Original subtitles

♪♪ [low chanting]

I first became interested in applying for both my roles at the archive

partly because of an interest in Kubrick's films, but also because...

the Stanley Kubrick Archive is quite unique in lots of ways,

and I was really interested in working with an archive that was so complete

across a whole person's career.

Kubrick kept all this material at his estate at Childwickbury,

and it was eventually donated to UAL in 2007, and open to the public in 2008.

When it arrived, initially it was well over a thousand boxes.

We don't tend to measure archives in individual items,

especially when they're as large as this one,

but it will be tens of thousands of individual items.

The archive goes back to his pre-filmmaking career.

The earliest material we've got in the archive

is from his time at Look magazine,

where he was working as a staff photographer, so from the late 1940s.

That material is photographs,

it's contact sheets, and it's actual copies of the magazines themselves.

We then have material from his earliest forays into documentary filmmaking.

[announcer] This is the story of a fight and of a fighter, Walter Cartier.

[Orgill] And lots of early draft treatments and scripts

from the 1950s onwards.

And it continues right up to material that was created after his death

with the finishing of Eyes Wide Shut.

So it really does span his whole career.

It's material that relates to story development, draft scripts and treatments,

then you've got all the pre-production research.

So location scouting, costume research, visual research, historical research,

for 2001, space research, things used in the actual production phase.

Continuity reports, props, costumes...

Post-production, editing, notes, sound and music, and then material

relating to the distribution of the film, the exploitation.

The publicity surrounding it.

But obviously no archive is ever complete. It's what survived.

It's what was kept by Kubrick. And no archive can ever recreate the past.

Sometimes people will come in searching for this one elusive document

that will tell them why something happened,

or what Kubrick meant,

and you won't get that in any archive.

What the archive is really good at showing

is the creative process behind making the films,

the labor that goes into it, how much work people were doing,

how much work Kubrick was doing.

It will show you the storyline behind various key points in the film,

and it will show you this constant refining down of ideas,

or refining down of a look for a costume.

You can see that in the documents.

What it won't show you is the truth about the films.

One thing that you can see running through the entire archive is, first of all,

Kubrick's desire to be involved from the very beginning

to the very end stages, where he was able to be in a position

to have complete creative control.

You can very clearly see that there is a lot of material

for each stage of filmmaking.

That is a constant across most of his work.

You can also see evidence of collaboration in his work.

Kubrick was happy to hear from other people about their ideas,

ask people what they thought about things.

A lot of material in the Kubrick Archive was created by other people,

at his request, and sent to him.

So you can actually see evidence of a very collaborative approach

to filmmaking, which I think is slightly at odds with the received wisdom

that people often get about Kubrick.

♪♪ [orchestral waltz]

[Orgill] Arthur Schnitzler was a Viennese author and playwright

who was writing in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, died in the 1930s.

He was a contemporary of Freud,

and I think Freud and Schnitzler were writing about the same things,

albeit Freud as nonfiction, and Schnitzler exploring these

through the medium of fiction.

I think Schnitzler once said that he wrote about love and death, which I think

you can see a lot of Kubrick's films will be about one or both of those two things.

So you can see the attraction for Kubrick.

[woman] Because it could cost me my life and possibly yours.

♪♪[foreboding bare piano line]

[Orgill] There is a letter in the archive from Peter Schnitzler,

Arthur Schnitzler's grandson, which is from 1959,

which refers to a visit that he made to the set of Spartacus, and also refers

to a conversation that he and Kubrick had had about his grandfather's work.

So that's the first obvious mention in the archive of the fact that Kubrick

was interested in Schnitzler, was interested in his work

and potentially, maybe adapting it.

The next kind of obvious thing is that in the early 1960s, an inventory was made

of the contents of Kubrick's apartment, and on the list of Mr. Kubrick's books

is Traumnovelle.

So that's also the first specific mention of Traumnovelle, rather than

just Schnitzler's work in general.

Earlier than that, there's no obvious Stanley Kubrick archive material

that shows that he was adapting a Schnitzler work.

There is, however, in this very early 1950s material,

some scripts that are on themes of jealousy, sexual obsession...

They aren't explicitly linked to any of Schnitzler's work,

but it shows a preoccupation potentially with similar themes as well.

And there is a press release from 1971 stating that Kubrick

was going to make Traumnovelle.

It seems to be that it was around the early 1970s as well,

that Kubrick asked Jan Harlan to translate Traumnovelle into English for him.

So there's certainly this resurgence in interest around 1971,

but ultimately it wasn't made,

and Clockwork Orange took up his time instead.

There is in the archive as well, a copy of intermezzo,

another Arthur Schnitzler's novella,

where Kubrick has written, in his handwriting,

"Very good alternative ending to Traumnovelle."

The ending in intermezzo is much darker, and maybe that's something that appealed,

but certainly there is evidence of other critical writing

that he was looking out for and researching on Schnitzler as well.

Intermezzo, Death of a Bachelor...

So these issues with the ending,

you can see evidence that he's trying to sort of think things through,

or looking for alternatives,

because in the novel Traumnovelle, the story ends with the couple waking up

to face a new day by their daughter.

It's a very different ending to the ending that you see in Eyes Wide Shut.

I do love you.

And you know,

there is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible.

[Bill] What's that?

Fuck.

[Orgill] After The Shining wraps,

we have a script which is interestingly titled

Succulence or Succubus, which is obviously an early, early script.

And then throughout the '80s, again, you have these periodic attempts

or going back and looking at treatments.

But in terms of the dated material that we have in the archive,

it's really from the late '80s onwards

that you start to see more consistent work being done on it.

He's written down things like, "Witty romantic comedy,"

seeing the film almost more as an exploration of human foible

rather than something that's darker.

In some of these story notes from the early 80s,

where Kubrick's jotting down his thoughts and ideas

there are multiple mentions of Steve Martin.

It was clearly something that he actually did think about.

Also Woody Allen.

Other names that he mentioned, he mentioned James Coco.

The playwright Neil Simon is written down, and Kubrick clearly saw him

as someone who could do that witty romantic comedy dialogue.

How seriously he thought of that, we don't know.

You know, a lot of Kubrick's early approaches

would be this kind of questioning, thinking about who might be involved.

But there is certainly, in the early '80s, this real reframing of the film

as potentially being a sort of romantic comedy,

as opposed to the film that it eventually became.

And through the '80s, he was asking people who he'd previously worked with.

So Diane Johnston, Tony Frewin, Michael Herr were all asked

to look at Traumnovelle or if they'd be interested in reworking it.

He also asked Sara Maitland, who was actually already working for him,

doing treatments for what eventually became A.I.,

if she would look at it as well.

So there were a number of people he was approaching

that speak to his interest in getting someone to work with him on it.

But really, what was happening as well during this period is the thing

that we have the most material for in the archive is Aryan Papers,

which was gaining momentum from the late '80s to the early '90s.

Aryan Papers came very close to being filmed.

We've got things like costume tests, for example.

It was that close up until 1994.

Aryan Papers is actually the thing that, within the archive anyway,

it seems that Kubrick was putting most of his energy into,

as well as actually receiving lots of other ideas for other films.

But it's really after the early '90s that he starts to properly...

shift his attention towards making Eyes Wide Shut.

And you can also see this with A.I. as well.

So A.I. is also-- we've got lots of material from the early '90s

that he was doing concurrently with Aryan Papers,

and there are people who were working with him on A.I.,

like Sara Maitland, who he actually asked to shift their attention or to do

something else related to Eyes Wide Shut.

So you see this juggling of lots of different things,

and then eventually the material relating to Aryan Papers really stops

around 1 994, 1995.

After that, you don't see any new material.

And that also happens to be when you start to see this real focus of attention

and real work being done on Eyes Wide Shut.

♪ You ever try, with all your heart and soul to get your lover back to you? ♪

♪ I wanna hope so ♪

♪ You ever pray with all your heart and soul ♪

♪ Just to watch her walk away? ♪

♪ Yeah ♪

♪ Baby did a bad, bad thing ♪

Kubrick would work with a lot of different people.

He wasn't always interested in only working with established screenwriters.

So he initially approached McWilliam, who was a novelist.

But then after about a year, he turned to Frederic Raphael,

who was much more of an established screenwriter

who'd written previous screenplays for films like Far from the Madding Crowd

and who was known as a screenwriter.

There are over 50 scripts and treatments in total for Eyes Wide Shut.

So that does range from things that are just a treatment

to completed scripts.

And a lot of the time, especially in the later iterations, it'll be things

like script inserts or alternative parts.

The idea that Kubrick worked without a script is not borne out by the archive.

There are scripts, but there is no definitive shooting script,

which does potentially imply

quite a lot of ad hoc decision-making taken during filmmaking.

So...

Shall we?

[Orgill] It tends to be that the later the film, the more material there is.

So actually, for Eyes Wide Shut, there is the most pre-production material

of all the films that we've got.

There's, I think, about over 340 boxes of pre-production alone.

And most of this is location research that was done in New York.

But actually a lot of it is location research

that was also done in the UK.

The different ways in which they were using locations

and the different backdrops to the film.

This combination of fake and real in some ways contribute to this sense

of heightened, dreamlike reality that you get in the film.

At various stages, they were thinking about using locations within London

to stand in for New York.

So there's loads and loads and loads of photographs of places

within different parts of London,

mainly East London or Central London, like clubs and bars, streets...

which were all considered at various points.

One of the most visually arresting things that we've got in the archive

is this rather notorious panorama of Commercial Road,

which is one of the longest roads in East London,

that Manuel Harlan, Kubrick's nephew, took

so Kubrick could see what the entire length of the street would be like

without having to go there in person.

So this involves taking a stepladder and a camera,

and taking a photo every couple of feet, developing all the film,

and sticking it all together with Sellotape.

So we have these incredibly long sections of the panorama,

that stretch several meters-- of both sides of the street.

Just to show Kubrick how it might work as a stand-in for New York.

It's almost like Street View.

Before Street View existed,

Kubrick kind of had an analog Street View made of Commercial Road.

But then there's also a huge amount of things like costume research,

loads of research into historic costumes for religious figures,

nuns and priests of the medieval period.

Also contemporary clerical outfitters' catalogs, which I find quite funny,

as well as all the research that was done into sourcing the Venetian masks

that are used.

So we've got hundreds of photographs taped into folders of the different masks

that were photographed in Venice and then sent to Kubrick for him to choose from.

We've also got some of the masks themselves.

Some of the costume, although not that much, but things like the wallet

that you see Bill Harford using, some of the dresses that are worn,

one of the cloaks that's worn in the sequence.

So there is this huge amount of research that's done into it, especially

the costumes for the masked ball sequence.

There's also things,

costume diaries that were produced by the costume department,

continuity reports, all of that material as well.

♪♪ [ominous music]

[Orgill] I think it's hard when we talk about something being Kubrick's

or anyone's most personal film, because what do we mean by personal?

Like, what do we actually mean by that?

There's nothing in the archive where Kubrick has written,

"This is my most personal film," but I think what you can see,

it's not that there's one document that shows this, but it's certainly unique

amongst his other work in the length of time

that he was interested in just generally these themes,

about this idea of jealousy between a married couple,

or infidelity, or the possibilities of infidelity.

The span of the interest in making a film like this is from the very earliest

material we have from Kubrick right up until his final film and his death.

So that alone makes it unique amongst the other films.

So in that sense, yes, you could say that it's his most personal film.

It's like the culmination of something he's been interested in

for 40 years finally coming to fruition.

[sobbing]

[Bill] I'll tell you everything.

♪♪[foreboding bare piano line]

I'll tell you everything.