Talking Movies

The death of Shelley Duvall, and some appearances by Nicole Kidman to promote the 25th anniversary of the unloved Eyes Wide Shut, have thrown a spotlight back onto Stanley Kubrick’s excruciating working methods. Many people in the media are oddly invested in defending his excesses as a perfectionist artistic process. But there is a much simpler way to interpret them.

David Fincher is the only director working right now who is notorious for doing a hundred takes of a scene. But as Fincher does not set himself up as a recluse we know more about his methods. We have heard Ben Affleck, an accomplished director himself, say that Fincher warned him they were going to explore the script on a fractal level. We have heard Rooney Mara say that when he did ninety-nine takes of her intense scene with Jesse Eisenberg some of the takes had barely run ten seconds before he said cut, as he was trying to disorient the actors, to create a more jagged energy. We have also heard how Neil Patrick Harris had to park a car dead centre to please Fincher’s sense of three point symmetry, and nailed it on take three, to everyone’s surprise, and a delighted Fincher called that a wrap because it was perfect. We also have the extremely valuable behind the scenes footage of Mara and Fincher, and his long suffering cinematographer, trying to light a scene forwards and backwards for a computer controlled elaborate camera movement that Fincher wants to do. And the scene changes before our eyes. Mara has the injunction to make her face reflect that Lisbeth is ‘thinking evil sh-t’. But Fincher doesn’t love her outfit, so the costume is changed. The set is cold, and a space heater has been brought in. Fincher notices it is affecting the lighting, and then falls in love with the effect it creates, so integrates it into the scene. And so on… The scene changes, he is not simply doing a hundred takes without any instructions. Then we turn to the cast of The Shining, and Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Scatman Crothers in tears of frustration – lacking any instructions.

Years ago for the University Observer I wrote a lengthy piece critiquing the over-praising of Kubrick. Critics would get hung up on a single image, and not see that was the problem – cinema is moving pictures. They were praising a former photographer for creating a memorable still frame. Whereas you should be thinking in sequences when praising great directors. You could defend Kubrick’s lack of instructions by looking to his photographer past. The photographer stands in the right place to frame the picture, and then takes many shots, hoping the elements he cannot control will come into the perfect mix if he waits long enough. But on a film set, you can control the elements – it’s literally your job. Even George Lucas, who was never going to be defended as a great director of actors, would tell his players his notorious two ‘directions’: ‘Faster’, ‘More intense’. Woody Allen is famously hands off with actors, regarding casting the right people and furnishing them with the script and some initial guidance most of the work needed. Christopher Nolan, according to Gary Oldman, only gave him one note over three Batman movies. Asking for another take, he told Oldman, ‘There’s more at stake here’. And that was it. But these directors who don’t get involved in epic discussions with their actors about motivations, don’t do a hundred takes without changing anything. Because what would be the point? If the point is to get hammy performances from actors, which seems code for coaxing deliberately bad acting from good actors, you could just ask them to “GO BIG!” Or hire bad actors, they’re not hard to find if you know where to look. Kubrick’s films have some of the worst acting you will ever see in a reputable filmography. And that’s after scores of takes.

Kubrick’s party line for his endless takes was that he was forced into it by the awfulness of actors, who never knew their lines. It’s become a rule of thumb for me over the last six years or so that if you have to start lying to make your case, then you have no case to make. There is, unfortunately for Kubrick, behind the scenes footage of a typical shooting day on The Shining. Shelley Duvall is getting her makeup done and trying to run her lines, Jack Nicholson is sitting at a table trying to run his lines off a suspiciously thin amount of script, and perched at the end of the table is Stanley Kubrick happily bashing away at a typewriter to produce the pages they are about to shoot in today’s version of the shooting script. Kubrick’s actors never knew their lines because Kubrick never locked their lines. That’s why Jack Nicholson eventually refused to learn any lines until he was in front of an imminently rolling camera because he’d got wise to Kubrick’s guff. So, why lie? It’s revealing, in that it attributes unprofessional lack of preparation to the actors, when actually the unprofessional lack of preparation is all on the director. If you were to see an entire crew standing idle, and actors rolling their eyes waiting for a shooting script of the scene slated for right now to be typed up, you would assume the director was totally incompetent. Clearly the director of Dr Strangelove is not totally incompetent. And so I suggest that all the unprofessional chaos going on in his sets, excused under the name of ‘perfectionism’, and burnished into legend by the media, could be better understood as the consistent reactions of a man battling an almost unbearable weight of insecurity.

Kubrick parted ways with his producer James B. Harris during pre-production of Dr Strangelove because he wanted to approach the material as a comedy and Harris wanted to approach it as a suspenseful drama. On his very next movie he discarded the entire score that Alex North had written for 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to curate classical music selections, some of them without seeking permission. And then when Anthony Burgess wrote a screenplay for A Clockwork Orange, he condemned it as simply the book in screenplay format. Kubrick then made the cast act out pages from the book while he filmed them, which is, of course, entirely different. He would later write up each day’s improvisations by the ensemble, passing it off as his adapted screenplay, something about which star Malcolm McDowell was not well pleased. There is a trend here, of a man increasingly desperate not to share any credit with anyone. Not only can he direct, he can produce, and he can write! There is something of Tarantino about the move away even from a composer, because Kubrick can now claim the credit for music he didn’t write by glorying in his very apposite choices. And, just like Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood being elongated because of pointless scenes there purely to showcase Tarantino’s obscurantist music choices from 1969, Kubrick’s insecurity would start to warp his work. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t mind people noticing the oomph Bernard Herrmann’s scores gave to his films. Christopher Nolan doesn’t feel slighted by the fact that Hans Zimmer is such a vital part of the success of Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk. But Kubrick had to let everyone know that he had curated the melding of photographs of many hotel interiors to create the Overlook. Roy Walker, back in your box.