A few years after Kubrick’s wife, his sister Christine, introduced them, Jan Harlan and the director of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ formed a collaboration that would last until the filmmaker’s death in 1999. Executive producer of ‘Barry Lyndon’, ‘The Shining’, ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’In other words, it is the living history of cinema. He visited Sitges to get what he deserved Honorary Grand Prize.
Were you expecting to work in cinema before Kubrick asked you for help in the pre-production of his legendary failed project ‘Napoleon’?
No, real no. I was very happy with my job [planificación empresarial y procesamiento de datos] in New York. I met him in 1963 and we hit it off immediately. Classical music was a bit of a hobby of mine and he was interested in it too. But I had no intention of working for him and it didn’t occur to me to say anything to him. Five or six years ago, when I was living in Zurich, he asked me if I would go with him to Romania for a year for his Napoleon project.
Its main function appears to have been to mediate for the Ceaușescu regime. Unlike Kubrick, he spoke German.
The idea was to tell about the first Italian campaign and the invasion of Russia in 1812, so Romania was an ideal country to shoot the film: there was an Italian atmosphere in the south, mountains in the north. Moreover, the Ceaușescu regime would be able to provide us with cavalry, which would suit us very well because they were not available in England; For this you need to go to a communist country. Then everything fell apart. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer withdrew from the project, and Stanley was greatly disappointed. I was sad for about two weeks. I wanted to go back to my life in Zurich or New York.
Yet he continued to work with him for several decades. Do you know how jealous many movie buffs are of you? He witnessed firsthand how cinema history was being written.
What I witnessed was so much pain! (smile). Every shoot was a constant struggle. None of them were calm because Stanley was very critical of himself and very careful in his decisions. He was not a man who was content with himself.
The first film of Kubrick’s contract with Warner Bros. was to be ‘Traumnovelle’, the project was concluded almost thirty years later with ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. Why did it take you so long to find your way?
‘His eyes are completely closed’ was a big problem for him. It was based on a short novel [‘Relato soñado’] Schnitzler’s from the 1920s. He wanted to modernize it and move it from Vienna to New York, but he could not find what he wanted time and time again. It didn’t matter which screenwriter participated in the film. He eventually realized that all he had to do was get to the main theme of the work, which is jealousy, a concept that does not understand time and space, that has always existed and will always exist.
As he explained, the only field of knowledge in which they were equal was music. Did you suggest a lot of music, hoping to hear it in movies later?
I spent time recommending things to him and sometimes he liked them, sometimes he didn’t. For example, ‘Piano Trio No.’, which I suggested for ‘Barry Lyndon’ and re-composed and arranged for the film. He liked the Schubert piece called ‘2’ very much. But I did this kind of thing as a hobby. This wasn’t my job.
What do you think of the numerous theories surrounding ‘The Shining’? As Stanley’s confidant, do you secretly know the correct reading of the film? Or are they all valid?
He knew that the movie made no sense, that it was completely illogical. But that’s exactly what he loved: If you make a horror movie, you don’t have to adhere to any logic. Its failure at the box office left it grounded. Forty years later it became a cult but a failure. It did not live up to expectations from a movie starring Jack Nicholson.
You worked with Steven Spielberg on ‘Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence’, an adaptation of a failed Kubrick project. The general opinion is that he is much more Spielbergian than Kubrick. Do you agree on this? Or is this really the kind of movie your brother-in-law has in mind?
Oh no, I agree with that. Stanley was convinced that this was a film Spielberg should have made before him. All characters and creations belong to Kubrick, including Teddy, the teddy bear who is capable of speech and reasoning. All of this is in the script. But Spielberg took the film into his own territory and the result was really good.
He is now expected to work with Spielberg on a miniseries based on the never-filmed ‘Napoleon’ script. How are you doing with this issue?
We continue to work on it. It’s pretty complicated. We currently do not have a director because Cary Joji Fukunaga left the project and we could not find the right replacement. I don’t know what will happen… Now another movie about Napoleon is coming [de Ridley Scott para Apple TV+]. He’s a very interesting figure. It was really effective across Europe, but it was also not good enough. Yes, at first he was, he had great ideas but he became self-centered and eventually started sabotaging himself out of his thirst for revenge. Revenge will never be a good driving force for anything.
Source: Informacion
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.