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Kubrick family attack monster film director myth |
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Society
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Written by Peter Warren
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Sunday, 11 July 1999 |
First published Scotland on Sunday Magazine and the Sunday Express
I FIRST met Stanley Kubrick 10 years ago at the wedding of his daughter
Anya to one of my oldest friends. At the reception, in a marquee on the
lawn of Anya and Jonathan's house, I was surprised at the ease with
which he could be approached. Kubrick even seemed shy.
And while I stuttered on about how I was about to fly to the Gulf to
cover the conflict with Saddam Hussein, scared of boring him and
slightly in awe, he listened intently.
Rather than being dismissive and aloof, as I expected, he instead
seemed fascinated. Kubrick, a man with a consuming passion for the
detail of conflict, was asking me the questions.
Here was a man in total contrast to the fiend the media had portrayed,
who, as Jonathan has described, "was always glad to find the point of
contact with another person and to discover what it was that fired,
amused or annoyed them".
When the Kubrick family first suggested to me that I write an article
designed to correct the myth which has built up around Stanley Kubrick,
I thought for a very long-time before I accepted. From a journalistic
point of view it's a big story. Kubrick, who died of a heart attack
last March, was a larger than life character in the film business. A
legendary film director, responsible for such works as 2001: A Space
Odyssey and Dr Strangelove, he was as famous for the artistic control
he exercised as for the films themselves. But I was more concerned over
whether it would be possible to accomplish what his family so
desperately wished: a fair picture of the man they feel has been
demonised. Painfully aware of the fact that anything they say about
Stanley will appear self serving and be written off with the comment:
"they would say that wouldn't they", they do nevertheless want their
say. Though the Kubricks admit that many wonderful things have been
written they have been genuinely hurt by the number of popular myths
that have grown up about Stanley - due in no small part to his choice
to remain distant from the media.
The request came very informally. I was standing in the large kitchen
which doubles as a conservatory in Anya and Jonathan's house outside St
Albans. Outraged by yet another article written since his death in
March, Anya Kubrick asked me if I would be prepared to write a defence
to the picture being painted. Their idea was to use the wealth of
interest in Kubrick in the run up to his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, to
put the record straight. They were worried that if they did not, their
silence would be seen as indifference and that the rumours would "wind
up carved in stone."
And so, the family have gathered together some of their memories and
stories to try and set the record straight, and give a truer and
therefore less sensational portrait of "SK", as he was often referred
to by those who were close to him.
"All we want is to correct some of the false impressions and replace it
with our, all be it, subjective "facts" and personal experiences," said
Christiane Kubrick, his wife for 41 years. "Stanley did not want to be
seen as this monster but he did not know what to do about it. He used
to say 'look at this, am I this spitting thing that sits in a corner
shouting at people?'"
The picture presented by the press is far from the man they know.
Reclusive? Obsessive? Dictatorial? A loner who walled himself up inside
his castle, slept during the day and worked at night, who, as one paper
said could "only occasionally be glimpsed outdoors, a huge bear of a
figure"?
The first time I visited the Kubrick house at Childwickbury I did so
nervously. So much of the media hype is grounded on his supposed
hermit-like existence and dislike of social contact.
Influenced by articles I had read, I truly felt that I was on the road
to some forbidden land. A notion curiously at odds with the truth. I
took a wrong turning, passed an old rusty gate, observed only by
ramblers rather than the security cameras I anticipated, then
eventually hit a little gate with a sign telling me to slow down for
children and animals. Without knowing it, I had passed through the
mythical security ring. While a casual visitor might not have got into
the house, they could get very close to the home of the alleged
Hughes-ian figure.
Soon I was playing football on the lawn with children and joining the
annual Easter Egg Hunt with the Kubrick family and friends. It was an
event that gave Stanley great pleasure - especially the following weeks
grazing for unfound chocolate eggs.
"Family life came first. My mother, his children and lately his
grandchildren, and his closest confidantes were all incredibly
important to him," says Anya. "When filming in Ireland for Barry Lyndon
became a necessity, we all travelled together like a gypsy caravan,
dogs and all! It's very strange to find ourselves defending this desire
to be with his family and if possible at home. I thought it was what
most dads wanted."
To be, as Philip Hobbs (Kubrick's son-in-law) has described, "working
in the office, with one eye on his wife painting out in the garden, and
another on the Superbowl on TV" was his idea of bliss. As Anya has
commented, "What Stanley liked was to be able to emerge from his office
and walk straight into the family kitchen; and then back to the desk
which was covered with the books he was working on, each book bulging
with white markers."
It was Kubrick's desire to stay out of the limelight that fuelled the
media myth of the director as hermit. He felt uncomfortable being
recognised by strangers and kept such a low profile that someone
managed to successfully impersonate him for two years - so little did
the public know his face. He found that maintaining a low profile
allowed him to enjoy a normal life. "He liked to be able to walk around
nearby St Albans, or London and browse the aisles of the supermarket
unmolested. He knew that he would lose all that if his face became well
known," said Katherine Hobbs, eldest of the Kubrick daughters.
Only very infrequently would he risk a run-in with the press, and when
he did it brought home to him all the reasons why he avoided the glare
of publicity. "When we went to see Nicole [Kidman] in The Blue Room at
the Donmar Warehouse we went backstage to congratulate her only to bump
into a lot of people -Joan Collins, Nigel Hawthorne, Tom Cruise and
Nicole among others all attracting dozens of photographers to the stage
door," said Christiane. "Definitely unused to this situation, Stanley
found himself suddenly recognised for once, his incognito failing him.
There were steep iron stairs, myriad blinding flashes and dozens of
hands and voices grabbing and calling him. 'Stanley, Stanley, look over
here, Mr Kubrick, here! Here! "He was dazed and nearly tripped, until
his driver, used to such situations, levered him into the car. As he
slumped, stunned into his seat, ever ironic, he said, 'We really must
do this more often'."
His love of irony was a side of Kubrick his family saw more than the press.
On one occasion, in a restaurant in London, with his parents and
family, he realised to his horror that he had been recognised. Unable
to get away, he faced the unwanted fan only to discover that the man
had mistaken him for Francis Ford Coppola and wanted to pay homage for
The Godfather. The humour would not have been missed by Kubrick.
As a young man during one of his first films, he gave a long radio
interview. He was nervous, of course. Suddenly he found himself scolded
by the presenter, who switched his microphone off and bawled, "I
thought you wanted to have an interview. Talk! You ****!". It was his
first taste of stage fright and one Kubrick learnt from.
The minutiae of interviews bored him, he was bad at small talk and
questions like, 'What made you choose this book?' made him squirm. So
he avoided them. "It's like asking me why I married my wife," he was to
tell his brother-in-law Jan Harlan, the executive producer on many of
his films. This is not to say that Stanley disliked publicity per se.
Where his films were concerned he couldn't have enough. He just felt
that he didn't have anything personal to add beyond his films.
It was a rule he briefly broke to record a rare, last encounter with a
camera when he delivered his thank-you speech for the DW Griffith Award
from the Director's Guild of America. "He postponed being filmed
reading his speech to the last minute," said Christiane laughing.
"Looking most unhappy in his Sunday suit, I sent him with Leon Vitali,
his assistant, to get on with it. After a long time I was asked to
judge the result. It was a catastrophe! Stanley was upset at my
laughter but I still made him do it again. When he had the courage much
later to look at it, he said 'You see, you see that's why I don't go
out there,' while collapsing into paroxysms of laughter."
Kubrick's camera shyness left the media with a free hand on his life
and unchallenged, a myth grew of a man fleeing censorship problems in
America over the film Lolita, into self-imposed exile in the UK.
In fact he moved to England in order to make Lolita. Along with many of
his peers, he was attracted by the high quality of British film
technicians and the Eady Plan, a package of economic measures to
encourage and attract foreign investment into the British film
industry. For both Christiane and Stanley, England was a revelation,
"by the time the filming of Lolita was completed, we had fallen in love
with England." This love affair was soon to pale.
His eccentricity quickly became material for the British press. "Let's
tackle some of the more ridiculous lies straight away," says
Christiane. "Stanley didn't have helicopters spray his garden with
insecticides. He didn't go that often to restaurants, theatres or
parties but he didn't exclude them either.
He wasn't a food faddist. The only thing that is true is that he would not fly."
This fear is understandable enough. As a photographer for Look magazine
early on in his career he needed a pilot's licence and got one very
quickly and nearly crashed his plane. Shortly after, a colleague was
killed piloting his plane and for some reason his friend's camera and
notebooks, horribly squashed and burnt, were sent to Kubrick.
It was an event that was to traumatise him. Unaware of the extent of
the shock, it was only when he flew to Spain to film Spartacus that the
reaction hit him. Terribly ill, in a state of nervous shock, the return
flight was his last.
This refusal to fly and unwillingness to explain it gave birth to a
view of Kubrick that stung him, painting him as dictatorial, obsessive,
living in secretive solitude in a dark, Gothic pile.
"One part was true," says Christiane. "Kubrick did not need much sleep
- working during the evening he was able to add some Californian office
hours to his day." The picture that was being painted disturbed him,
and a few weeks before his death he became concerned enough to consider
defending himself in the press. Christiane remembers one occasion when
he had just read a newspaper piece that claimed he never drove above
30mph and always wore a crash helmet. He just said wryly that:
"whenever you read an article about something you have first hand
knowledge of, the major facts are invariably wrong." Then he added with
a shy smile, "For all we know Lech Walesa could be a woman."
Probably the biggest media flare-up surrounded A Clockwork Orange.
The withdrawal of the cult film is one of the best maintained of the
stories surrounding him. Instead of seeing the film's deeper
condemnation of violence, the media preferred to play it as an
endorsement.
In the wake of this came a more dangerous development. "A 'fan' left a
small ticking parcel behind - as it turned out it contained a real
'clockwork' orange," said Christiane.
"To further his decision to withdraw Clockwork Orange from UK
distribution, the popular press tagged 'Clockwork Orange' to every
crime story headline.
"Added to the brew were Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse's campaigns
to hold the media responsible for social problems and crime. With his
film being blamed for almost any act of violence Stanley became very
nervous about the death threats made against him and us. The police
advised him to take them seriously. This was what finally drove Stanley
to withdraw the film. At the time both fans and cranks frequently
appeared at the door."
Most people are familiar with the image of Kubrick as the great
dictator who took years to make a film and an age to shoot a scene.
This myth the family tempers rather than dispels.
"The headlines like 'film takes two years in the making', 'a 100 takes
to get a shot'," commented Christiane, "and the allegations of
psychological sadism and deliberate attempts to break actors into
characters were all just convenient additions to the popular Stanley
Kubrick photo-fit."
Anya Kubrick says: "They weren't merely inaccurate they also left his artistry out of the picture."
As Manuel Harlan, the stills photographer on Eyes Wide Shut has said,
"Stanley always developed and changed the script in the course of
shooting and rehearsing with the actors. He placed an enormous
importance on this collaboration. His chief extravagance was to leave
himself the possibility to repair his artistic mistakes, which often
directors do not have the opportunity to do. His so-called
obsessiveness was perfectionism."
Jan Harlan, Manual's father, who also worked with Kubrick on the never
realised Napoleon, remembers his dedication. "He did his work over and
over again without blaming anyone. And, in his own way, he worked
alone. As Stanley used to say: No committee ever wrote a symphony."
Fascinated by the generalship of Napoleon, Kubrick had once got close
to making the film in Bucharest in 1970. It was a project for which he
had secured 5,000 horses and men from the then still existing Romanian
cavalry.
A master of organisation, according to Harlan, he ran his offices with
a simple hierarchy. "It was one of general and soldiers. Not many
meetings, rather a one to one relationship between the boss and any
individual on his team. It was up to them to keep each other informed.
The actors floated on their own islands and were treated like the very
special commodity they are.
"He had the reputation of being dictatorial - commanders usually are,"
said Harlan. But Kubrick did not press-gang any one into his films and
as Jan discovered: "criticism of Stanley's supposedly difficult
character was countered by the fact that so many people dropped
everything just to work with him again and again, knowing full well
that a long, hard slog lay in front of them."
Strangely in the 15 or so hours of interviews that were given to write
this piece the picture that emerges of Kubrick the man does have some
passing resemblance to that other Kubrick the family detest so much. It
is a similarity they are willing to admit but it is, they say, a poor
shadow of the man. In a final statement, eloquent in anger, the family
hit out at both the myth and those they think are guilty of
perpetuating it.
"The many books and articles published, while sometimes correct at a
trivial level, are horribly inaccurate in their depiction of Stanley's
personality, opinions and that dreadful word lifestyle. Those
inaccuracies were much easier to live with when he was alive, now it is
not so easy so we are defending him."
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