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Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
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An interview with Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams
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- [00:00]
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Podcast Sponsor/Announcer
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to New Books and Film, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dan Moran. I am thrilled to be here today with Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams. Robert is professor emeritus at University of Maryland, where he has taught cinema studies for almost 50 years. Nathan is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales. Each has an impressive list of books he's written himself, but the two have previously collaborated on Eyes Wide, Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film. And they are here today to talk about their new biography of the director Kubrick, An Odyssey, published by Pegasus books in 2024. Welcome, Robert and Nathan.
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Robert P. Kolker
Thank you.
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Nathan Abrams
Hi.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So I have to say before we start the actual interview, that this book knocked the wind out of me. I was not, you know, solicited to say this, but I just have to tell you, it was great. I thought every page of it. I mean, at the sentence level, I thought it was great. I came to such an understanding of the person. And. And. And that was great because as you know, people, you two know more than anybody else. People don't just kind of like Stanley Kubrick. They don't. They don't say, oh, yeah, I think he made some good movies. Like. Like, people dive into the Kubrick wormhole and they become obsessed with him. And. And they. About the man who made these films. And all we're ever told is, well, he was really private. He was really enigmatic. He was quote, unquote, obsessive, which we'll talk about later. I'm sure you're tired of hearing that word, but I got to tell you that when I read this book, he really came across as a three dimensional person. I can't imagine doing a better job in the biography sense. So I just have to say well done. Thank you.
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Nathan Abrams
Thank you very much.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So let's start with the actual life. Kubrick is born in Manhattan on July 26, 1928. So talk about his parents and his childhood.
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Robert P. Kolker
It was a very good upbringing. His father was a prosperous local physician as well as an obstetrician. And he had everything he wanted, including a camera, at an early age, which got him started. The only downside of his early years was that he hated school. Barely graduated high school.
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Nathan Abrams
Yeah, I would add, it was a comfortable Jewish upbringing in the Bronx. He was kind of cosseted and protected. He had a doting mother. Kubrick's relationship with his mother seemed very close. Not to say that it was distance from his father. His father. Father taught him chess and photography. Two key things that influenced Kubrick's career as well as pleasure time. And he did have pleasure time throughout. And he did experience some anti. Semitism in, in. In the 40s in, in the Bronx when. The 30s and 40s. But largely, I think he was sort of protected from the wider world around him. If, if you think of the United states in the 40s and early 50s.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I got a sense from his. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was gonna say I got a sense from his. From reading your book. And that his parents often had conversations when he wasn't around saying, what are we going to do about Stanley? This young man's got to find some kind of direction. We know how bright he is. But it seemed like he didn't want to, like, fit any of the previous, you know, cookie cutter molds.
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Robert P. Kolker
Yes, they certainly had those discussions about his education and at one point sent him off to relatives in California for a year to see if the change in surroundings might help get him kick started in learning. Didn't help. He came back and he continued to cut classes and just. He even. He didn't even start to read until a relatively late age. Once he started, he never stopped, but it took him a while to get wound up. The thing he did best in his young childhood, young adolescence, was walk the streets with his friends and his camera and go to the movies. Always go to the movies and always complain about what he saw, that he would be able to make a better film.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
He comes across as kind of like Peter Parker in Spider man. This teenager with a camera who always is trying to get the best shot. So let's talk about one of those. On April 12, 1945, FDR dies. And Kubrick is now 16 years old. He's got this hobby of photography. He takes a picture of a newsstand vendor with this sad expression, and he's surrounded by newspapers about the president. So can. Can either of you talk about that moment and what that moment led to?
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Robert P. Kolker
I think he recognized Kubrick, that is, recognized that something important was there, could be there, because it's. The photograph is partly a setup. He asked the newspaper vendor to look sadder than he was looking. But the photograph, this perfectly composed, symmetrical statement about a really gripping moment in American history, post war history. And he knew that this was something, and he immediately took it to. Did he take it to look first or to the news first?
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Nathan Abrams
He took it to one of them. I think one didn't offer as much as the Other. So it ended up in look magazine.
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Robert P. Kolker
Right? It ended up with look magazine, and it started his career.
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Nathan Abrams
Something to add is, you know, Kubrick asked the vendor to look sadder than he possibly was in reality. So what we see early on in his career is this penchant for misdirection or. Or staging. Staging is a key element of documentary craft, of documentary photography that he learned from his mentor Rothstein at Look magazine. So we already see Kubrick understanding the form, manipulating it subtly, but he also knew what photograph would sell. So you can see that early marketing side early on. You know, I mean, you can't just take a good photograph, right?
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Robert P. Kolker
You've.
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Nathan Abrams
You've got to be able to sell the photograph.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, absolutely. Something that came. That's something that came across in the book very often, too, was that people think he was this lone artist and he. But he really was interested in making people go see the movies like he wanted them well marketed, right?
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Robert P. Kolker
And he was hardly alone. I mean, even in his mature period of his career, he was always surrounded by assistants and during production, certainly had, if not the usual number of people around. He kept his crew as small as possible. Still, he was working with a lot of people and, of course, the actors. So he was never alone. Except.
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Nathan Abrams
And he wasn't. I was gonna say he wasn't just the artist. He. He married. He married an artistic sensibility with a commercial sense as well. I mean, he wanted his movies to make money, right? And, you know, particularly in his mature years, so you can see that influencing decisions through A Clockwork Orange onwards, casting for the Shiny Eyes Wide Shut, particularly after the kind of relative failure of Barry Lyndon. So Kubrick wasn't just pursuing a lone artistic vision without a care in the world. He knew he had to make money for Warner Brothers, his backers from 1970 onwards or 71 onwards.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And.
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Nathan Abrams
And he wanted people to go watch his movies. You know, what's the point of making a film if no one's going to watch it?
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Robert P. Kolker
He had a not so secret desire to make a blockbuster. He wanted to make ET and never, I guess, with the exception of 2001, never got there. I mean, his films never struck an instant chord, particularly with the. With the critics they built over time. And he was very aware of this, which drove him to take very good care of the reproduction of his films, first on videotape and then dvd, because he knew that they would grow in interest and. And audience as time went on.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
When you look back at his early photos for look magazine, because reading your book Sent me on the Internet to look at those photos and to. I watch the documentaries on YouTube, like your book, you know, it was. It was a great joy to go back and find all those things. To what extent, when you look at those photographs he took for look magazine and the news, do you see Kubrick's eye present there?
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Robert P. Kolker
There are a few photographs that show that eye for symmetrical compositions and watching for the vanishing point. There are only a few of those. There are also a few photographs of doubles, of twins or people who look closely alike, which would. Something that would come up often in the. In the films. But with few exceptions, the photographs are journalism, photojournalism. If they betray anything, they betray a talent for getting the right composition, for posing the figure and the figures in the right way or capturing characters or people, rather by surprise, which is not something that he did in his later work. He left little to surprise. So there's the sense of a visual imagination at work in the photographs. And I think that more than anything foretells what. What's coming.
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Nathan Abrams
I think the other thing to say is it depends what you mean by Kubrick's eye. I think too much with Kubrick studies. It depends on which period you're Kubrick. And we tend to then look backwards at the photography. And, And I think consideration of photography is a relatively late development in, In Kubrick studies and scholarship. There's still not much written about it in comparison to any of the films. And, and. And the early films also suffer from that. I think the way to think about it is the other way around is, is, you know, not look back at the photographs from the films we know, but look, look from the photographs to the film, which is, you know, how. How. Not if you tell me not how the photographs foreground the films, but how the films develop out of the photographs. So in addition to the things Bob said, there's the cinematic eye, but there's the staging, there's the manipulation, the misdirection. What looks like an unplanned surprise shot is actually staged. So there's not that much difference between the photographic career and the, The. The. The feature film career. But the difference is the feature films aren't passing themselves off as non fiction, whereas the photography is. But so to me. Well, to us, should I say that the photography lays the groundwork for the filmmaking and really deserves greater consideration. And the other thing that's interesting, and we did try, you know, in the early chapters pretty much to list every photograph he took, hopefully not in a boring, listy way, but to show not only the range of photographs that he captured, but you can see a coalescing of interests that then guide his later career. So nudity, sexuality, performers, the unusual social conscience, you know, cityscapes. So, you know, in a sense, you can see Kubrick's emergent interest boxing in those photographs that are more fully developed in the films Celebrity.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, absolutely. And it was not boring because I actually did use those notes in your book and go back and find the films, and I encourage all the readers to do the same thing. So I want to go back to something Bob said earlier. He had a quote. I want to pull this from your book. You quote him as saying, this being a young man, he says, I don't know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a better one than that. And that was his reaction to watching movies. He comes across as somebody who from an early age had a very healthy ego. One of his first movie ideas, this actually made me laugh out loud, was, we're going to make Iliad. We're gonna do that. We're gonna make a movie of the Iliad. So can you talk about that? Like, talk about his ego?
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Robert P. Kolker
Well, it was sound, and he learned early what he wanted and was pretty well aimed to get. Took him a while to get into a financial position where he could do what he knew he could do. But even in that process of financing, of getting financing, he tried everything he could. He approached all the people that he knew, found out new people to approach, depended on relatives, his rich uncles for his. For his first film, first feature film. And he managed. He always managed up to the end of his career, even when he couldn't manage to make a film that he wanted to make for various reasons. He was always working and thinking and knowing what he wanted and that he could ultimately do it if everything fell into place. In some cases, things didn't fall into places.
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Nathan Abrams
I think we have to sort of temper the view of Kubrick's sort of overarching ego. It does play into mythology of what we. Which we try to puncture in the book. Yeah, Kubrick had a lot of confidence, and I think you needed it. You know, eldest cosseted son, beloved son of a Jewish family. And I think he needed it through the various careers he had. And there's certainly a huge dollop of chutzpah to. To Kubrick's career. But not everything went his way, as Bob said. And, you know, he did have to beg and borrow to. To get his early films made. He was only assured of funding somewhat from 1970 onwards. So he'd already had 20 years in the business up to that point, and not everything he wanted to do worked out. Napoleon will talk about Aram papers. We'll talk about AI, you know, and he didn't always get things right. He made mistakes. We're very keen to kind of paint a tempered picture of Kubrick where it wasn't this sort of egotistic will to power. Like the star child at the end of 2001. He made errors. And as a result of those errors, he. He kind of reset, rethought. He was always trying to push himself to do something better in. In each new genre that he tackled. And. And I. You could call it ego. But I think what's interesting. What we think is interesting about Kubrick is he kind of tried a different genre every time and that. And wanted to reach a high bar for that. So he set himself a difficult challenge to reach with every film and pushed him and his crew and his. And those who work with him and his actors to get there. And you could say, oh, well, because he. He thinks he's the greatest. He can. He can make the greatest film in that genre. But I don't think it really comes across that way. I think he's always trying to struggle to be better.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah.
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Nathan Abrams
Rather than complacent. And I think the true egotist would be complacent.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yes.
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Robert P. Kolker
The truly is better than ego.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Right? Yeah.
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Nathan Abrams
Yeah.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Or what you said, a dollop of chutzpah. I mean, that's exactly what it was. Because every one of those films, you watch them and you. You. That's what you get the sense of. Yeah. Ego. He would have rested on those laurels, but he was never resting, as you prove throughout the book. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about some of the films. Let's talk about you. You make a point in the book about what he learned from each experience. And I want to ask you about what he learned about some of his early films. So the first one, Fear and Desire, 1952. Can either of you talk about what he learned from that experience?
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Robert P. Kolker
Nathan, you want to take that?
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Nathan Abrams
Yeah. Well, my favorite is he learned how to use a camera, a movie camera, which he didn't know. He got trained on that. And in the archive, there's this little note in the. In one of the folders from the early years, and it said something like, we sit in a book, oil every thousand feet, ask about that. And I thought of that. From acorns do great trees grow. You know, this is the master filmmaker who had to ask when and how to oil a film. Yeah, he shot it on location. So he learned about that. He learned about working with a skeleton crew. Both.
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Robert P. Kolker
He learned. He learned not to be abstract. The problem with fear and desire, or the matter of fear and desire is this kind of abstract idea. I mean, it starts at the very beginning with the narration saying that this takes place in a country of the mind. Well, all of Kubrick's films take place in a country of the mind, his mind, and ultimately our mind, but are much more rooted in material, concrete, time and space. Fear and Desire isn't. It's awkward, it's fascinating. It's a little boring.
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Nathan Abrams
I don't agree.
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Robert P. Kolker
I don't know if Nathan will agree with that or not.
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Nathan Abrams
No, it's only about 52, 53 minutes long. I know. There's a longer version now on release, which I've yet to see. I think just to take Bob's point about abstraction, it's. He's right. Kubrick's movies, in a sense, all take place in the country of the mind. But they're not so obvious in announcing it in the way that Fear and desire was. And I think what Fear and Desire taught him was not to be so open, or as we say here on the nose about his intentions. It was like a game of str. Of chess. He revealed his strategy with his opening move. And I think Kubrick learned to misdirect better. Probably, you know, probably by the 60s, really. I think, you know, we get to the mature Kubrick as we. As we understand him. And I think that was one of the problems with. With Fear and Desire. He also learned other things, budgeting. And he didn't quite learn the lesson of doing sound properly because he mucked that up on Fear and Desire. He mucked it up again. You know, having to post sync and spend far too much money on post production than he'd anticipated for. So we do see. And I think it's important to point out, just as we can see, technical innovations, intellectual moments in his films, there are errors, and I think with each error, he doesn't learn to overcome them. He just makes a different era next time.
- [21:41]
Robert P. Kolker
And one of the best and most intriguing paragraphs in the book was written by Nathan about how fear and desire showed too much. Yeah. And that Kubrick had to learn how to disappear more completely behind the film.
- [22:01]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, I love that metaphor. And I'm glad you brought up Nathan just now, because I. I highlighted that in the book where he says when you play chess, you do not announce your strategy. And that's exactly what he did in fear and Desire. So let's talk about the second film. So let's go to Spartacus. Let's talk about Spartacus as one of his early films. 1960. What did he learn from Spartacus? That's a whole other book, I'm sure. But what did he learn from making Spartacus?
- [22:22]
Robert P. Kolker
He learned not to make a film like Spartacus. He learned never to work in Hollywood again. He learned that the studio system ground you up and left you in pieces. He learned, and this was probably the most difficult for him to learn, that he would not. He was not in control. So he made it. The film was a big success. He did learn how to make a big, sprawling film, which certainly helped him with 2001. It was the film that brought him the closest to contemporary politics since it involved blacklisted figures in the creation of it. But it's. It's a terrific film to watch and to sort of giggle at and know the story behind it or the stories behind it.
- [23:16]
Nathan Abrams
What I would say is the Kubrick that most people understand and love or hate today, you can only understand in the context of having made Spartacus. You know, some. Some scholars, I won't name them, have left Spartacus out of their books as if it's not a Kubrick film. But their understanding of what a Kubrick film is probably determined by the films made afterwards. As much as you wouldn't have the Kubrick of Lolita, Dr. Strange, Love, 2001 and so on without Spartacus. And there were a few key things just to pull out here that we do mention in the book. Apart from learning to manage a big budget film which was a blockbuster with all these, like, all these major egos. He learned about improvisation, which Kirk Douglas encouraged. So Kubrick's screenplays aren't always locked down. Despite there being a final shooting script. It's developed during the production itself. That's something we can trace back to Spartacus in particular. The other key thing is he developed his taste for British actors. And the simple reason is British actors, most of whom were classically trained, knew their lines. So there's a great story. I think Kubrick told it to Frederick Raphael. He told it to one of his collaborators that he. All the cast, all the big British principles would be muttering to themselves. And anytime he came near, they would stop. And he thought they were plotting against him until he learned they were just reciting their lines over and over again. And so that Developed his taste. Because what Kubrick wanted and was that people turned up knowing inside out what he wanted them to say. And then the interesting things would develop, but nothing interesting would develop if they didn't even know their lines. And if you see, once he moves to the UK and probably in part why he moved to the UK in addition to the reasons Bob's mentioned to get as far away from Hollywood as he could but with similar facilities and crew and expertise know how, but also English speaking, because he was a mono clot, was British actors and. And apart from a few key principles throughout his films where he. Where they're demanded. If you look through from. From Lolita onwards, everyone else is British and usually TV actors, often small screen actors, but who he could rely on to know their lines. And whenever he complained about an actor, by and large probably wasn't a British one. I know I'm sounding xenophobic now. Simply because he knew they would come up knowing their lines. And sometimes he hired British actors without even knowing they were British. Like Alan Cumming in Eyes Wide Shut, who did American accent on the audition tape. And Kubrick was surprised to meet him in real life and is actually Scottish. And Kubrick said, but you sounded American on the tape. And Alan just said, stanley, it's called acting.
- [26:15]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And that is wonderful because that comes up several times in your book. You would think that actors. He'd be upset with actors because they didn't reach the interiority of the character. But it keeps coming up like, you have to know your lines. You have to start at the beginning before we can go any further. Let's talk. Let's talk for a while about. About the kind of Kubrick that's become part of mythology. About, you know, the multiple takes and, you know, Scatman Crothers doing the same scene with Danny Lloyd over and over and things. What's one of your favorite anecdotes you came across or maybe a new one you didn't know of. Of that shows that the loving detail or the painstaking detail Kubrick took to get something right in any of his films.
- [26:53]
Robert P. Kolker
Well, certainly Eyes Wide Shut, the film that was gestating for 50 years. Right. He was under no pressure of time or budget. And if he came into a set, which he had previously approved and sketch, I suppose, and it wasn't right, he had it redone. When he found or couldn't find one perfect location for the orgy setting. He spliced together a bunch of stately interiors of stately houses and put them together. Same thing. In Barry Lyndon, he waited for the perfect shot, particularly at the beginning when he started looking for the perfect shot. And after that everything began to, began to fall into place. But even after that, if his eye caught a detail that was not what he wanted, he simply had it changed. It was a very slow process and it's one of the reasons that there are so relatively few films, because he took his time.
- [28:09]
Nathan Abrams
One of my favorite from Eyes Wide Shut is the underwear that the dancers at the orgy sequence are wearing. He obviously did his meticulous research to have them picked out. But once he looked through the camera, you know, everything had to look right on camera. It didn't matter how much planning he did. Once he looked at the monitor, he said, no, they're all wrong. And he says, like Stanley, but you chose them. He's like, yeah, but they're still wrong, and went out and. Well, he didn't go out, but had someone go out and find new, new ones. It's just, you know, you could prepare and prepare and prepare and you know, once. And this is probably for the number of takes, why there's so many takes. You had to see what it looked like on camera first. And that's once everything went well, you know, is the lighting right? Are the angles right? Did some remember their lines? Is the mic visible in the shot? You know, only then one, once everything's gone correctly, can you then do something interesting? Yeah, and often he had to push the actors to places where, you know, it might come from tiredness, anger, frustration to find something that he didn't know he was looking for until it was given to him.
- [29:14]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
You make the point somewhere in the book and you'll get this right for me. But one of the really illuminating statements you quote him as saying is that we all know about the multiple takes and trying to get it right, where he tells somebody else, you spent so much money on the sets and the pre production, everything else, you might as well do as many takes as you want. Because then he says, that's the least expensive thing. Just do it again. Just keep doing it until it's the way you want it.
- [29:39]
Robert P. Kolker
This goes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of drive and self, possession and knowledge. He had to get what he knew was right. That took time. It wasn't for him. Flashes of inspiration, as far as I can understand, it was repetition that finally revealed what he ultimately understood was the gesture, the delivery, the placement of objects themselves that were absolutely right.
- [30:20]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So let's move on to some of his unproduced films. Because your book does a great job of taking us through the Kubrick catalog and we could spend a lot of time going through other films. But I want to talk about a great, great learning experience for me was to learn about the unmade films. So let's start talking about those. I'm going to mention them and to get your take on each one. So we'll start with Napoleon. So Kubrick said this would be the best movie ever made. Why Napoleon? What happened? What were his aims?
- [30:46]
Robert P. Kolker
Nathan, you want to take that?
- [30:49]
Nathan Abrams
Yeah. He. He long. Well, he. He long had an interest in military history. And military history leads you to a couple of places. Napoleon being one of them. The other place it leads you to is German military history and then inevitably to World War II and then from there to the Holocaust. So out of an interest of military history, you can see why an interest in Napoleon would come. And it was also is fascinated by the figure of Napoleon. And we see him already beginning to work on a Napoleon screenplay or at least an idea for screenplay whilst he's completing 2001. And he begins a lot of extensive pre production on that. Even a screenplay script is probably too generous a term for what was produced. But it was produced to try and get the funding. And he had locations and costume locations sorted, costumes mocked up. He had thoughts about the technical specifications of the film but it just wasn't the right time for another movie on Napoleon. And he couldn't get the backing initially from mgm and then Warners wouldn't do it. And I think they correctly calculated that Napoleon was the wrong project at the wrong time. And I think it's an interesting one because it shows, again, Kubrick making a tactical error that this is what he wants to do after 2001, but it's not the right film. And we see that again replay with Barry Lyndon. He goes ahead with Barry Lyndon in 75. And Barry Lyndon doesn't do well comparatively. Even. Even with that lag that Bob mentioned earlier, that critical, commercial, often critical lag, it doesn't recoup its money eventually but didn't make the return that he wished for it. So what we see is kind of Kubrick and miscalculations of. Of wanting to do projects but they're not the right projects at the right time. And arguably I haven't seen the latest one yet, but arguably that. That. That miscalculated as well. So one has to wonder if Napoleon as a film is ever the right project at the right time.
- [32:48]
Robert P. Kolker
Yeah. Yeah. People want to still make Napoleon. I haven't seen the Ridley Scott film yet either. I know that Steven Spielberg has been wanting to recreate Kubrick's ideas in an HBO series. It's important to note that the preparation was extraordinary. I mean, he made an index card for almost every day in Napoleon's life.
- [33:17]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, 15,000 cards, you say. He had had 15,000 index cards of items that had to do with Napoleon's life.
- [33:25]
Robert P. Kolker
But, you know, this miscalculation is partly maybe because he was away from Hollywood. He didn't know perhaps that there was a Napoleon already in the works. He did know there were a lot of earlier Napoleons which he pushed aside. Even the abogance famous 1920s Napoleon. He's a terrible. But there were. There was a Russian Napoleon or War and Peace or Battle of Waterloo, I forget the title of it, by a director named Bandarchuck, which is quite extraordinary with battle sequences that it's hard to imagine that Kubrick would get any better. But he didn't know these films, and he thought this would sail right through. And as Nathan said, the market wasn't there. Yeah, the market was there for known. No new Napoleon.
- [34:30]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, not for a new one. You quote someone saying, I think it was about Barry Lyndon later, that Americans don't want to see films where people write with feathers. Let's. Let's go on to the second one. Aryan Papers. What was the story behind this? How did he get involved with this? Why was it ultimately impossible?
- [34:47]
Robert P. Kolker
Well, it was a matter of script. Basically. Two things. Script and cgi, computer graphics.
- [34:57]
Nathan Abrams
Aryan Papers, Bob.
- [34:58]
Robert P. Kolker
Oh, I. I was thinking, AI Aryan Papers. That was. That was really a difficult business because he got up to almost production on that and let Nation finish the story. It's a difficult story to tell.
- [35:21]
Nathan Abrams
Well, like I said, Kubrick long had an interest in German military history which led him to World War II and which led him to the Holocaust. Obviously, being Jewish, there's probably a personal interest in there. The Holocaust takes place in the. Precisely the places where his ancestors came from. So there's probably that idea of that. But for the grace of God go I. So, you know. And one can trace Holocaust imagery, whether deliberate or otherwise, through. Through Kubrick's work up until the early 90s. But he's always looking for the means to adapt, I think Kubrick. It's important to think about Kubrick screenplays. They have to be adaptable. They have to be broken down in what he called the non into non submersible units. And, you know, a story like the Holocaust, you think, well, how'd you break that down into non submersible units and it takes them until 91 to find the property to adapt. And that's Lewis Begley's Wartime Lies. And. And that's doable largely because it takes place away from the major centers of killing, whether. Whether in. In the fields and forests of places like Ukraine or in the death camps like Auschwitz. It's about a young boy and his aunts masquerading as gentile, using Aryan papers to. To pass. It's a very, you know, Kubrickian sort of take a theme in that misdirection seeking to pass. We. We speculate on this one that by 93, when he abandons the project. So he's been working on it again for 91 through 93, extensive pre production. He's got the locations nailed down, which aren't in Poland, primarily because Spielberg's shooting Schindler's List there and he doesn't want to compete for resources with his friend. And by 93 he changes his mind, in part because of the release of Shinder's List and because he knew that an audience, a cinema going audience, couldn't bear to watch two movies about the Holocaust. And I think that's only part of the reason Warner Brothers might have prevailed on him to drop it as well, for commercial reasons. Also no major star in it, as they insisted upon. Fries wide shut. I think other reasons might be more personal. There's the horror of the Holocaust. I mean, Christiane, his widow, says that he became depressed at the time. Knowing all that meticulous research Kubrick did. He probably knew far too much than he wanted to. And there's also that sense of struggling with his own Jewishness. I mean, Kubrick was in no way religious, but he managed to sort of submerge Jewishness in all his films up to that point. So how do you make a film about Jewishness in which it has to be explicit? I mean, from that perspective, it's really interesting that he chose Aryan papers, wartime lies about two Jews attempting to pass as gentile. But I think that was an added problem to the mix. And so by 93, when it was suggested, he dropped the film. I think all suggestions point to the fact that he was probably quietly relieved to do so, although he did think he was going to. He wasn't going to give it up entirely. But then it never did happen.
- [38:36]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Let's move on now to AI and Spielberg and what eventually happened. So, you know, one of the things I wish reading it was I wish you could be a fly on the wall and listen to these long phone conversations between him and Spielberg where they go back and forth about AI And Pinocchio. It was just fascinating. So talk about AI and why that never came. Came to pass under Kubrick's name.
- [38:58]
Robert P. Kolker
He couldn't get the script that he wanted. He had a number of writers come in and try. I think there was an inherent sentimentality in the story that he couldn't quite control that certainly went against the grain of much of his other work. Though there is sentimentality in Barry Lyndon. The other was finding a robot Boy and finding in the 90s whether CGI was up to the task. And he knew full well. I mean, one of the amusing stories or one comments that he made is that if he used a real boy, by the time he was finished, he would be in his adolescence. So the conversations with Spielberg continued. And he planted in Spielberg's mind that Spielberg would direct and Kubrick would produce. It was a big mistake on Spielberg's part because Stanley insisted on having a fax machine installed in Spielberg's bedroom which Spielberg quickly learned was not going to be possible. And they sort of left it at that. I mean, he eventually turned to Eyes Wide Shut. And a few years after his death, Spielberg directed AI from his own script but with a lot of Kubrick at base and including a lot of the visual design that Kubrick had commissioned when he was working up pre production on the film.
- [40:52]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So before we get to Eyes Wide Shut and kind of the end of his career and the end of his life, let's pause for a second and talk briefly about him as a person because I learned a lot about his domestic life in this book. You know, like you said before he got. He had to get out of Hollywood. You know, what was it he liked so much about England? What was he like as a husband, as a father, as a person?
- [41:09]
Robert P. Kolker
He was a doting father, I imagine, a demanding father. He loved his daughters. He loved his pets, all dozens of them. And he most certainly loved his wife. And she not only loved him, but put up with him. The relationship worked for so many years. And I don't know that we could get to. Any biographer can get to who the person actually was. We get a good idea of someone who, as we've said so often here, is driven in his work, loving of his family, protective of his privacy. Above all else, he did not want to be a celebrity. Or if he did, he wanted the celebrity to be in his films and not in his person and gentle when not on set.
- [42:14]
Nathan Abrams
I'd like to add to that, it was really difficult, penetrating to, you know, the real domestic interior of. Of Kubrick's life in the sense that very few people have talked or written about it. There are snippets here and there. There's one book by Emilio Delisandro, his kind of driver and.
- [42:33]
Robert P. Kolker
Right.
- [42:33]
Nathan Abrams
Sort of handyman. He didn't leave notebooks and diaries in the way other filmmakers have. You know, that. That was. That was difficult to penetrate. But what does come across from having talked to people close to him including one of his daughters and others who've worked closely with him is a warm, kind, generous spirit. You know, we have to divorce the guy who's making the movies. Like, when he's shooting the movies, he's driven, you know, seven days a week, if he could, 25 hours a day or eight days a week. 25 hours a day. Yeah, he was driven in pursuit of his vision. But when he wasn't on the set, he didn't want to talk about movies. He wanted to talk about politics and art and other things. And. And the idea is warm, generous, giving. Yeah, he might have wanted something when he. When he gave you a present. Funny. And. And one of the things that comes across. And maybe this wasn't always understood. It comes across clearly in Frederick Raphael's BioGR. He had that goading sense of humor. I think he was always trying to push people, goad them. And he might say some things that sound outrageous, but he's looking for the reaction. And, you know, this. This Jewish sense of humor, as I would call it, really comes across. And. And far too much of how Kubrick was on set has been spilled over into how he was in life. You know, let's look at how he represents women on film and use that as how he is. Was with women in. In his life. I mean, it's one example. I don't think you can correlate the two in. In such a neat way. There's. There's Kubrick, the personal man. And I think he did keep them separate, even as though he used his home as his studio. He was very keen to keep those sides of him separate as Kubrick the director. And then when he's not directing and I think he was able to jugger those Persona, he definitely comes across. Captured it.
- [44:30]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I'm sorry. Yeah, he definitely comes across as funny and avuncular to certain people. I love how he's fascinated with the microwave when he gets a microwave. Like, he loves his. He loves his gadgetry and things like that. He loved gadgets There's a great story you tell where I forget who it is, but he invites somebody to dinner and he says, do you like Chinese food? And the person says, sure. And all of a sudden all this Chinese food comes in and the person says, I wonder what would have happen if I said no? So he loved to surprise people in a non threatening, kind of funny way. And that's a big, big thing that comes across in your book. All right, so let's move on to his last film. Let's move on to Eyes Wide Shut. So the reader learns that he was making this movie off and on in his head for years and years. I remember, you remember when it was first leaked, when it was coming out. The build up to this for people that weren't alive then was just incredible. I mean, the anticipation for this film to come out was just incredible. And something that comes up over and over in the book is the, the degree to which he would search for the right story where he had even, like, people reading things for him and reporting back synopses that he could possibly use and not knowing that they were sending these things to Stanley Kubrick. Right. So he was, he was big and like, you got to get the right story. Right. So what was it about the story behind Eyes Wide Shut that. That made him say, right, this is what I want to do.
- [45:47]
Robert P. Kolker
They've made nations. Thanks, Bob.
- [45:52]
Nathan Abrams
Well, his, his. We. We suggest that Kubrick was introduced to Eyes Wide Shut probably in the 50s. There's multiple sources for that. That could be his maybe, maybe at the courses he audited at CCNY or Columbia. Sorry, he took classes at CCNY at City College New York and audited class at Columbia. And then the, the woman who became his second wife, Rus Sabotka, who was, who was Viennese, maybe she lent it to him. Kirk Douglas claims it was his psychiatrist who gave it to him in 59 when they were having trouble on the set of Spartacus. But we, we think that he definitely read it by the 50s. And in particular, I mean, there's the Freudian element. Schnitzler is a contemporary of Freud. Freud described him as his doppelganger. And that what Freud was doing scientifically, Schnitzel was doing imaginatively and doing it better. It was Freud's conclusion. Kubrick was a massive Freudian and in. In. And that Nazi is influence in his work. And there was something about that element of jealousy in, In. In.
- [46:59]
Robert P. Kolker
In.
- [46:59]
Nathan Abrams
And. And marriage. Yeah, in that. That appealed to him. I suppose what we suspect is that Kubrick meticulously researched everything. You can't really meticulously research marriage, can you? I think the only way you meticulously research marriage is by being married for a long time. Otherwise you haven't done it properly. Arguably, that's. That's my suggestion. And, you know, Christian kept telling him not to do it.
- [47:28]
Robert P. Kolker
Right.
- [47:28]
Nathan Abrams
You know, we're too young. We're too young. Not yet. Not yet. Maybe by the 90s. Fine. Stanley, stop. Stop pestering. Stop being a nudnik. Go make the film. And I think this was. This came out in discussions for our previous book. I think Bob came up with the formulation was he spent his career putting big things on the big screens. Space. Nuclear war, Vietnam War, the Seven Years War. How do you put intimate and mundane moments on the big screen in a big way but maintain their intimacy and mundanity at the same time? And I think that that takes work. So I think there were lots of reasons why he struggled with it as much as why he was drawn to it. And also, you know, Schnitzel's from the capital of the empire from which his ancestors hailed. He's a very Jewish author. He's dealing with themes that Kubrick has dealt with throughout his career. We also have to mention sex. One of the things that appealed to him about Napoleon was, as he said, Napoleon, I think it's this way around, had a sex life worthy of Arthur Schnitzler. Was it? Arthur Schnitzer had a sex life worthy of Napoleon. But he certainly drew the comparison. And. And so we. You know, one of the things that's interesting to do as a thought exercise is think. Right?
- [48:50]
Robert P. Kolker
This is what makes him froze for a bit. Marriage, I think, is the. Is a key here. And intimacy. And I think there are a couple of things that led to the disappointment at first view of the film. And one of which, as Nathan pointed out, is that it is a smaller scale than the previous films. There are not those big set pieces. Even the orgy has a strange, distant, dreamlike aura about it. And the fact that it. That it deals with the most intimate thing in a person's life or in a couple's life, certainly. And it was difficult for him, and I think it was difficult for audiences. And it was difficult for these two big stars to suddenly be seen in this small, contained and intimate way. The fact that it was a dream film, in many ways, it was Kubrick's dream of a film that he want. That he dreamt about for so long. But it's also a film that is about a dream and is about dreaming. And maybe is a dream. And that is communicated through the artifice, the artificiality of the film. The studio sets of New York streets all of which, given time, really are affecting and full of emotion and uncertainty and even that most Kubrickian of moods, dread. And this was hard for audiences who were used to something completely different. But I think, as always, in retrospect, it has grown as a kind of important capstone to the career, certainly.
- [51:09]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So Kubrick dies in March of 1999. I think he dies six days after he shows the cut to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. So I want to end last question with a little thought experiment. And this is purely speculative. We said earlier, you know, what did he learn from Fear and Desire? What did he learn from Spartacus? If Kubrick were around longer to see the reaction, the reception of Eyes Wide Shut, what do you think he would have learned from that? Or what do you think his reaction might have been? We know this is totally speculative, but I have to ask.
- [51:39]
Robert P. Kolker
Great question. It's hard to answer. I think he would have been used to it right now.
- [51:47]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Right.
- [51:50]
Robert P. Kolker
I think he would have been satisfied and he would throw the onus back on the critics and maybe the audience. He may have, in retrospect, not approved the kind of publicity the film was given because it was publicity that was misdirected. It was. The publicity was not what the film was about.
- [52:17]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Exactly.
- [52:18]
Robert P. Kolker
And I think he may have been aware of that.
- [52:24]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
How about you, Nathan? What would you say if you had. If you had a fantasize about Kubrick's reaction?
- [52:30]
Nathan Abrams
Yeah, I definitely think he would have acknowledged the mistakes that were made in marketing and some of which would have been rectified. And. And it was a problem because he usually took control of it. So when he passed, someone else had to. So decisions were made that probably he would have disagreed with. And I don't know how much of the film he would have tinkered with. There was an argument that it would have been very different had he been alive and that what we saw wasn't the vision he wants to put on screen. We don't agree with that. I did have another thought, and it.
- [53:00]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
That's okay. I do remember. I certainly. And I'd love to get your final take on this is that I. I very much remember the marketing campaign and I very much remember going to see Eyes Wide Shut the day it opened and then thinking when walked out, like, that's not the movie that you know. You know, in a wonderful way. Right. That's. It's always good to be surprised that way, but it's. It's certainly not the movie as it was billed before in this great lead up.
- [53:25]
Nathan Abrams
The thing is, how do you sell that kind of movies? Maybe there was a cynical edge. A cynical edge to it. I know what I wanted to say. So much of what was said about Eyes Wide Shut was said in his absence. And that included Frederick Raphael's memoir, which it's been suggested wouldn't have been published as is. Not because Kubrick would have changed it, because Rafael would have done it had Kubrick been alive. So it's a big counterfactual. But would the reception have been the same, different, worse, with him alive? I. I think there is that element that we've waited 12 years for a Kubrick movie, and I think if you wait 12 years for anything, it's never going to turn out to be quite as good as you've pictured it in your head over those 12 years. That's no disrespect to the film. I've just watched again recently in 4K and think, yeah, it's still, it's still great. Although some of it you watch now, the post me too mentality and cringe at, you know, to Sander Zavos, for example, just saying, oh, he wouldn't be in a film now. But, you know, is. Is a reflective of its times. But so I think there's going to be that inevitable disappointment. And also, you've probably got some critics who aren't that well versed in Kubrick's films. You know, they maybe just graduated and don't know what to expect and, and want to make a name for themselves. And what better way to make a name for yourself than taking a shot at the king? That doesn't necessarily reflect on how Kubrick would have done things differently. The interesting thing is what would he have done next as a film? Anthony Frewin says it was going to be Eric Brighteyes, but there's some debate over that.
- [54:59]
Robert P. Kolker
I always like to refer when thinking about Eyes Wide Shut to the literary critic Edward Said, who wrote about late style and talked about the artist, the mature aging artist who was no longer bound by being extraordinary, who lived his work and did the work that he wanted to do without any constraints. And I think that very much explains Eyes Wide Shut.
- [55:35]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Robert and Nathan, it has been great talking with you. Today, Kubrick and Odyssey is published by Pegasus Books. It's available wherever books are sold. If you know anybody, including yourself, who is an admirer of the work of Stanley Kubrick. It's an absolute must read. I know I'm giving it the hard sell, but I heartily, heartily endorse it. Great job with the book, and thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [55:54]
Robert P. Kolker
Thank you.
- [55:55]
Nathan Abrams
Thank you.
- [56:02]
Robert P. Kolker
Sam.