(EWS) Behind the scenes of ''Eyes Wide Shut'' | B Svetkey | People Magazine | 7/23/99

Behind the scenes of ''Eyes Wide Shut''
Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film was Stanley Kubrick’s last work before his death


BENJAMIN SVETKEY


POSTED ON JULY 23, 1999 AT 4:00AM EDT



”Nicole and I talk about it so much at night. When we’re 70 years old, sitting on the front porch, we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Wow! We made this movie with Stanley Kubrick!’ We know it may take a long time to finish, but we don’t care. We really don’t.”


That was Tom Cruise in younger, more innocent days, way back in November 1996, just weeks into shooting Eyes Wide Shut. At the time, the poor guy figured it would take six months to finish the film, eight at the most. ”We’ll be done by June,” he cheerily predicted. ”But however long it takes is fine with us.”


Well, he got the month right, anyway: The cameras finally stopped rolling on Eyes in June — of 1998 — ending one of the longest shoots ever bankrolled by a major studio (or at least the longest since Kubrick’s last two-year production).


Also one of the most gossiped about. Like a lot of the late great director’s movies, Eyes was shot in total secrecy, its sets at Pinewood Studios in England locked tighter than that CIA vault Cruise dangled into in Mission: Impossible. Whatever the film’s married costars were up to inside Kubrick’s sealed soundstages — one (false) rumor had Cruise wearing a dress — the world would have to wait to find out. And wait. And wait some more.


Not anymore. This week, Kubrick’s final film — he died at 70 of a heart attack just days after screening a finished cut — will at long last unspool. All the speculation about its plot (”a story of sexual jealousy and obsession” is all Warner Bros. had said about the production) will finally be over. All the questions about how kinky (and naked) Cruise and Kidman would get will finally be answered.




Still, there is one mystery that won’t be revealed on screen this week. And it’s this: Those two years Kubrick took to finish Eyes? How exactly did he spend them? How, precisely, did he make the movie? And — most titillating of all — what was it like inside those closed sets, where the world’s most demanding director held Hollywood’s most powerful couple hostage for so long they almost did end up in rocking chairs on their front porch?


To solve that mystery, all you have to do is keep your ears wide open.


”He was a really normal guy,” Kidman said of Kubrick shortly after his funeral last March. ”A really smart, really great guy. We were even talking about doing another film together.”


Kubrick has been called many things over the years — brilliant, inspiring, abrasive, tyrannical — but ”normal” is a new one. Rumors of his eccentricities ranged from the mildly loopy (never motoring over 35 miles per hour) to the oddly paranoid (he was said to be terrified of America, even though he grew up in the Bronx) to the downright notorious (he supposedly drove actors mad with his relentless perfectionism, insisting on shooting retake after retake). Obsessively private and press shy, he seldom left England and almost never attended public events (recent photographs are almost impossible to find). Which, of course, only made him more fascinating.

(KK) Killers Kiss review | Variety Magazine | 9/27/55

(EWS) Eyes Strain | People Magazine | T Gliatto | 8/16/99

Eyes Strain
BY TOM GLIATTO
POSTED ON AUGUST 16, 1999 AT 12:00PM EDT

At the end of the day, how do Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman wind down? Quietly. Very quietly. All they want to do after they leave their respective movie sets, says Kidman’s friend, actress Naomi Watts, is be with their children, Isabella, 6, and Connor, 4, and sink into their thoughts. “They write things down in little journals—poems and things,” says Watts, who knows Kidman from their early days in Australia. “And they reflect on the day.”
If any couple needs a bit of reflection, it could well be Cruise, 37, and Kidman, 32. In the days before the opening of their controversial, eons-in-the-making movie, Eyes Wide Shut, they swept through the media like a White House scandal. Kidman seemed to hop from one magazine cover to another, peering out from each with a look of calculated naughtiness.

While the eagerly awaited psycho-sexual drama—the final work of revered director Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove), who died of a heart attack March 7 at age 70—opened July 16 to mixed reviews, word of mouth has been uncommonly vicious. The box office receipts for the film, a 272-hour-plus study of a doctor trolling the sexual underbelly of Manhattan after his wife confesses thoughts of infidelity, plunged more than 70 percent in two weeks. And according to Cinemascore president Edward Mintz, whose company-tracks opening-night responses, Eyes received some of the worst grades in his 21 years of polling: 73 percent of people 25 and over gave it an F. “You start getting Ds and Fs,” says Mintz, “a movie shouldn’t have even been made.”
Presumably, Tom and Nic have their eyes wide open for Mission Impossible II, which Cruise is expected to finish filming this month. If the sequel does anywhere near as well as the first, it should make up for the millions Cruise might have sacrificed in acting fees to work with Kubrick.

In any case, after nearly a decade together the two still have one great consolation: each other. Kidman, who met Cruise on the set of 1990’s Days of Thunder and married him that December, put it presciently in a ’97 interview with Australia’s New Woman magazine: “When you have your husband, your best friend, your lover—everything all in one—standing there holding your hand, you feel secure. It doesn’t matter if everyone walks out.”

And while Cruise has said to London’s Time Out that acting out his intense confrontations with Kidman in Eyes was so wrenching “it could have been something that destroyed our marriage,” their union sounds capable of surviving Howard the Duck. The only place they seem to find fault with each other is on the tennis court. “They’re staunch rivals,” says Kidman’s friend, director John Duigan. Certainly Kidman could have asked for no greater fan than Cruise for her performance onstage last year in the London and New York City productions of The Blue Room, in which a brief nude scene inspired one critic to proclaim her “pure theatrical Viagra.” Cruise, says British theater publicist Joy Sapieka, “was here quite often backstage. He was very proud.”
According to Eyes costar Todd Field, who plays a cynical pianist and the troubled doctor’s friend from med-school days, “Tom and Nic talk about each other like they just met two days ago.” And legal woe to anyone who might imply otherwise. Last October, Cruise won a libel suit against the British tabloid Express on Sunday, which in 1997 suggested that the actor was gay and his marriage a sham. (He donated the approximately $320,000 in spoils to charity.) This spring he and Kidman both launched a suit against the Star for claiming that sex experts had to coach them in the art of lovemaking for Eyes Wide Shut, an allegation the couple’s attorney Bert Fields calls “absolutely false.” Adds the attorney: “Tom is not going to let people defame him or his family. He has the means to wage this war.”

Kidman is fiercely protective too. When Isabella once complained that a classmate had been pinching her, Kidman went straight to the teacher. “The thing I think is really important as a kid to know is that your mum is always on your side,” she told New Woman, “and she’s always going to fight for you.”
She and Cruise both proved good soldiers during the punishing Eyes Wide Shut shoot, at 19 months (November 1996-June 1998) one of the longest in movie history. They spent weeks alone rehearsing with the reclusive Kubrick, a perfectionist known for demanding as many as 60 takes of a scene or replacing cast members well into the course of production. And…they loved it, says producer Jan Harlan. “They and Stanley absolutely got on like a house on fire.” The Cruise-Kidman kids were even treated to a camera show-and-tell by the director.

Still, both parents “want to bring normal things into their [children’s] life,” says Naomi Watts. Cruise insists they will be spared the worst aspects of the Hollywood scene. “All the kids in L.A. get Ferraris when they’re 16,” Cruise, who has homes in L.A. and Down Under, told Australia’s Cleo magazine in 1996, “and there’s just no way in hell that’s ever going to happen with ours.” Isabella, he has said proudly, has a surprisingly good throwing arm, and one friend describes Connor as “Daddy’s boy.” One day on the set, recalls Vinessa Shaw, who plays a prostitute in the movie, “Connor was flexing and doing all these muscle movements, and I was like, ‘Who taught him that?’ ” Cruise laughingly admitted the boy might be imitating his fitness-conscious dad. Watts says she wouldn’t be surprised if the couple, who adopted Isabella and Connor, have more children in mind. “Tom and Nic are very family-spirited,” she adds. “The more the merrier.”

Such togetherness will not, for now, extend to their professional lives. With Cruise set to star in Steven Spielberg’s next movie, the sci-fi thriller Minority Report, and Kidman, who recently finished Birthday Girl, planning to sing and dance in Moulin Rouge, the couple have no plans to work together again soon. “In your life there are certain times when it’s the right time to work together,” Kidman said at Eyes’s L.A. premiere July 13. “Who knows when the next time will be?” No doubt their journals will be the first to hear.
Tom Gliatto


Liz Corcoran and Jane Cornwell in London and Julie Jordan, Kelly Carter and Lyndon Stambler in Los Angeles

(EWS) Nicole Kidman on Life With Tom Cruise Through Stanley Kubrick's Lens | Hollywood Reporter | 10/22/12

Nicole Kidman on Life With Tom Cruise Through Stanley Kubrick's Lens 7:00 AM PDT 10/24/2012 by Merle Ginsberg
Nicole Kidman
The actress writes for THR about working on the master's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," as LACMA unveils its retrospective Nov. 1: "People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't really think it was." This story first appeared in the Nov. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
I saw my first Stanley Kubrick movie in Sydney when I was 13 or 14: A Clockwork Orange. (I used to "wag school," or play hooky.) It kind of went over my head, but I was deeply disturbed. I saw The Shining when it came out, and I was making out in the back row. I told that to Stanley -- he really loved that! I saw Lolita when Gus Van Sant wanted me to watch it as prep for To Die For. And I delved into 2001: A Space Odyssey with Tom [Cruise, Kidman's husband at that time], who was a Kubrick cinemaphile. He talked me through it, and I was flabbergasted by Kubrick's greatness.
So by the time I went to meet him for Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was already a god to me. The strange thing about Stanley was, there's all the mythology -- but when you got to know him, he was practical and logical. Very well-educated. He was incredibly challenging and stimulating. I would throw ideas at him, and he'd break it all down, and I'd change my opinion. We'd fight about the differences between men and women; he loved that stuff. I wasn't scared of him. He could get irritated by people. I was allowed to go in his office and read his books.
On his films, he did everything: fix the sound machine, operate the camera. He even sort of handled the wardrobe -- for all his dressing low-key, Stanley actually loved clothes.
The most important thing to Stanley was time. My approach to the two-year shoot was actually very Zen. Tom and I thought, "We're so lucky, we've gotten to spend two years with the master." Stanley said the film was finished -- but if he had more time, who knows how it would have morphed.
People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't really think it was. Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us. Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life -- which we weren't oblivious to, but obviously it wasn't us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.
Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn't end up in the movie. I did feel safe -- I never felt it was exploitive or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.
There was a lot of interest in Eyes Wide Shut before it was released. But the weekend it came out, July 16, 1999, was the death of JFK Jr., his wife and her sister -- a black, black weekend. And for Stanley to have died [on March 7, 1999, at age 70] before the film opened … well, it all felt so dark and strange. Stanley had sent over the cut he considered done to us, Tom and I watched it in New York -- and then he died. The next morning, I got the phone call. That was one of the worst calls; I just started screaming. I had Isabella and Connor in the kitchen with me. Tom and I immediately got on a plane. The funeral was so traumatic. I truly loved Stanley and felt very connected to him. He was in our lives intensely for about four years.
People have asked me if Stanley ever told us what Eyes Wide Shut was about -- and the answer is no. He didn't believe in interpretation. He always said, "Never say no to an idea -- you never know how that idea will ignite another idea." He also said: "Never put me on a pedestal. When someone's on a pedestal, there's no creativity." That's how I approach every creative person now; it does not help to glorify them.
I see Stanley as a great philosopher of the human condition, like Socrates was in his time. That's what von Trier, Daldry, Campion and Stanley are. We need these kinds of filmmakers. People rarely read now. Philosophical ideas are coming from cinema. I try to be supportive of artists who question everything. It's optimum to work with someone trying to shift things, to give us a greater understanding of why we're here, what we are. When you're working with someone like that, as Stanley was, it's an honor.
-- As told to Merle Ginsberg

(SK) Transcript of Kubrick interview with Jeremy Bernstein 11-27-66

Transcript Subject: Stanley Kubrick Interviewer: Jeremy Bernstein Date: November 27, 1966 Location: Kubrick’s home (Abbot's Mead, Barnet Lane, Elstree) 2 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 TRACK 1 SK: Testing one two three four. Jeremy Bernstein tape, November 27. Side A. Born July 26, 1928, New York City. My father is a doctor. One sister, Barbara. Married, two children. Lives in New Jersey, six years younger. Her husband is a lawyer. I was taught to play chess at the age of twelve but did not play seriously until about age of seventeen, when I joined the Marshall Chess Club in New York on West 10th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. JB: Did you have any particular intellectual interests as a child? Do you remember? Were you an avid reader? SK: No… I had few intellectual interests as a child. I was a school misfit and considered, you know, reading a book… school work. And I don’t think I read a book for pleasure until after I graduated high school. JB: What were you doing… if you were a misfit? SK: Well, I had... I had one thing, I think, that perhaps helped me get over being a misfit, a school misfit, and that is that I became interested in photography about the same time, twelve or thirteen. And I think that if you get involved in any kind of problem solving in depth on almost anything, it is surprisingly similar to problem solving of anything, you know. I started out by just getting a camera and learning how to take pictures and learning how to print pictures and learning how to build a darkroom and learning how to do all the technical things and so on and so on. Then finally trying to find out how you could sell pictures and become… you know, would it be possible to be a professional photographer? And it was a case of, over a period of, say, from the age of thirteen to seventeen, you might say, going through step by step by myself without anyone really helping me, the problem solving of becoming a photographer. And I found that, I think, in looking back, that this particular thing about problem solving is something that schools generally don’t teach you and that if you can develop a kind of generalized approach to problem solving, that it’s surprising how it helps you in anything, you know. And that most of the deficiencies that you see around you in people that, say, you don’t think particularly are doing their job right or something, assuming that they care, you know a lot of people that appear to care or may actually care are still not going about things particularly the right way. When you think about it, I generally find that it’s just that they don’t have a good generalized approach to problem solving. They’re not thorough. They don’t consider all the possibilities. They don’t prepare themselves with the right information and so forth. So, I think that photography, though it seemed like a hobby, and ultimately led to a professional job, photography might have been more valuable than doing the proper things in school. JB: Were you, sort of, the despair of your family at that time, because of your school work, or did you…? SK: Well, it wasn’t a real drama, you know. I imagine so, but it was never completely apparent until I graduated from high school that I couldn’t go to college. Because I graduated in 1945 when all the GIs were now pouring back on the GI Bill. And I had a 67 average and it turned out that there wasn’t any college in the United States, even of the lowest caliber,who would take a student with less than a 75 average in that year. So, I couldn’t get—I failed to get—into college. JB: Did you take all the scholastic aptitude tests and so on? SK: They wouldn’t consider you. In other words, they wouldn’t even accept your application if you didn’t have a 75 average in that particular year. JB: Looking back, sort of in retrospect, do you think not going to college was in a certain sense a fortunate thing? SK: Oh, tremendously. Because what happened is that I, well, I had developed myself as a photographer and prior to graduating high school I had sold two picture stories to Look and… JB: What were they about? SK: One was about a teacher in high school, named Mr. Traister, T-R-A-I-S-T-E-R, who taught English and he used to dramatize Shakespeare. He would read the parts and act it out and he made it very interesting, you know. It was one of the few courses that were interesting, you know. Most of the English courses that I had consisted of the teachers saying, “You’re to read five pages of Silas Marner tonight,” and the next day the class was spent sitting at the book like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, looking up over the book saying, “Mr. Kubrick” and then you stand up they would say, “When Silas Marner walked out of the door, what did he see?” and if you didn’t know what he saw you got a zero. [Laughs] And that was it. And as a matter of fact, I failed English once and had to make it up in summer school. JB: But did you show aptitude for things like mathematics and so on? SK: The only, actually, the only courses that I got good marks in were science courses. I think I got… I can’t remember now… but I think I got about an 87 in physics and—not in mathematics though—but in science courses I liked and did reasonably well. But anyway, Traister was one and I forget what the other one was now. But they bought these two—oh and I also sold them a picture… I sold them two picture stories and a photograph of a news dealer sitting in 170th Street on the Grand Concourse, right across, two blocks away from Taft High School. JB: Was that where you went, Taft High School? SK: Yeah. With all the headlines saying “Roosevelt Dies” or “FDR Dead.” And he was sitting there looking depressed. And they liked this picture and used it in a whole series about Roosevelt and it was sort of the final picture of the series. JB: Were you interested in extracurricular activities, apart from photography, as a high school student, in sports or stuff like that? SK: Well, I used to play, but I mean, I wasn’t on any of the school teams. [Laughs] JB: …ball? SK: I used to play everything, you know, but…. Basketball on the concrete, you know, outdoor… what do they call them again? JB: Basketball courts? SK: No, no, you know, the playgrounds… the city playground. Stickball, you know, in the street, and the odd softball game in the Taft… dirt, gym yard. They had a very large dirt gym yard… SK: …things like that… touch football in the street. JB: Would you say the fact that you didn’t go to college has given you a certain sense of what one might call “irreverence” for college graduates who don’t meet up to what you would consider to be your, so to speak, intellectual standards? I mean, if you come across a college guy who’s got a lot of degrees but doesn’t seem to radiate competence, does it bug you? SK: No, I don’t think that I… I don’t think I look at it that way. The reason I think it was an advantage for me is that I then backed into this, you know, fantastically good job at the age of seventeen. I was, I went, I took…. I can’t remember what it was but I took some pictures down there. I was now… what had happened was I could not get into college and all sorts of things. My father, who was an alumni at NYU uptown, took me to see the dean and said,“This is my son and I was a student here,” and so forth, and nothing worked. So I started going to City College at night under the hope that if I got a B average for so many credits, I don’t remember now, that I could then get into day school… a day college. But within about, I don’t know, a few weeks of this I was down at Look with some other pictures and there was an extremely nice picture editor there. Her name was Helen O’Brien, and the managing editor at the time was Jack Gunther, who was later killed in the Bryce Canyon, Utah, plane crash, and she asked me what I was doing and I told her, you know, nothing, and I was going to try to… and she said something about, you know, she thought she might be able to get me a job as an apprentice photographer. And, you know, so I went up to see Jack Gunther and so forth and I got a job. JB: And how long were you a photographer actually, on Look? SK: Well, I was apprentice photographer for six months and then I became a staff photographer, and I was there for four years. JB: So you were actually there until age twenty-one? SK: Yeah. And, of course, that would have been, you know, the period I’d spend in college and I think that the things, what I learned and the practical experience, in every respect, including photography, what I learned in that fouryear period exceeded what I could have learned in school. And also, getting out of school, I can’t remember what was the particular turning point, but being out of school I began to read and within a relatively short period of time, I would imagine, caught up with where I probably should have been had I had a modicum of interest in things in high school. Because, I mean, after all, you really only miss, I mean, before you’re twelve or thirteen, how many serious books can you read? So, I only really blew four years of part-time reading. How much time… you go to school all day, you play a certain amount, you’ve got to do your homework. So, in retrospect, I don’t feel that I missed reading that many books and I felt that I caught up pretty quickly when I became interested in, in things in general. JB: What first gave you the idea of actually going into the movies, as opposed to…? SK: Like everybody else, you know, I was always very interested in movies and I used to go to see films and I’d see practically every film. And I used to see all the films at the Museum of Modern Art and the Thalia and…. Actually, at that time, when I was a teenager, there were… the so-called art house didn’t really exist to the extent it does now, you know, it was the postwar Italian, sort of, the Rossellini pictures which brought the art houses into existence. So, there weren’t that many good films that were ever played in the theaters around, except at the museum. Anyway, I used to see all the films and I knew…. I had seen them all a number of times at the museum and a friend of mine, who subsequently has become a film director named Alex Singer, was working as an office boy at The March of Time and one day he told me that it cost forty thousand dollars to make a March of Time and it was a one-reeler. And I said to him,“Gee, that’s a lot of money.” I said, “I can’t believe it costs that much to make, you know, eight or nine minutes of film.” So, I called up Eastman Kodak and checked on the price of film. And then I called up the laboratory to find out how much it cost to develop it. Then I checked on how much it cost to rent 35mm movie cameras. And then I checked the cost of the other facilities, sound and editing and so forth. And I forgot what it added up to but it was something like… that I could do a documentary film, with an original music score and everything, for about thirty-five hundred dollars. So I thought,“Gee, if they’re making these pictures for forty thousand and I can make them for thirtyfive hundred, surely I must be able to sell them and at least get my money back, and probably make a profit,”you know. So, in fact I think we thought we could make a considerable profit because we assumed that if they were making them for forty thousand dollars a piece, that they must be making a profit, you know. And, so I rented a 35mm Eyemo camera, that’s spelled E-Y-E-M-O, which is a spring-wound camera, produces a professional picture. And I did a documentary film about a boxer named Walter Cartier, who I had previously done a picture story for Look about, and I knew him. And it was called Day of the Fight. And I got the whole thing, you know, did everything. Alex helped me, you know, sort of carried lights around and assisted me. And I did the whole thing, just myself and Alex and Walter and his people that he knew. And cut it. And another friend of mine, who subsequently has become a professional movie composer named Gerald Fried, F-R-I-E-D, did a film score and got the whole thing finished for thirtynine hundred dollars. And then when we began to take it around to the various companies to sell it, they all liked it but we were offered things like fifteen hundred dollars and twenty-five hundred dollars and so forth and… JB: This was, by the way, when you were still aged twenty-one, roughly? SK: Well, less than that… JB: Less than that? SK: I did this about, oh, I’d say, maybe nine months before I quit Look, about twenty, plus. And at one point I said to them, you know,“Christ,why are you offering us so little for this? You know, one-reel shorts get more than forty thousand dollars.” And they said,“What are you—you must be crazy!” And I said, “Why do you think that?” So I told them about The March of Time and…. Anyway they, they said, you know, it was ridiculous and shortly after that The March of Time went out of business. [Laughs] For the reason, we later found out, that they were spending approximately, I mean… you know, if The March of Time sues me for this…. Alex somehow found out when he was working there that it was costing forty thousand bucks to make one of their one-reelers and they went out of business. [Lights cigarette] Well, anyway, I finally sold a film to RKO-Pathé, who are no longer in business either, and sold it for about a hundred dollars less than it cost me to make it. I know it was a small loss but I had the pleasure of seeing it shown. And I remember I went to the Paramount Theater, where it was playing with some Ava Gardner, Robert Mitchum picture and, you know, it was very exciting to see it on the screen and it got a nationwide and worldwide distribution. And so I thought, everybody liked it and they thought it was good, and I thought that this would be, I’d get millions of offers of which I got none to do anything. So, I made another documentary, this time about a flying priest. JB: Was this Father Hubbard or something? SK: Father Stadtmueller or something, in New Mexico, who flew a Piper Cub around to Indian parishes, and RKO thought it was a colorful subject. And so I went there and pretty much on my own again made this short and still, you know, nothing was happening. JB: Were they supporting you for this? SK: No. They gave me fifteen hundred dollars and, of which I had to pay for the film, the travel, and everything. I made nothing. I think I lost money on that too. But I had been making a reasonably good salary at Look for four years, so I had a certain amount of money and I was still working. So then I quit Look because I decided that there obviously wasn’t any money in shorts but that…. SK: I then found out how much feature films were being made for… and, you know, millions, and I had calculated I could make a feature film for about ten thousand dollars. And… JB: How did you calculate that? SK: Well, again by, you know, projecting the amount of film I’d shoot, figuring that I’d get actors to work for practically nothing, you know, work with…. I mean at this point I was the whole crew, cameraman, assistant cameraman, you know, director, everything. So I had no costs. So a friend of mine in the Village did a script. JB: Were you living in the Village in those days? SK: I was living on 16th Street, off 6th Avenue. And he did a script, which was terrible, sort of, dull undramatic but very, very serious allegorical story about four soldiers from an unnamed country lost behind enemy lines, trying to find their way home again. And it had lines in it like,“We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists of names and addresses looking for our real….” No, “…running our names…fingers, down the lists of something or other, looking for our real names or our real addresses.” I can’t remember what the line was but it was that kind of a thing, you know. And, of course, I totally failed to recognize what I didn’t know about making films or anything, you know, I just thought, “Well, these other two things have turned out pretty well.” But they were documentaries and… JB: The second thing had turned out pretty well? SK: Yeah…. But I didn’t really know what I didn’t know and I thought, “Well, Christ, there really can’t be very much more to making a feature film and I certainly couldn’t make one worse than the films that I kept seeing every week,” and…. But I wasn’t satisfied to just make an interesting film. I wanted it to be a very poetic and meaningful film and it was a little bit like the Thurber story about the midget who wouldn’t take the base on balls [laughs] and decided to swing, you know. And so I got the film made but it was very, very dull and it got an art house distribution. It was called Fear and Desire, distributed by Joseph Burstyn who was the, at one time, I think he was the distributor who first brought in Rossellini’s pictures. It got a few reasonably good reviews. It got a nice blurb from Mark Van Doren, who was very kind about it. And it had a few, you know, it had a few good moments in it, but with the exception of one or two of the actors they were all terrible actors, and I knew nothing about directing actors. JB: How did you go about directing? Just sort of… SK: Well, I don’t remember, [laughs] you know… it was really just… well actually from some of the so-called professional efforts I have subsequently seen, you know, people doing, I would say I didn’t go about it that much differently than a lot of other people do. But I didn’t really know anything, you know. But there were some good moments in it and, as I say, it even got a few good reviews. But it never, never returned a penny of its investment. JB: Was this your own dough you put up for it? SK: No, I raised the money privately and then, well this picture was… it took a long time to edit the film and get all, you know, the thing done. I spent over a year on it. It opened at the Guild Theater in New York and it was pretty apparent, you know, that it was terrible, you know. While it was still playing I decided, well, I’d better get another script very fast and try to promote some more money on the strength of the, just the fact that the thing was playing, because it wasn’t apparent to me how I was going to earn a living or do anything, you know. Again, not one single offer ever to do anything, you know, from anybody. So I… in about two weeks knocked together another script with somebody, and this time it was sort of a reaction to the other one. This was nothing but action sequences and mechanically constructed, [lights cigarette] sort of action-gangster plot. TRACK 6 JB: Was this the time you were also hustling chess, Stanley? SK: Mmmm… I wasn’t hustling chess but I was playing chess for quarters. I mean, I wasn’t a hustler in that I pretended not to be a good player and beat people. I just was playing in the park, you know, for quarters, a quarter a game. JB: But were you actually doing this for the fun of it or were you also hoping to make a living? SK: No, I was doing it for the fun of it but I did make about two or three dollars a day, which… it really goes a long way if you’re not buying anything except food. JB: Well, do you still retain a lot of acquaintances from that era, guys that you… SK: There’s only one friend who I still see, a boy named David Miller, who is an operations research analyst and who I have remained friendly with. I still know all the people there, you know like Duvall and Feldman and… there is a guy named Edmond Peckover. But the regulars at the park don’t change too much. 9 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Were there kind of a paternity of people playing for money? I mean, I don’t know whether, you know… SK: Yeah, there was, well, I mean there were the regulars, you know. Like, the real regulars used to be Arthur Feldman, who was really the best player there. JB: He also played for dough? SK: Oh yeah, I mean all the regulars played for money. There was Arthur Feldman, I’d say, who was the best player. Then there was a guy named Joe Richmond, who was probably the next best player. Then there was a guy named Edmond Peckover, I would have put him, say, third. And another regular was a guy named Amos Kaminski, who was a physicist, he would have been next. Then I would say myself and David Miller, about equal. And then there was descending… I mean, I was only interested in people who were better than I was, you know. So those are the ones that I particularly remember because they were enjoyable to play with. Then there was a whole lot of potzers, you know! JB: From whom you earned your living. SK: And semi-potzers, you know, and people who put up fierce struggles, you know, but who invariably lost, you know. JB: How many hours a day were you putting in down there? SK: Well, when I was waiting for things to happen, you know, waiting to get an answer on something, which went on for months, you know, sometimes I would go there about twelve o’clock and stay there until, you know, midnight. I’d say a good twelve hours a day, with breaks for food. JB: You were sort of playing under the lights? SK: Oh yeah, in the summer it was marvelous, you know… JB: …outdoors where those concrete tables are? SK: In the daytime you’d get a table in the shade and at night you’d get a table by the light [laughs] and if you made the switch the right way you’d get a good table all the time.You know there are those two end tables where the light is by the fountain, that have the best light at night and those were always the tables at night you would try to get. JB: Did you have a sort of regular clientele of guys who would, just sort of out of misguided pride, would come back and… SK: Well, I used to play of course a lot with the better players because they’d give me odds and because, you know, they couldn’t get a game really. For instance, Feldman used to give me a pawn and move, and with a pawn and 10 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 move, I never really kept track, but it was pretty even. I mean Feldman didn’t make his living off me, you know, but when there was no sort of real potzers around then the better players would play each other, and would give, you know, fair odds so it would be a pretty good game. Like there were some players that would just give you always white, which was a small advantage but it was an advantage. Pawn and move of course is… well, the smallest advantage would be white, then the next advantage would be two moves and the next one would be pawn and move, you know. JB: How did you stack up in the Marshall Chess Club? SK: I won the B tournament and I played in one A tournament and finished around in the middle. JB: Do you think…? SK: I would like to point out to you that the A tournament, though, was not the top tournament. The top tournament was the club championship, so you know… you can figure out where I stood. JB: But, you think that you could give Duvall a pawn and move, roughly? Is that a serious appraisal? SK: Oh, absolutely, yeah. JB: That’s rather depressing. TRACK 7 JB: When did you get launched after this point into the movies again? SK: As I say, when Fear and Desire was still playing at the Guild Theater, I spent about two weeks lashing together this all-action script and… let’s see, now what is he in relation to the family? Well, the guy’s name was Mo Bousel, B-O-U-S-E-L, and he has two drug stores in the Bronx. Mo Bousel co-produced and put up the money to make Killer’s Kiss. His name is Morris Bousel. M-O-R-R-I-S B-O-U-S-E-L. [Laughs] That was not a great financial success. It was at that time that I was playing chess for quarters in the park. [break in tape] JB: … told him that there was a… SK: Speaking of Jimmy Harris… 11 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: …there was a guy in the Village who was making films by himself and just doing everything together and that he thought that you and he should get together, and introduced you, and then Jimmy suggested that—this is the impression I got, which may be wrong—Jimmy suggested that he could take the producing burden of the films, is that right? Finance the films? SK: Yeah,well, I had made Killer’s Kiss, the second feature film, and substantially, that’s what happened.Well, first, you mean, I made The Killing. JB: I mean, you made that by yourselves? SK: No, well we formed the company, which was called Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, and after looking for a story, we bought a book called Clean Break by Lionel White, and this was the story that we made into The Killing for United Artists. United Artists had bought Killer’s Kiss. Well, first of all United Artists’ function was only to finance and distribute the film, so it was up to us to hire the people and make the film. And I presume that United Artists thought that if Killer’s Kiss could be made, you know, on the semiprofessional basis that it was, that with an adequate amount of money, which was fairly minimum anyway, that we could make a film. Jimmy had to guarantee completion of the movie,which means that if the movie ran over the budget, he had to put up all the extra money, which is a great safeguard, and especially since, financially, he was responsible to make this kind of a guarantee, it wasn’t that much of a risk on the part of United Artists. But we had a very good cast but none of the people were big stars in the sense that they were extremely choosy about what they were in. And I would say that all of them had probably been in worse films than they might have, even at the beginning, thought this one might turn out to be. JB: Wasn’t Marilyn Monroe… SK: The principle cast was Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Joe Sawyer, Ted de Corsia,Vince Edwards… JB: I saw that film… SK: …who, you know, later became Dr. Kildare… JB: … so long ago that I am just trying to remember how, how… was it the one Sterling Hayden dies at the end, isn’t that right? SK: No, he gives up. The money blows away at the airport and then he gives up. JB: I’m very confused. SK: You probably haven’t seen the picture. 12 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: No, I remember Sterling Hayden very clearly but I can’t… SK: You’re thinking of The Asphalt Jungle. That’s why you thought Marilyn Monroe was in it. He dies at the end of The Asphalt Jungle in a field with a horse. JB: Ah, that’s right. SK: You’re thinking of the wrong picture. You never saw The Killing. JB: Maybe that’s… SK: If you want to see it, there’s a print at the Museum of Modern Art…. United Artists can give you a print. So anyway, we made The Killing and somehow Dore Schary saw it and he liked it and he was the first one who really showed any interest in us, you know, to the extent of offering us any sort of a deal to make another picture. And so we went to MGM and looked through, the deal was that we could look through all their backlog of story properties and, you know, if we found one that they liked, we could do it, and I think I told you this, we came up with this Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig and I did the screenplay with Calder Willingham, at about which time Dore Schary was, you know, taken out of, you know, his job and the project came to an end, sort of before, just about the time the script was finished. JB: And it was at that point that you ran across the old war story? SK: Well, it was really sort of concurrent with this that I remembered reading Paths of Glory, as one of the few books that I did read. JB: Is it a fair description of Jimmy to say that he is independently wealthy? SK: Yes. [break in tape] TRACK 8 SK: You have to have patience because if you don’t, your own frustrations prove to be too much of a distraction. It is a slow, you know, it’s like those games where you jiggle all the balls into place. Sometimes there’s more balls you’re jiggling than others but it’s largely that. And if you allow yourself to become irritated, then it’s just another distraction. 13 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Well, how do you keep yourself, so to speak, amused when there are all kinds of minor delays? Something breaks and you have to go and sit down… SK: Because I keep thinking about the next things that I’m doing, you know. I just, I try and use all the time. That’s why I found, for instance, when all these people were there, I found myself in a slightly up-in-the-air feeling. Luckily the stuff was quite simple but I usually, I would imagine to anyone sort of looking at me, I have a sort of vague, withdrawn look on my face because what I’m just doing is thinking about what I’m about to do, or what other scenes…. I just use the time to think, that’s all. It’s like sitting in the park playing chess. [Laughs] JB: Do you think about, about how to manipulate the actors and that sort of thing? SK: Well, I think about whatever problems are problems. I mean, sometimes, manipulating the actors aren’t the problem. Sometimes the problem is the story or the schedule or a set that isn’t completely designed, or something. But whatever it is, I always have plenty to think about. JB: Well, how close do you permit yourself to get to the actors as friends? I mean, is it bad to be too friendly with the guys who are working for you? SK: No. I mean, if you can… in other words, it’s bad if you don’t like somebody to have a bad social situation occur, like an attempt at friendliness which turns out to be sour or, you know, his wife goes away saying how terrible you are or something like that. But, I mean, if you like the people it helps to know them and it’s enjoyable to be with them. JB: It’s not awkward to apply discipline or anything? I suppose it isn’t very disciplined. SK: Well, it isn’t disciplined anyway because unless the actor… it’s so rare that you would ever get to the point where you’d say to the actor, “Look, this is my picture and you’re working for me and you do it the way I want or go home,” because what you really want him to do is to feel confident and enjoy what he’s doing, otherwise he’s not going to be able to do it very well. So somehow you have to be clever enough to, or persuasive enough to—although persuasive isn’t even the right word because I tend to believe that if you’re right, people realize it. [Both laugh] JB: Are you usually right, Stanley? SK: Well, I try to be. No, but I have found that when I am right, you know, when in retrospect it turned out to be I was right and in doing it, it was, it seemed right and so forth, you do not usually find difficulties arising if you’re right unless the 14 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 actor is incapable of doing what you’re asking him to do, for limitations of his talent or his emotional range or something and he gets insecure and thinks of a lot of reasons why you’re wrong, but really what, what he’s trying to do is avoid failing, you know. But then really you should figure out what the limitations of the actors are and never put them in a spot like that. [break in tape] TRACK 9 SK: After leaving MGM and the Burning Secret, prior to this Jimmy and I had bought Paths of Glory. I did a screenplay with Jim Thompson and Calder Willingham and nobody wanted to do it. It was turned down by every company until our agent, Ronnie Lubin, L-U-B-I-N, interested Kirk Douglas in the project, and through Kirk’s interest United Artists put up the money on the basis of it being done for a very low budget in Europe. The picture was a moderate success but it was nothing to create opportunities for us because of big grosses or profits. The reviews on it were very good. Many reviews were superlative and from that point of view it was an enormous success. The greatest virtue of the film was that I met my wife, Christiane, who was an actress. I was watching a television broadcast looking for an actress, actually watching someone else and saw her and got in touch with her agent. She came out to the studio and we met. I began dating her and we subsequently got married a year later. She is a marvelous actress. She had done a lot of work in Germany. I would like her to act but she has no interest in doing dull routine acting things and is more interested in painting. If I ever have a part, a decent part for a woman, which for some reason I never seem to write into my films, she would certainly do it. This was followed by about six months spent working on a script for Kirk Douglas, which he didn’t like and was abandoned. And some more months working on something which Gregory Peck was supposed to do for us, which was also abandoned because it wasn’t liked, and followed by the offer from Marlon Brando to direct his Western, which resulted in six months of work. Again, abandoned as far as I was concerned because I left the project two weeks before it started. This was followed by a script called The German Lieutenant, which, again, no one liked and followed by Kirk Douglas’s offer to take over Spartacus after a week of shooting, which I did and… 15 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: And you find yourself… [break in tape] SK: Yes, my narrative criticisms, which were at first so enthusiastically received, began to grow pale as time went on due to the counter pressures of the writer Dalton Trumbo and Kirk’s producer, Eddie Lewis, L-E-W-I-S, who did not see eye to eye to me, with me, on the story. Between the shooting and editing of Spartacus, two children were born to me… to Christiane: Anya and Vivian. I was on the picture almost two years. Children’s names: Vivian Vanessa, age five. Anya Renata, age six. Katharine Susanna, Katharine spelled K with an E at the end, aged eleven. Only about 8 weeks were spent in Spain doing the battles and the big march-bys. The whole picture was done on a back lot at Universal. JB: Did you get any sense of intellectual satisfaction out of Spartacus at all? SK: No, but it was, you know, again an opportunity to work and…. It was interesting to, from a purely, as an exercise, you know, to try to do scenes that you thought weren’t very good and to try to make them interesting. I thought the first forty-five minutes of the film, of the life in the gladiatorial school,which was simple, turned out quite well, as far as I’m concerned, but then the rest of the story, from the slave rebellion on to the end, I thought seemed a bit silly. TRACK 10 JB: And then what happened? SK: Well, during the making of Spartacus we bought Lolita, Jimmy and I, and… now, nobody wanted to make Lolita. Actually, the history of all the films, practically, that I’ve done is no one ever wanted to particularly make them, and we… just sort of running out the clock managed to put the picture together someplace, you know. Well, nobody particularly wanted to make Lolita and finally Seven Arts, a company named Seven Arts, put up the money and we made it. It was made in England. JB: Did you yourself do a good deal of rewriting of the book? SK: Yes, well, Nabokov and I, I believe, got along very well. JB: And is it… SK: I know he liked the film very much when he saw it. 16 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Is there anything that’s particularly striking about the making of that film that you remember? SK: Well, no. You mean anecdotes? Not really. I think the only thing that is regrettable about the film is that due to the incredible pressure against making the film, put on the carload by all sorts of groups…. Although I think the film was faithful psychologically to all the characters and captured, I think, the sense of them, I think that the total lack of eroticism in the story, in this film presentation of it, spoils some of the pleasure of it. You know, you can imply all the eroticism you want but there’s nothing like delivering some to help understand a little more the enslavement that Humbert Humbert was under. I think that I would consider that a criticism of the film but when it was… you know, if you…. The film could not have been made, nobody would have made it at all and it would never have been distributed. There was some criticism by some people that said that she looked too old, but I never thought that was a valid criticism because the… it was one of those books where nobody bothered to really read the description that Humbert Humbert gave of Lolita and they got this, that somehow, it was a rather interesting example of sort of mass delusion because inevitably people imagined her as being about nine years old and looking about nine or ten years old, and yet there’s a very clear description in the book of Annabel, his childhood sweetheart. And he says in the narrative that were it not for Annabel there would never have been Lolita. And then when he sees Lolita he says she was a perfect reincarnation of Annabel. And Annabel is described as, you know, a pretty sexy twelve-and-a-half… I forget, actually I don’t exactly remember Annabel’s age but I know Lolita was something like twelve years and three months when he meets her and then the story progresses through quite a few years. Well, Sue Lyon was actually just thirteen when we made the picture and I thought this criticism was not valid. Many of the people who wrote it, I think, well I know didn’t bother to really read how old he said she was and what she looked like. And there was this peculiar example of a lot of people imagining her as being about ten years old. TRACK 11 JB: Strangelove is the first film you made where you preceded really from an intellectual premise rather than from a story, or from an intellectual situation, rather than from a specific story… curiosity about possible outcomes of nuclear strategy. How did that come about? After Lolita was made? SK: Well, I was interested in whether or not I was going to get blown up by an H-bomb, prior to Lolita. But my interest intensified itself sort of concurrently with that. I believe that the Berlin crisis took place during Lolita and about that time I 17 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 became keenly interested and started reading up on all the literature of which there is a terrific extent, you know, a tremendous a lot…. Boy am I getting fucked up on the… a tremendous a lot! [Laughs] And, you know, I read, I would say I pretty much read the spectrum, you know. I began finding after a while that I wasn’t reading anything new and I decided I knew the whole thing, you know. And… it was then that I began to… the thing that struck me most of all about it was that at first, when you read the brilliant analyses and the games theories, and Herman Khan, you’re very reassured because you start off by thinking, “Gee, you know, God, there are these bombs,” and you get an image vaguely of sort of a World War II mentality. And then, when you read the literature in the field, your first reaction, superficially, is you are very encouraged because you suddenly realize that there’s this whole body of thought that’s gone into the whole thing and you think, “Ah, yes, well now I…” and then as you read on and on and become more involved, then you begin to realize that all these things lead to very paradoxical outcomes and in reviewing the whole thing, every line in it leads to a paradoxical point. And I suppose this was the most thematically obvious thing about Dr. Strangelove, was the paradoxical outcome of any particular line of thought. JB: Well, if it really is true in a real world that every line does lead to a paradoxical outcome, what hope is there for any of us? SK: Well, personally, I think that the hope is basically just luck. The situation is simply, for just luck reasons, is never really put to any particularly great strain. A lot, of course, a lot has been done, a lot keeps being done about trying to improve the situation against accidental war, and better command and control, and a more sophisticated threat technique of trying to graduate threats into as many steps as you can to leave as many alternatives and back-away points. But the depressing thing is that at every period of history, the people always thought that they had, I mean the power structure and the leaders, always looked back on the previous period of history and thought that they had learned something and I think that, you know, the old thing about “the only thing you can learn about history is that you can’t learn from history” is probably true. And that this illusion that you get that you’re much more sophisticated and that it can never happen that way again may be true, but the thing you don’t realize is that it’ll happen a different way, you know. I mean, now that everybody is very convinced that they’ll never have another 1914-type situation, you know, well they might have a 1985- type situation that they’re not prepared for. JB: It’s like what they say about the French army always being perfectly prepared for the last… SK: Yeah, well, most armies are. You know, you find the occasional exception like Nazi Germany, but inevitably I think that as time goes on, the danger increases 18 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 because the thing becomes more and more remote. I mean, the problem to begin with is that people do not react to abstractions, you know, they only react to direct experience. Very few people are even interested in abstractions and even fewer people can become emotionally involved or emotionally react to an abstract thing. The only reality that nuclear weapons have are a few movie shots of mushroom clouds and a few documentaries that occasionally show in art houses about the effects of Hiroshima. But that the atomic bomb is as much of an abstraction as you could possibly have. I mean, it’s as abstract as the fact that you know that some day you’ll die. It’s something that you know but you really do a very good job… JB: You can’t think about it… SK: No, and you do an excellent job of denying it psychologically. So, to begin with, because of the very effective denial and the lack of any evidence, there’s almost no interest in the problem. I mean, most, I would say, in the minds of most people it’s less interesting even than city government, you know. [Laughs] And the longer time goes on without the thing happening, this illusion is created that somehow it’s like money in the bank, or you’re building up security. In fact, I think, you’re just becoming more accustomed to it and more liable to think that at some point that you’ve been taking these wonderful precautions and that the chances are minimized and so forth, and then finally you will get confronted with a situation that you couldn’t anticipate. For instance, even now, I think, it surprises me that the Russia and the United States could do a lot to almost completely eliminate the possibility of accidental nuclear war, without any real loss of security. Both of them could allow observers in key places to instantly authenticate whether or not a nuclear war was in progress, you know, or it seemed to be in the process of happening. And then if there were some nuclear accident or a screwball, you know, a psychotic, you know the mad major, or the missile that gets away, you could instantly authenticate that this might be true. I know that the United States seems anyway geared not to respond to, say, a single nuclear explosion any place, at least that’s what they say, that they now have, they feel invulnerable, retaliatory capabilities and that the single city taken out would not start the nuclear war. But, you know, again you never know that panic that happens when suddenly all the lights go out, like you described in New York City.You know that indefinable something that might just make the senior decision maker abandon all his previously beautifully worked out graduated steps of response, you never know. And it depends on who he is and what his personal state of mind is, what information is available to him and so forth. The fact that a lot of effort has been gone to, to try to work out possible accidents, and I suspect that great precautions have been taken to protect against these accidents, but whether the human imagination is capable of really devising the subtle permutations and psychological variants to 19 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 all those things, I doubt. The people who make up these war scenarios are not really as inventive, say, as a great writer or as reality. I think Herman Khan is a genius and I think that he can envisage certain situations but when you read the, many of the war scenario possibilities, they don’t strike you as being the work of a master novelist. They don’t really seem real, you know. They’re political possibilities, but they don’t have the real trappings of reality that might, you know, confuse and panic the decision maker in the real circumstance. JB: Were you surprised at the reaction to Strangelove? The fact that it was so widely discussed and so widely reviewed? Did you have any feeling of what the response would be to it? SK: Well, I mean, all films are reviewed. The discussion went beyond reviews. But… no, I mean it was quite obviously something that might become a controversial issue. JB: Well, when you got finished with it, did you have a sense that, in some sense, it was a winner? I mean, was it a thing that you really… SK: Well, I was very pleased with it. I mean, when you say “a winner”… I mean, I thought it was… I was very pleased with the film. It happened to also be a very successful film commercially. JB: How did Terry Southern get into the act? SK: Well… Terry came to interview me for Show magazine shortly before I was leaving for London to make the picture and I became… JB: To make Strangelove? SK: Yeah, I became friendly with him. I had read The Magic Christian and Flash and Filigree and thought he was a terrific writer and I came to London and started… JB: Did you have the script pretty well…? SK: Oh, the script was done, and it was done in its black comedy form, a fact which a certain amount of confusion has been created about in certain areas. The script was done, Peter Sellers was cast, and I was coming over here to prepare the film and I, you know, thought Terry was very talented. I never stop working on a script. I like to work with somebody else because under the time pressures that you’re under, you can’t afford the sort of lapse of intensity that if you work by yourself you might suffer. And Terry seemed like an ideal person because the style of the script was similar, you know, to his sense of humor. And so about six weeks before the picture started, I asked him if he wanted to come over here and work on it with me and do some more dialogue and revision. And he came over. He 20 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 worked for six weeks and that was it. I started the picture and he went off and did some other things. TRACK 12 JB: Have any of the pictures been as intellectually complicated as the present one, I mean, 2001? Caused as many intellectual problems? I mean, it’s a terrific undertaking trying to create the future. SK: Well, I don’t know what… “intellectually complicated” isn’t really the right description for it, I don’t think. I mean, Strangelove was a more intellectually complicated picture, you know, it involved complex arguments, and quite a few, you know, abstract ideas, you know, clearly or comically stated. This is not as complex a picture, it’s not as complicated a picture in terms of, you know, ideas represented, ideas actually spoken, you know. [break in tape] SK: In praise of Arthur C. Clarke… it is true that he is, I think, the most poetic science-fiction writer. JB: He’s also nearly the best informed, I think. SK: Right, he’s scientifically the best informed. His narrative ideas, I think, are, for my tastes, the most appealing and he has this rather unique poetic sense of the… a sort of nostalgia for the, you know, the mountains that have eroded away over millions of years and the millions of years in the future and people looking back and forward—you’ll have to fix this up because it sounds like real crap—but it’s very hard to define it nicely, but it is true that he… JB: I find every time I finish reading some story like that of Arthur’s I always feel sad. SK: Right. JB: There’s some element of sadness. SK: Right. JB: Either we’ve made… SK: Right. 21 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: …contaminated Venus… or he has a vision of something in the future which you know you’ll never see. SK: Or something in the past that you can never know about.Well… but I think that’s marvelous, you know, I think that somehow, without making it sound too pompous or precious, that he captures the hopeless but admirable human desire to know, you know, these things that they never will, you know, can never really know, to reach for things they can never, you know, really reach, or reach back…. It’s very hard to say it exactly but this sense of sadness and this poetic sense of time passing and this sort of loneliness of… worlds. I mean, he manages… I’ll tell you what he also manages to do: he can take a star, a sun, say, in that one story, I forget the name of it, where the… these sort of sun creatures come towards Mercury. He can take an inanimate object, like a star, or a world, or even a galaxy and somehow make it into a very poignant thing which almost seems alive. He has a way of writing about, you know, mountains and planets and worlds with the same poignancy that people write about children or love affairs. [break in tape] SK: Also, although you have read the script and you shouldn’t really try to refer to the story, there is, without underlining it, there is a contrast in the story between giant orbiting bombs, which you might say is the negative use of nuclear energy and this particular spaceship, which leads to great, fantastic accomplishments, which is also another, the good use of nuclear energy. JB: Yeah. TRACK 13 JB: But I think one can talk about the Orion, which is something I wanted to do for a long time, in fact I have… SK: It’s a way of pounding that, yeah. JB: I have a set of notes somewhere at home which I once took down, for just writing a piece on the Orion, showing, sort of logically speaking, why it is the only propulsion system that’s worth considering, if you talk really about interplanetary missions. There is nothing else which makes any sense. SK: Right. 22 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Fundamentally because its operating temperature is at the escape velocity, that’s really the crucial element in it. And, so that would be very nice actually to talk about the Orion and these absolutely magnificent paintings which the guys have been doing over there. And of course, the other thing that strikes, if you compare making such a fictional space mission with the real thing, the thing that amazes one is how fast everything is done in the sense that if you make a decision, whether it’s on a costume or on a lettering, or on a… you get the satisfaction of seeing it created in some form almost immediately. I mean, isn’t that so? SK: Well, it doesn’t seem almost immediately to me but if I was used to another timescale… JB: Compared to scientific timescale… SK: Yeah, it must seem very quick, yeah. JB: I mean, in a scientific project you make any suggestion like that and maybe it’s six months, or…. I mean, you take a typical experiment in physics: a guy has a good idea for an experiment, by the time you get any answer out, these days, typically it’s a year and a half. SK: Wow. JB: So it’s a completely different order of… SK: It’s interesting that you would feel that way because to the average person, the timescale of a movie seems like time has stopped. Most people are so bored and so astonished when they see the pace of things. Somehow they have an image in their mind that it’s all done in a week, or something like that. Most people, I’ve found, who don’t come from your side of the fence, think that everything works incredibly slowly. Which is interesting, you know. It just depends what you’re used to. JB: The thing, you know, when you shipped me over to watch that television thing… SK: Oh, that’s right… you thought so too. JB: But that’s a different side of it. That’s a side of making these sort of quantal sequences, on which you work for three hours to extract thirty seconds on the thing, that would drive me off of my head. But the thing which… the technological side of it, where you get an idea, say, for a propulsion system or Christ knows what, and within three days, well, you’ve got a drawing there, you’ve got some guy making a model, and you have a lot of thought on the different sides. I mean, what timescale these guys are using—Eastern 23 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 Standard Time and all this sort of stuff—well, all this goes fantastically fast. I mean, the number of problems that you deal with and solve in a half an hour is more than you would deal with in a comparable scientific project in six months, in my opinion. Because of course, you’re just working in a different media, in the sense that you don’t really have to worry, say in the case of a spaceship, about the structural stability of these things, you know. I mean, you might spend six months or a year computing something out on machines.Well, you know, you know it’s going to work and it can be designed. So you take that as a premise and then you put something there which in principle is going to work, and then you can stop at that point. That’s what really constitutes the difference in…. It’s very interesting, I find it extremely remarkable. SK: If these things do work that quickly, the thing that does take all the time is to extract, say, two hours and fifteen minutes of the story and really keep distilling and distilling and distilling and distilling and distilling. I would say that if you count the time that’s spent during the shooting day, also working on the story, in rehearsal and rewriting and so on, I would say that an average of at least four hours a day has been spent on the story, much more than that… because in the real solid writing period it was like eight hours a day. But let’s just say, at average, four hours a day for two years, say an average of six days a week, that’s twenty-four hours a week times maybe a hundred weeks. I’d say that’s a good twenty-four hundred hours spent on, call it two hours and forty minutes of story. So that’s about a thousand to one, isn’t it… JB: Yeah. SK: …on the story. Now that’s where the real crunch is put. [break in tape] TRACK 14 JB: One doesn’t get the impression that film directors do think a great deal… [both laugh] SK: You say that…. They’re supposed to, you know. It helps. 24 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: That great sort of… SK: Let’s get this quote, I think we ran out. The analogy of using the frustrating wasted time periods on the set for thinking on your opponent’s move in chess. [break in tape] JB: You were telling me the thing about the daily working, with or without cutters, which I didn’t completely understand. You said when he directs, that he has a cutter who works every day and that you do not have a cutter who works every day and that is somehow a good thing. SK: With the exception of a few directors, like David Lean and, well let’s not say who, but with the exception of a few directors, most people have their film edited by film editors as they go along. And then, when the film is done, they look at the film and dictate some notes about it and the film editor tries to do what they say and then maybe they look at it again and they do it again. But basically it’s like trying to, say, redesign a city by driving through it in a car, you know. You can notice a few things and say, you know, “put that traffic light in the middle of the street” or “those buildings over there look kind of shabby” or something, but if you really want to do it right, you must do it yourself, you know, piece by piece. So, I think by now I have enough, sort of, ability to imagine the way a scene will come out so that I can tell without editing the material if I have enough film coverage and, you know, what I can do with it, and then I edit the film with the editor myself when the film is… when I’m all finished. JB: You haven’t done any editing up to now? SK: None, no. Just the thing, just slinging together that thing you saw. JB: Because I don’t see how, I mean, you have a couple of these few minute sequences of this and that… I don’t see how you could edit that really. How would you edit that? SK: Well, you haven’t seen… that’s only a fraction of the material. In other words, what you’ve seen is only the comings and goings of other scenes, to just show you what the set looks like. I mean, we’ve shot about eighty thousand feet of film already. JB: What is eighty thousand feet in time? SK: It’s about, well, it’s fifty-four hundred feet an hour. [Laughs] JB: Fifty-four hundred feet an hour! SK: Yeah, it’s six times nine, yeah, fifty-four hundred feet an hour. 25 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: How much film will you shoot before the whole picture is done, would you think? SK: By the way, that isn’t a lot of film. People have shot a million feet of film, actually. [Laughs] JB: You mean in their lives? SK: No, I mean in a film. So say a picture is three hours long, it would be sixteen thousand two hundred feet. So what ratio is that? That’s about fifty to one or something. JB: More. SK: More… fifty something to one. JB: That’s almost like a thousand to one, isn’t it? SK: No, it isn’t. Ninety percent to one. [break in tape] TRACK 15 SK: Film directing, I think, is a misnomer for anybody that seriously wants to make films because directing the film is only, you might say, one third of the process. You know, writing the film, directing the film, and then editing the film is, you might say, the whole job and it was really, it’s only the old major studio sort of image of how a film was made that the producer held in his hand on the palette, you know, the various people, the artist, the cameraman, the actors, the film editor, the director and so forth. And the director was just sort of, like, a senior member of the crew. [Laughs] And that, you know, he had no real integrating status in what happened. I mean, there were the few exceptional characters, even in the great days of the Hollywood studios, who somehow exerted their authority over what went on but… I mean, even today, you talk about directors who have the right of what they call the “first cut,” which means they must approve the first cut but after then the producer can do whatever he wants. JB: So it’s a meaningless right, in other words? SK: Virtually, and it’s a right to try to persuade someone. Because, I mean, if you don’t even have the right of the first cut, you can’t even explain what you want. But I have… you know, I do the cutting myself. 26 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: You have… a picture of yours, at this stage, is your picture, completely? SK: Yeah. JB: Has it always been like that or is that a…? SK: Well, let’s see. It was like that on Dr. Strangelove and Lolita and I think Paths of Glory, I don’t remember, subject to delivering the minimum censorship requirements to playing it. And the way you make deals, the way you make that arrangement, is that you say, “The picture will not be longer than a certain period of time,” and that you will deliver the minimum required censorship, so the picture can be played. I mean, in other words, if they just say “give it to us any way you want” and you deliver a picture that is legally unplayable, they have to protect themselves against that, you see. JB: What do you feel about your pictures being shown on television? SK: Well, I wish that they didn’t put the commercials in. The worst thing that they sometimes do is cut the films, but… JB: You don’t retain any rights over that? SK: Well, on some of the films I do, but then, you know, it’s terribly difficult to police it, because unless you see the film yourself there are very few people who are qualified to tell you what was cut, or in fact, I mean, even if a friend calls up and says, “I saw such and such a film and it looked cut,” you know, and you say, “well, what was cut out?” and they say “I don’t know but I think it was cut.”Well, it’s almost impossible to find out what was done. It’s a peculiar problem. JB: Preminger just lost a court case over that. SK: Well, I believe his case was against interruption of commercials. JB: Well, I think, and… SK: I don’t think he was the cutting issue…. I don’t know, perhaps you’re right. JB: Commercials were certainly the key thing, but in that…. Lillian Ross wrote a piece about that case in The New Yorker and there she described the reason why he lost, which is basically that he knew what he was doing when he signed the agreement. SK: Well, that’s it. I mean, they either have the right to do it or they don’t.