tagline was simply, ‘Cruise. Kidman. Kubrick.’), neither actor quite knew what they were getting into when they decided to work with the director. While his penchant for retakes was legendary, the film eventually broke the world record for the longest ever continual film shoot for a single movie (clocking in at 400 days). That said, as Kubrick had been mulling over adapting Arthur Schnitzler’s novel for nearly 20 years, with the initial idea of having Steven Martin in the Tom Cruise role, perhaps 400 days isn’t too much longer.

Again, despite not being set in the UK, everything had to be filmed in Britain, with London and Pinewood having to double for the Big Apple at all times (the main time that the real NY appears is in generic shots back projected while Tom Cruise, who’s in the foreground, was actually on a treadmill at Pinewood). While the press loved to speculate that the length of the shoot was down to Cruise and Kidman having no sexual chemistry in their lovemaking scenes (exacerbated by the fact Kubrick wouldn’t allow any information about the movie to be released at all, allowing endless speculation), the real reason was what it always was with Kubrick – his attention to detail, need for endless takes and the alterations he kept wanting to make. Whether the intensity of making the movie contributed to it or not, Kubrick died only four days after presenting his final cut to Warner Brothers.

Again though, the press reaction was muted. While most critics gave it largely positive reviews, there was a feeling that due to Kubrick’s death, they were reviewing him as much as the movie. When things turned to the actual film, a lot of people found it rather wanting. The question then becomes, why is a man whose films have opened to mixed reviews, middling box office and who even his most fervent admirer’s would admit was difficult to work with, so revered in cinema?

The answer is largely that he was unique, his films introduced the world to new ways of looking at things (particularly technically) and like the man himself, virtually all of his movies are so enigmatic that you can have a different response to them every time you watch them. There has literally been no one like him, whose career spanned noir, sword and sandals epics, satire, farce, sci-fi, horror, war drama and erotic thriller, while challenging convention and breaking taboos (even his final film had to have CG people added to cover up some of the more explicit sex, in order to get an R rating in the US).

There’s no doubt that those people who argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey is boring, Full Metal Jacket falls to bits in the second half and The Shining is a few thrills stretched out way too long, have some valid points to make, yet even they’d have to agree there’s no sci-fi, war movie or horror flicks like them. It’s also true that every one of Kubrick’s films has rabidly devoted fans, who love the fact that so much is left open for them to interpret.

He may have been reclusive, difficult, have a slow work rate and an almost obsessive compulsive way of filmmaking, but he’s also one of the greatest visionaries cinema has ever seen, not least because of the effect he’s had on everyone from Spielberg and Scorsese to George Lucas and Joss Whedon. There’s little doubt that whether you enjoy his films or not, his legacy is immense.

TIM ISAAC

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