Original subtitles

♪♪[somber piano]

[Christiane] Stanley was finished with Eyes Wide Shut, and he was exhausted.

He suffered discomfort and huge tiredness in the last two weeks.

He was overworked, and even for his lack of sleep,

he had even less sleep.

I don't think he looked well.

I was worried about him, and I was all set to send him to a doctor to have a checkup,

and he looked awfully pale.

He was exhausted,

which is very much a sign of a bad heart.

I had a father who died of a heart attack,

so I assumed if there was anything wrong with him,

it would be the same symptoms.

A wrong assumption, because most people who have a heart attack

are very surprised by it.

He had a big infarct, which is a clot.

What I very much hope is that his brain was gone

before he had any sensation of suffocation or suffering.

I console myself.

He would have been so unhappy with a horrible heart

that constantly makes him die over and over and over.

I'm so sad he died so young.

But we were really very happy for 42 years.

We were one of the lucky couples.

♪♪[stirring]

[Christiane] Unlike rumors about him that he was a hermit,

Stanley was the opposite of a recluse.

♪♪[upbeat]

First of all, he was an immensely curious person.

He wanted to know everything about everybody, to a tactless degree.

He would come right out and ask people, and they'd say, "Stanley, you can't--"

"I just wanna know, you know?" [laughs]

And that could both be insulting and flattering,

because, you know, most people are just not that interested

in anything as he was.

Recluse, that's not true.

We used to go down into the little town of Saint Albans

and walk around the supermarket.

It's just that nobody knew what he looked like.

So he never got bothered when he was doing that.

Work center was at home.

So there was nowhere to go to go to work.

So that was another area of it which people don't understand.

It wasn't that he didn't go anywhere because he didn't wanna go anywhere.

He didn't need to go anywhere.

You can be a hermit poet, a hermit novelist, a hermit gardener.

But you can't be a hermit filmmaker.

That's a big misconception about him.

I mean, Stanley was very gregarious.

And as a film director, I mean, he was surrounded by people all the time.

He loved people, talking to people, the right people.

I mean, fools didn't last long with Stanley.

[Dullea] Stanley was a lot of fun.

He would invite us to his home for dinners from time to time.

The most stimulating company. There were people from all walks of life.

Not the film business. Scientists, painters, writers.

And he could hold his own on any level on any subject.

I mean, he was an autodidact, I suspect.

He was amazing.

He was no more private than myself or anybody that's--

Is not, you know, a social butterfly.

But we were invited, you know,

every weekend to go and drink beers and watch a movie with him

and talk about anything.

That very day I met Stanley, he invited me over to his house

in Saint Albans for dinner.

And so I got a chance not only to meet Stanley

but, the same day, to meet Christiane and his kids.

And the entire evening I spent in his house was spent in the kitchen,

not in a dining room, not in a formal dining room,

but it was in a kitchen.

I couldn't believe, because I had also heard

that Stanley was kind of distant and cool,

but he was a family man, first and foremost,

and that surprised me the most.

He had his kids and he had his wife.

Obviously, it was a very tight family.

He was very much in love with her. You could tell that for sure.

[Christiane] I met Stanley because he saw me on television,

and he wanted to cast me for the girl in Paths of Glory.

And so I went to his office in Geiselgasteig, and there he sat.

And I was very impressed, and so was he.

♪♪[warm, pensive piano]

[Harris] When I got to Munich just before Paths of Glory...

It was about to start shooting.

...Stanley said that he had an idea for the end of the movie,

which was not in the script.

He explained to me that this-- A German woman in the hands of the French

would come up on the stage and sing a song.

And he said, "And I have just the girl to do the part,

and it just so happens that we're going out together too."

And I said, "Oh, now I understand what this is about."

He'd written that scene because he wanted a lyrical ending for the film,

and Harris accused him of just wanting to sleep with me

and sacrificing his artistic purity to that, which was not true.

It really was not true.

And it's a point of honor for me to mention that.

I didn't interfere in anything.

I had already been hired and everything, and then it all started.

And it had nothing to do with Jim Harris's fantasy

of total moral decline.

[Harris] I saw the light, at some point, that he was so right.

It turned out to be so important as a punctuation for that picture.

And Stanley went on to marry her,

which proves it wasn't just a fling or a passing fancy.

The song I sang in Paths of Glory was my last part, and I knew that also.

From then on, I really--

He was a control freak.

I wasn't allowed out of his sight. [laughs]

So I was very happy, because ever since I met him,

it seemed to me that all the other people that I knew

were really horrendously boring in comparison.

♪♪[mellow]

Stanley grew up fairly sheltered, except he lived in the Bronx,

so once he was out of the house, not so sheltered.

So he really lived very much a New York City life.

His father gave him a camera, and that was it.

He'd learn to do it properly.

He did everything in the darkroom. He knew everything about lenses.

And he was quite scientific in his approach and really eager to know.

So by the time he got his first job in Look magazine,

he was a child, really.

He was just 17.

Socially, totally inadequate to have this job,

and he ran into endless amount of trouble socially.

But he made good money, and he was very-- And he saved it, and he was very sensible.

He also was making money on the side playing chess.

He was a very good chess player.

Then he was clever enough to realize that what he really wanted to make is films

and that he had to give up

what had become a very lucrative job by now.

And saved up money to make his first film, and his uncle lent him some money.

And the whole story is very hand-knitted, the start of his career.

I sometimes read his old diaries when he was a very young man,

and I wish I could show this to film students.

It would give them courage, how difficult it is to make up--

How nobody wanted to talk to him on the phone.

How he had nothing but rejection after rejection for everything he did.

And he never gave up.

And that, I believe, is the testing ground for most artists,

this ability to just hang in there because that's what you have to do.

We finally got married...

I think it was on the 14th of April, in Las Vegas.

And I had never seen Las Vegas.

Everybody said, "What? It sounds so sleazy."

It was brilliant.

To a young European, to go to Las Vegas was...

[chuckles] ...everything, you know, just fabulous.

And then we lived in Los Angeles.

When I arrived, not only was the weather amazing, everything was.

And I went to UCLA.

I was very grateful to UCLA, sort of filling me in on certain things.

And I studied both painting and English there.

The mixture of toddlers and a painter is not very good for your home decoration.

I knew many women painters whose husband wouldn't allow them to make a mess.

I messed up every room.

Luckily, Stanley was extremely tolerant of all my painting stuff.

Boy, did I not fit in.

Oh, God. Poor-- I had a very patient husband, I must say.

And I made every social mistake possible, as you can imagine.

Jim Harris was forever trying to bring me up to scratch.

And they taught me horrible things to say in English with great amusement.

So they trained me to be an American.

And then soon we left for England, and I had to be trained to be English.

So now I'm just a wreck.

♪♪[upbeat]

[Frewin] Fifty, 60 years ago, you could be a celebrity

and still be a private person.

Nowadays, if you're a celebrity, the public feel that they own you.

And you're expected to go on TV, bare your soul, your heart.

You know, you become a sort of public property, in other words.

Stanley, I guess, was a bit old-fashioned in that way,

in the sense that he thought, "Well, what matters are the films.

I mean, not what I had for breakfast or my favorite color.

This is unimportant. It's the work that matters."

[Christiane] He wasn't pompous or vain

or walking around thinking, "I'm a genius."

He-- The very opposite.

The very fact, if you care that much about making good films,

you constantly find yourself inadequate, so did he.

He wasn't a show-off at all and never played the "Mr. Film-Director"

for one second.

He did come back from the BBC once and say, "Oh, God, it was so embarrassing.

This man recognized me in the hallway,

and I had to give him my autograph, and..." You know.

[Senat] The fact is, he liked to live his life slightly differently

from other people

and could afford to do it, and did it.

Not a lot of people build their own lives in that way.

Didn't care to do interviews or to be recognized in the street,

which is not a criminal offense.

It's just the way that he liked it.

[Katharina] That was a great treasure to have, that he could be incognito.

But isn't that the ultimate luxury, though?

Being famous for your work and what you do and what's important

and not have to worry about some lens following you.

Because he wouldn't talk to the press,

very often the press liked to build up some kind of myth about him.

But it wasn't accurate in the case of Stanley.

♪♪[pensive]

He had a very bad relationship, always, with the UK press,

but it was only the UK press.

In the rest of the world, it was fine.

The English press didn't like him because he never talked to them.

He was so often invited by TV and radio to talk and to be in chat shows.

If there was anything important to say, he would put it in his film,

and that was the end of it.

[Christiane] I think he thought of it himself.

He says, "I am far better as a filmmaker than I would be as a chat-show guest.

I would be inferior. I would say wrong things.

I would be nervous." He had no faith in himself at all in that.

And he apologized to Warner Bros.

He just said, "I can't do it. Forget it. I'll make a fool of myself."

I felt like, at the end of it, that what he had created

was a kind of Wizard of Oz character.

What he projected out to the world,

that brow and those eyes and that focus of making a film,

that was the way that he wanted the world to see him.

But then what I discovered as Toto,

the little dog running and pulling the curtain back,

was that it was just a kid from the Bronx who was in love with making movies.

[Harris] Stanley had two things that he was devoted to,

and he separated his time

and devoted 100% of that separation in each case.

One was to his work, the other to his family.

He was probably a tough taskmaster for the children

because he is a tough taskmaster for his work as well.

But it's because of a dedication, it's because of a desire

to bring out the best, in the movie that he's making

or in the children's growing up.

♪♪[tender piano]

[Katharina] He was very protective.

He didn't like going to bed if the cats weren't all home

and he didn't know where we all were.

Thank God there weren't mobile phones when we were teenagers.

Oh, my God. You know... "Where are you?" [laughs]

So, yeah, he was extremely protective but also very supportive.

And certainly, if ever you were confused about anything,

what to study, what job to have, any of that stuff,

he would always come up trumps.

Always, always, always. He was problem-solver number one.

He loved his children, he loved me,

and he wanted us to do exactly what he thought was right.

That felt very bad for his daughters, especially during the women's lib era.

[Katharina] I remember bringing one boy home one time.

I was about 17, and he-- To have dinner.

And, you know, he'd had the look and the questions,

and I just said, "Oh, God, this is not going well."

So we came back, and he dropped me off at the door,

and I was going upstairs,

and Dad pokes his head out of the dining-room door,

and he looks at me and says, "You're kidding, right?" [laughs]

It's just, like... It was so harsh.

But I was the first of three girls.

My sisters got away with murder. I sort of cleared the way.

♪♪[lighthearted]

People didn't realize how good his sense of humor was.

It was a very, very funny sense of humor.

That would appear, as I say, when I would be here at the house

and, you know, he'd be making tea.

You know, he wasn't practical with these things,

but he was always happy to-- "Do you want a cup of coffee, Larry?

Want some toast?" And he'd burn the toast, and the tea would get spilt.

I loved that, you know.

See, that was part of the attraction for me.

It was more about the personal side and seeing Stanley and laughing.

We would laugh. And he used to tell terrible jokes.

Very funny jokes, but some people might find them distasteful.

But I used to find them really funny.

I think our sense of humor was a little bit similar,

so I think that helped, you know, our working relationship.

He was one of the funniest men on the planet.

He was like a stand-up comedian in many respects.

Even when the chips were down on one or two things,

it's very rare that you'd had a conversation with him

that didn't begin with some kind of a joke.

And because he had this Brooklyn accent,

he sounded like a comedian from time to time.

But his jokes, his stories were very funny. Very funny.

I mean, maybe they weren't for everybody, but I got his humor, and I loved it.

When he was funny, he was incredibly funny.

And if he was feeling a little upset with someone,

he could be bitingly sarcastic.

We all went through it. [chuckles]

He was just such a powerful force of nature.

That's what he was, really.

I think it was the very first scene in the Shell House

at the very beginning of Barry Lyndon.

And I took the ribbon off from around my neck

and hid it down between my breasts.

And it was when we were doing the close-up.

I don't know where he was sitting. He was somewhere over there.

And he said, "Can you lift the right one up a bit?"

[laughing]

"Thank you.

Okay, just pull in the left one a little bit.

Yeah, okay.

And the right one again.

And can you push them both...?"

And then the whole studio fell about.

It was his idea of a gag, okay? [laughs]

[Christiane]After the Paths of Glory, it was a very uncomfortable time for him

because nothing sort of was happening right away.

And he tried, and he didn't want to just make any old film

in order to support himself

and, by now, me and the children.

So when Kirk phoned him and said,

"I want you to do Spartacus, " he jumped at it.

He knew that if he got through this film, this would be, for his career,

a good thing that he made the film, finished it,

and was now an established film director,

not somebody who made little independent films.

♪♪[dramatic]

[Harris]Unlike Paths of Glory, where Kirk was our employee,

in this particular case, Stanley was his employee,

directing the picture for Kirk.

And Stanley had never been in this posture before,

where he had a boss.

He was very used to pleasing himself, having done everything himself.

So this was a new experience for him,

to now have to do whatever was put in front of him.

And I think 90% of the time,

if not more, everything went extremely well.

He got through the picture. The picture turned out great.

And the experience of working with these actors was terrific.

Stanley brought a lot to that picture.

But he felt that he couldn't wait to get on to the kind of filmmaking

that we were used to, where there's no boss over our heads,

that we made what we wanted and didn't have to account to anybody.

[Kaplan] Stanley chose to make movies in the UK rather than in America

because he had more freedom there.

He was away from the studio structure in Hollywood and the studio system.

It was a creative choice as well as a physical choice.

[Christiane] Many New Yorkers, I think, feel trapped in California.

It felt like being in a boarding school.

You know, all the people you work with, you meet at dinner

and you meet them in restaurants if you go out.

And: "How's it going, Stan?" And he didn't like that.

So after Lolita, then soon we left to England.

♪♪[stately classical]

[Field] I remember asking Stanley, "Why did you leave the States?

Why did you leave Hollywood?"

He goes, "It was really simple."

He said, "I was living in the Flats of Beverly Hills,

and I was tired of walking up to people that I knew

and shaking hands with them and them saying, 'How are you?'

and knowing that they hoped my answer was 'Lousy."'

[Modine] He said that in Los Angeles, people would ask him,

"How are the dailies? How's the film going along?"

And he'd say, "Oh, it's great."

He said that before they turned away,

he said you could start to see the bitterness on their face,

the animosity,

that everyone in Los Angeles seemed to him to be waiting for you to fail.

And he didn't want to stay in that environment.

[Christiane] He liked England because,

like many people who read a lot of English lit,

they got hooked with certain fantasies about England

and found them to be partly true.

And he liked the weather.

And he said, "When I got to England,

I found that the crews, the technicians, were really wonderful at what they did."

The sound man wasn't trying to direct the film.

The director of photography wasn't trying to direct the film.

The director was the director, and they were technicians.

And he loved that. So he started making films there.

And because he was a chess player,

there he was, now eight hours ahead of Los Angeles, as the time goes.

Playing chess, you make your move, stop the clock,

and wait for the other person to make their move.

He was eight hours ahead of them.

It was a great position to find himself in.

He was a part of the system

because he was being financed by the major studios,

but he wasn't as subject to their directives

by being away from it,

and I think it gave him a real sense of freedom.

♪♪[peaceful classical]

[Christiane] Stanley recognized, when he saw this house,

that this had endless possibilities.

This house is actually quite amazing. It's very old.

It's been there pre-Roman days

because we live above the water of Saint Albans.

There's a river called Ver, and the river flows under our house.

It's always been occupied.

Wherever there's water, there are people.

So Childwickbury was owned by the Church,

and I believe there were monks here and novices, and they kept cattle.

And, it's mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diaries,

they fled here during the plague.

This house has been added onto into a rabbit warren

of Victorian and Georgian and down to medieval bits.

So it's got an amazing history.

It is a dream house.

We had some cats run over in our old house,

and this was very protective to the animals

because it's, you know, quite a distance from the road.

It was strange when you move to the country here,

the things that are normal to other people.

He'd never seen a cow close-up.

So it was a splendid education,

teaching him what could and couldn't be done in the country.

He took it very seriously, the whole thing.

The isolation and the newness of his surroundings were very good.

It looked like he had the ultimate privacy, and so he did.

He loved living here. He never left at all.

He simply liked working from here, and he had the room to do so

and keep all his family with him without being disturbed by anybody.

You can't disturb each other if the walls are thick and old.

I mean, I'm totally aware of how spoiled I am to be able to live here.

I am.

[Frewin] He used to say, "It's easier to fall in love than find a good story."

Which may be true.

There aren't that many good stories out there.

♪♪[pensive piano]

"Watch Spot run." "Jack and Jill went up the hill."

Something like that would have bored Stanley.

He would want to do something challenging to himself

that would also be challenging to the audience.

I mean, otherwise, why bother?

[Christiane] Stanley struggled with each script.

He wrote and threw away, and he wrote and he threw away,

and he changed and he put it back.

I think it was the writing process of most people, filmmakers especially.

[McDowell] He wasn't just gonna make any movie that came down the pike.

He wasn't the kind of director you could just send, you know,

a kind of middle-of-the-road-ing kind of movie script to.

It had to be a subject that really embraced things that he was interested in.

And so he worked on the scripts.

If he didn't write them, he developed them.

[Vitali] That was a constant process.

In between camera setups, he was there on the typewriter,

working and reworking and reworking.

Sometimes we had eight or nine different color-coded pages of changes

inside the scene in a day.

It used to get to the point where you kind of thought,

"Well, which color are we on now?"

Because it was just impossible to keep track of it.

[Christiane] It was one of his great fears,

not finding a story that was really interesting,

really good enough, and he dismissed many.

He probably had three or four things at any one time that he was reading,

and he had a dilemma which one he really wanted to do.

And then he'd read something about one,

went, "Ah. Yeah, I'd better not..." then pick something else up.

I know, you know, he would do this. This was how he was as a person.

He didn't go out of his way to work that way.

It just happened.

[Christiane] He was very depressed and sad that he wasted time doing that.

It was like...

yeah, falling in love with something and not paying off.

Yeah, he went through that very often.

He wanted to do this film on the Holocaust, Aryan Papers.

Yeah, that was a big, big project,

and we had one year of preproduction on it

because it's a huge topic, and it's a topic close to his heart.

It is something he wanted to do.

♪♪[solemn, pensive]

We had already the permission, for example,

in the city of Brno in Czechoslovakia

to get the Nazi flags on the houses

and get the trams out of the museum and the road and close the city center.

We were very much advanced.

And then Terry Semel and Stanley decided to postpone it

because of Schindler's List.

That was finally his way out.

"Oh, well, it's coming too late. You know, you can't make two in a row."

But Schindler's List was a story

about somebody who saved a handful of Jews,

not about the actual killings.

And as he developed this film,

it became clear to him he just couldn't do it.

He had absorbed all this information,

and at some point, he just imploded on knowing this.

He very much felt that if you show the total truth...

how would you get an actor to do that?

How would you get an audience to see that?

You just can't do it.

And at that point, you're not a filmmaker anymore.

You're a contributor to the ultimate crime of all the torture stories in the world.

So in a way, he was unhappy,

but he was happy that that was his official remark

about stopping that film.

It's just coincidence. It's just...

It shows you, you know, two minds with a single thought.

They were all good filmmakers

and had the same interest in those subjects.

The Napoleon thing, he was the saddest about.

He would have liked to have made that.

♪♪[dramatic classical]

[Jan] Stanley was interested in this figure

because that was such a brilliant person who was also so foolish at the same time.

That interested Stanley,

this mix of huge talent, huge charisma, and utter foolishness.

[Christiane] He thought the history of Napoleon

was the most interesting thing he'd ever read.

And he was immensely well educated, and he spoke about it very well.

And he was very thoughtful, and it would have been a brilliant film.

I remember one of the visits that I had with Stanley

was at his home when he was working on Napoleon.

And I remember he invited me into this workroom, huge room,

and there was an aerial shot of a possible location for a battle scene.

And he had a grid over this thing, a very detailed grid,

and this covered the wall.

He was counting the figures

in each of these little squares that made up the grid.

He had an eye for extreme detail.

MGM got cold feet and pulled out

because there was a project,

Dino De Laurentiis making a film with Rod Steiger.

Waterloo, that was the title of the other film,

was just one particular episode of Napoleon.

It was his end, really.

Well, that's not what Stanley was interested in at all.

[Christiane] And it was a total flop.

And so the studio told Stanley

the Americans don't like films where people write with feathers.

[Harris] Stanley's always told me, when he was prepping,

that casting is like maybe 80% of your film

in terms of whether it's gonna be good or not.

[Dullea] Great directors cast very well.

And if you cast very well, you don't have to do a lot.

I've always found

that the most successful things that I've done in my life,

both in theater and in film,

have been when I suspect that I've been cast well.

[Harris] So you pick the right actors that can contribute something,

that are intelligent,

that they know their lines, they're prepared, professional,

and when they come on to the picture, they're going to make it better.

So casting is so important,

and you notice, in all of Stanley's pictures,

the acting is impeccable.

[engine running]

[McDowell] He called me in to meet with him because he had a project.

Now, at first, I misunderstood my agent.

I thought it was Stanley Kramer, a very different animal.

I was shooting a movie at Elstree Studios, so I was very close to where he lived,

and I just popped in to see him.

And we went into a tiny little office.

And I said, "Well, what is it?"

And he goes, "Um..."

And then he, of course, realized that he was gonna have to tell me

if he was gonna give me the book.

He said, "Have you ever heard of it?" And I went, "No."

He went, "You haven't?" Like it was some big thing, you know?

I said, "No, I haven't heard of... Clockwork Orange?

No, I have no idea what it is."

He said, "Oh, it's a huge cult book."

And I went, "Well, not in Notting Hill Gate, it's not."

[laughs]

[O'Neal] I think it started that Stanley Kubrick was sending me a script.

I said, "Who? Really? Am I dreaming?"

And he had sent me a script, and all the names were changed

because he didn't want anyone to get wind of what he was working on next.

An elaborate story of the 18th century with lots of duels and love affairs.

What could he imagine of the 18th century?

And I flew to London, to the Dorchester Hotel,

where Mr. Stanley Kubrick would be waiting for me in the restaurant.

And I found him, from the beginning, dynamic.

Extremely attractive.

Beautiful eyes.

Look right through you. Look beyond you.

He's framing, always framing a scene.

♪♪[dramatic]

[Field] Leon Vitali was an incredible young actor,

one of the best in England,

when Stanley asked him to come play Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon.

He and Stanley got on when they were making the movie,

and Leon showed an interest in filmmaking.

And when Stanley was looking for an assistant,

Leon stepped right up and right into that other role.

You know, he was responsible for a good deal,

if not all, of Stanley's casting on the rest of the movies,

like The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut.

I got a book... [chuckles] ...sent to me through the post,

and it was The Shining,

and a little yellow sticker on the front saying, "Read it."

That was Stanley's handwriting.

And the next night, he rang me.

He didn't even say, you know, "Hi, it's Stanley" or anything.

He said, "Did you read it?" I said, "Yeah, I read it."

He said, "Do you want to go to America and find a little boy?"

I said, "Yeah, of course." [chuckles]

And it went on from there.

With The Shining, you know,

I saw 4000 little boys over a period of six months in America.

With Eyes Wide Shut,

you know, for the role of the receptionist in the hotel

where he goes to find Nick Nightingale,

a role that Alan Cumming played, actually,

I saw 80 actors for that one.

Just one scene.

And casting with Full Metal Jacket,

that went on all the way through the movie.

I mean, the aim was always to get the cast together before we started,

but we never managed to do it.

[D'Onofrio] I was doing theater in New York,

and Modine and I had met at an audition,

and we went together in Central Park and learned our dialogue together.

He was passing by the Ritz one night,

and because he hadn't been around for a while, I asked where he was,

and he said he was preparing to do a movie with Stanley Kubrick

and that there was a part available and that I should send a tape.

And a couple of weeks later, Stanley Kubrick called me on the phone.

♪♪[energetic, pensive]

[Vitali] Stanley was the first person, really,

to do any kind of auditioning on video in England.

And what was beautifully refreshing about that was,

it wasn't about walking in

and meeting a producer or director in a room with a 10-by-8.

This was a thing where you were given text up front and you had to learn it,

and then you auditioned in front of a video camera with a casting director.

And it was just great

because what you felt was that "I've shown what I can do."

One of the things we never did was say,

"Well, this character is, you know, physically like this

or psychologically like that."

It was all about letting in as many people into the process of auditioning for it

and seeing exactly what they could give you.

They might give you an extra dimension

to whatever you had in the back of your mind,

which was always a wonderful surprise when they did.

[loud thump]

[McDowell] What I remember about him, outside of him the director,

what really impressed me, I think, the most

was Stanley Kubrick the producer.

♪♪[dramatic]

He was such a parsimonious producer that he watched the costs.

I mean, really, really, he was on top of it.

And that's a good lesson to learn, actually,

because a lot of it is complete waste,

a lot of what we do, you know, in terms of getting the money on the screen.

Stanley was brilliant at getting the money on the screen.

[gunfire]

[man 1] Fire!

- Good. - [man 2] Cut it!

Good.

[Ermey] Other directors, the problem they have

is they have a producer looking over their shoulder.

That producer's the money guy

because there has to be some sort of control.

We've got a certain amount of money, and here's the project.

It's all mapped out exactly where this money goes

and how much goes for this scene

and how many minutes this scene's going to last.

Stanley doesn't have that.

He doesn't have that producer looking right over his shoulder.

Stanley had freedom.

He wouldn't even allow a Warner Bros. representative

to come on his set while we were filming, period.

[D'Onofrio] I remember my first day on set,

I wanted to meet Stanley Kubrick,

the guy who had just hired me for a film, you know?

And they said, "Well, you'll have time." I go, "Where are they shooting?"

"Over there, that bunch of people." I said, "That's where I'm going."

So he walks me over, right?

And as we're walking over, there's this van,

and it's full of these people sitting in it.

I knew it wasn't part of the movie.

It was very odd 'cause it's just sitting there.

We get there, I'm introduced, and Stanley shakes my hand.

He goes, "Sit down. We're gonna do a thing where they march through this alley."

So they shoot it, and then they shoot it again and again.

And I'm watching this van,

and those people are just sitting in the van.

I said, "Who are the people in the van?"

Stanley leaned over and he said,

"Those are the Warner Bros. executives. They're not allowed to get out."

[laughs]

[Smith] That dilemma of director-producer

and with that amount of control that he had,

you can imagine these conversations going on.

"I'd really like to shoot a bit more on this,

but it's gonna cost this, and I can't justify that."

Even though he could say, "I'll spend this,"

he wouldn't just do it, you know, without any good reason.

I'm sure he analyzed everything in that way.

He was totally entrusted with his budget, with his money, everything.

Nobody interfered.

Warner Bros. trusted him.

Terry Semel said, "Look, I mean, either you have this guy or you don't.

There's no point in interfering."

They trusted him, and he knew that.

[Sobieski] I was supposed to be there for two weeks,

and I was there for two months.

It sounds so expensive when you think about it now.

How did he keep a production going on for that amount of time?

How did all these things happen?

But people don't realize that he worked with his family so much.

And by working with his family,

he was able to keep things really secretive and really small.

And there's nothing more beautiful than working in a family business.

The very first time I became involved with the business

was after I had finished school.

I was 17, and I became the video operator on Full Metal Jacket.

Everything that the camera films is also recorded on video

so that the director can see the playback of the take.

And I was in charge of just making sure everything was recorded,

that it could be played back, and that I archived it.

But it was interesting

because Stanley relied on the video playback quite extensively

to look at the take back with the actors.

And I was there spooling back and then pressing play.

And I would overhear his conversations with the actors and his thoughts.

So it was a good place to be.

When you are on his set, it's, you know, really lovely.

You don't realize that the catering company is, like,

the little kid on the truck is his grandson,

and it's run by his son-in-law,

and that his daughter is in the office.

My least favorite job

was xeroxing scripts, 'cause it would-- "Give me 20 copies of that."

He'd always preface it by: "You got five minutes?"

'Cause if you walked past and you weren't actually doing anything...

"It'll take you five minutes." No, it won't.

There was one time, I can't remember what I was printing,

and he kept sending me back, saying, "I can't read it."

And it wasn't until some time after we realized, actually, he needed glasses.

That's why he couldn't read it, 'cause his arms weren't long enough. [laughs]

[Stanley] All right, shall we try this, Doug?

- [Doug] Yeah, sure. - Okay.

[Doug] Okay.

All right, let's go. Take the coats off.

♪♪[upbeat]

[Harris] The best players, whether it's in sports or even in making films,

make it look easy, the real good ones.

So watching Stanley, it really looked easy because he was so good

and he always could articulate what he wanted.

He gained the respect of his actors, and things just flowed.

The impression as a director

was the opposite to what my preconception of what a director would do.

Which is the idea of being this very commandeering,

domineering, shouting, tyrannical character.

He was never like that. He was just really quiet.

And he was really friendly with everyone. That's the point.

My very first note from him was a very discreet...

You know how some directors say, "Oh, for God's sake, do..." blah, blah?

He didn't do that. He said, "Can I talk to you a moment?"

And he took me aside and he said, "Just to tell you,

we know that she's a little flirt,

so you can play her as sweetly as you like."

I've thought of that note so often since in things I've done.

'Cause it's so perfect, obviously. You don't have to act it.

The audience know.

His directions were-- Nothing eccentric about his directions.

I mean, they were as straightforward as:

"Matthew, you're not gonna do it that way, are you?"

[laughs]

Or one that he'd said, as I'm marching into combat,

was pulling the beard down, looking at me, coming over, whispering in my ear,

"Look really scared."

My entire experience with him,

he was like the nicest, most considerate director,

you know, the entire time,

even, like, super protective, actually.

I was, like, a little kid, but I had to ask him

if I could take a break in the middle to shoot another movie.

I was really scared, and everybody would get, like, really quiet

as if, like, the president was coming into the room.

And this guy came in and he was just-- Couldn't have been sweeter.

Had eyes that were so twinkling.

He was just lovable and made me feel super comfortable.

It was a really great experience.

People say he wasn't-- Didn't come forward with things,

but when he was saying goodbye to me, he said...

He said, "You are a really lovely actress,

and I wish there were more, but there's no more in the story."

I mean, so lovely things like that.

[Modine] I was worried because we were getting further behind schedule.

What I felt-- Because of one's ego, you think, "Oh, I'm responsible."

And not considering what problems he was faced with.

You got it.

So I thought, "Jeez, what am I not giving him? What am I not doing?

How do I play this character? I don't know what I'm doing."

And he goes, "What's the matter?"

And I said, "I don't know."

And he said, "What's wrong? Obviously, you're upset about something."

And I said, "Well, Stanley, I don't know what to do.

I don't know how to play this part. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

What do you need from me?"

And he shook his head and he said, "I don't want you to play anything.

All I want you to do is be yourself."

I marked that down in my diary because I know the important part of that sentence

was to be yourself.

[D'Onofrio] It's a very legitimate thing that Stanley did.

There was no nonsense, none.

He goes, "Do you know what you're gonna do tomorrow?"

Tomorrow was the bathroom scene.

And I said, "Yeah, I think so."

And he said, "Okay, it has to be big. It has to be Lon Chaney big.

Do you understand what I mean?"

And I said, "Yeah, I understand what you mean."

"Okay, see you tomorrow morning."

So I incorporated what I had in mind.

And we went in and we did the dialogue in two takes.

And then he asked me to come and sit with him after,

'cause he would watch playback.

And he put his hand on my hand,

and he squeezed my hand a little bit during one of the takes,

and he goes, "That is incredible work."

He goes, "That is incredible."

♪♪[dramatic]

I always kind of took it as, you know, "Thanks for doing the right thing for me."

You know, like, "I trusted you to come here and do this.

And thanks for showing up."

It was kind of nice that he did that.

[soldiers]♪ This is my rifle This is my gun ♪

♪ This is for fighting This is for fun ♪

[Frewin] Stanley tended to stick with a crew he knew wherever possible.

Also, Stanley's reputation preceded him, so you knew what you were in for.

He expected a lot out of you, but, I mean, he expected even more out of himself.

So he wasn't one of these directors who sort of ponces about and says,

"Can you go and do that?"

And then gives you a bollocking for not doing it properly.

He led by example.

♪♪[lively classical]

He didn't want to rush.

He-- For him, it was absolutely essential

that there was no pressure when it really comes to film.

That's the moment when you don't want to have any pressure.

You can have it in preproduction, that's fine.

Yeah? But not when it comes to turning over.

Take your time.

And the actors liked it.

There's no doubt about it.

I just know that I had turned myself over to him.

That he was my general, and that I wouldn't be saying to him,

"Listen, are we gonna be done soon?"

All these stories about him doing a hundred takes of everything

are so not true.

It depended on the moment.

When it was necessary to do a hundred takes, he would.

But most of the time, he sometimes took hardly any takes at all.

[McDowell] He didn't do that many takes on Clockwork,

but I heard that later, or it's legend, he went over a hundred and all this.

I think that, you know, Stanley got it in his head.

He was a man of theories.

And unless they could be disproved quickly,

you could be in an awful lot of trouble.

And the theory was,

the more takes you do, the more resistance you break down in the actor,

that you're likely to get something fantastic around 100, 120 takes.

I think I got to 50 in one take because it was a very technical thing.

And I just said to him, "Stanley, could we go back to 1A?

Because to hear 'take 50' is so, ugh... It just so takes the air out of it."

And he looked at me and he went, "No."

[laughs]

That was it. I went, "Okay, excuse me for asking."

Could you stand the way you do with your gun, or simulate the gun?

[Vitali] He'd walk around with a viewfinder

and just keep putting different lenses on, and you'd run through it once,

you'd run through it twice, you'd run through it a hundred times

if necessary, till he found his first shot.

[Savage] When he was directing you and when you were doing those multiple takes,

he was looking for something.

You knew when he'd got it.

There was a kind of an excitement from him

that you felt and you saw in his face

as soon as the take that he was really happy with.

There was already an image he had in his head,

and he would go until he got that image.

On that dance field, we danced,

which we knew inside out

'cause we'd done it for two or three weeks. [laughs]

He'd say, "Lovely, let's go again."

And so take one, take two, take three.

I have never done as many takes on anything.

And when you thought it was good

and you thought, "God, that was a good one,"

"Lovely, go again." [laughs]

You'd think, "Uh-oh, what could you be wanting?"

He would just say, "Do it again. Let's do it again." And I said:

[sighs]

"Well, I should do it differently, right? If you want me to do it again?"

He said, "No, just like that."

"Just like that? And yet you want another one?"

He said, "Yeah." I said, "It's your 16th just like that."

He said of Peter Sellers,

he said, "He will give you 50 takes, and 49 are not usable,

and the 50th, it can't be repeated, it's so good."

And if you remember Peter in some of Stanley's movies,

he's pretty breathtaking.

You kind of started to just lose this idea of acting.

You were just being it.

He was just waiting for you to drop all those add-ons that you do as an actor,

those little touches you think make the performance.

He just wanted you to be, and so by the end of it,

there wasn't this pretension of a great acting performance,

and you were in the moment, simply because you'd done it so many times.

There was one actor that did, I think, two days' worth of takes

on one line that never made it in the movie.

[man] Bring all the flames up.

[D'Onofrio] We were about 50 yards, looking through this broken wall.

There was a hole and all these flames coming from these gas pipes.

Cameras are in there, and we're outside the building,

we're sitting at the monitors watching this scene, and he had his megaphone.

And he would click the thing and go... [clears throat] ...in the megaphone.

It would go like, "Wah, wah," like that.

And he'd say, "Well, uh... [clears throat] ...it's take 66.

Um, that was absolutely not good at all.

And we're going again."

[clears throat] Hang up.

[O'Neal] I was there in England and Ireland for almost a year and a half.

And at times, I didn't think it would ever end.

When Stanley turns the camera from here to here,

we got a lighting job ahead of us, okay?

Now, the actors can go away and rehearse,

but when they call us back in, then Stanley has to relight the scene.

It's his baby.

But there was a rhythm to it, and you found the rhythm.

Stanley's approach was very, very simple. He wanted to test everything.

- It's a good hand warmer. - [Doug] Just angle it.

No, honestly, this is a log.

- [man] Just drop it down. - Look at this, Doug. Look.

How's that look? To me, it looks great.

[Smith] Jan used a really great expression:

"He looks under every stone, and then he looks again."

The thought that he'd gone away from something

without knowing that he's done every single possible thing

to make it as good as it can be.

And that was the kind of conversations that I used to have with Stanley.

"Stanley, we had this, and that looked great.

We liked it when we saw the tests."

And he couldn't always explain that. But there was something in him

that he just wasn't comfortable with, that he wanted to explore something else.

He lights for a long time, and then he decides he's not happy with it,

and you go home and come back the next day and try again.

So there was maybe three or four pages in this scene.

Marie Richardson and Tom Cruise do the first few pages,

and I come in at the end of this one-- This first scene that I'm in.

I thought, you know, it'll be a few days. But it was more than a few days.

So I got to the set to start to shoot my entrance into that scene.

And he said, "I don't really like what I'm--

How I've kind of got you guys lit, so I'll see you tomorrow."

I was like, "I was so close to actually shooting a frame of footage,"

but we didn't do it until the next day.

[Christiane] He was trying things out.

He had little models of things, and he was lighting them.

And he would travel with a flashlight and then get it lit properly.

He liked to play with that and had some good ideas

of how to get scenes very logically constructed

and visually very nice by playing with his little paper dolls.

Stanley found out that I was on the same lot that he was preparing The Shining,

and he took me on a tour of the sets, which were--

I had never seen anything quite like it before.

Then Stanley showed me how he planned his shots.

He had a Nikon still camera, and he had rigged a periscope

that went from the lens straight down.

So when he took me into a miniature version

of all the sets of the Overlook Hotel,

he could put that little periscope down into the set

and he could basically take a lot of pictures

and plan where his camera was going.

So I had a real tutorial that first day I went to Elstree

from the great master himself.

[Ermey] You know, it took seven days to light that bathroom.

Every morning, the first thing we would do when Stanley'd come in,

we would go right to that head.

And he would adjust filters and lights and get rid of this...

He wanted an icy, cold, blue ambiance.

And I think he accomplished that mission too.

♪♪[warm, pensive]

[Smith] The reason that made Stanley's days longer than most other people

is because we would shoot for the designated hours,

but then we would go off into another part of the studio

and test the sets, light and test the sets

with just a skeleton crew, like five or six people.

And then we would maybe do two or three hours there,

get some food in, and invariably, it was very relaxed.

At the end of the day in The Shining, McDonald's would arrive.

In those days, the hamburgers from McDonald's were a big thing.

Then after our hamburgers, you'd do a lighting test.

And it was fascinating to see the way he was doing lighting tests.

I learned all the time because Stanley is a great, great teacher.

Yeah. Well, that's not bad.

I have to say, that's probably...

Was one of the things Stanley enjoyed as much as anything.

And it was very, very relaxed.

It was almost like a social evening, I would say.

And it was very enjoyable.

[O'Neal] You know, we had no stand-ins.

He said, "Well, I can't light the scene to a stand-in. It's not you."

So we had to be completely dressed, coiffed,

even with my sword... [grunts]

And do our own standing in

until it's lit, which could take half a day.

They'd touch us up,

and we'd begin shooting.

No matter how good a stand-in is,

you bring them in and light them, and it never looks right, and you say,

[mutters] "Doesn't look right, doesn't feel right." 'Cause they're a stand-in.

The second the actor comes in, boom, there's a spark that happens.

And it's the only time you can tell

if you really filled the lighting in right or not.

Action.

You little scumbag! I got your name! I got your ass!

You will not laugh! You will not cry!

You will learn by the numbers! I will teach you!

Now get up! Get on your feet!

[Smith] Stanley didn't like big crews. It was a thing that he had.

He never wanted to have more people around than was necessary.

And sometimes he was 100% right, and sometimes, you know, he was wrong

and we'd have to get more people in because we didn't have enough.

But he, generally speaking, didn't like to have more people

than was really essential.

We had a very, very humble setup.

On Eyes Wide Shut, we had four offices and a Xerox machine.

We were very few people.

You could go on our set and you thought they had wrapped.

We did major, major scenes on Eyes Wide Shut

and we had a setup of seven people.

Very, very, very simple.

He was totally entrusted with his budget, with his money, everything.

Nobody interfered.

Warner Bros. trusted him, and he knew that.

He knew he had to deliver.

And I think that's the secret, that relatively small crew,

because we went over schedule by 200%,

but certainly only 10% over budget.

On the whole, Stanley thought time is the most important thing

that you spend with actors.

And if you have such an emotional story,

such incredibly complicated thought processes

that go into these scenes,

you want to take time.

And he'd keep his crew very small,

keep it all as cheap as possible, and take the time.

[Vitali]With Eyes Wide Shut, it was scheduled for 89 days, that shoot.

After day one, we were half a day behind schedule.

And I just thought, "That's great.

How wonderful. This one's gonna go rolling on and rolling on and rolling on."

On the call sheets, you know, you'd have "day 24 out of 89," "day 50 out of 89."

So when we got to day 89 and we still had a third of it to do,

we sort of said, "Well, what do we do now, Stanley?

Tomorrow do we put 'day 90 out of 89' or...?"

And he just said, "Don't put any days at all."

That was it.

The number of days we'd been shooting was taken off the call sheet,

and we never thought about it again.

♪♪[warm, pensive]

[Ermey] He told me that his favorite part of filmmaking is editing.

Because in the editing room, that's where the film comes to life.

And he loved editing.

He couldn't wait to finish the movie.

He said, "I only really enjoy making films after the actors are gone

and I just have it to myself."

Full Metal Jacket was the first time

that he actually started using a computer editing system.

[gunfire]

We had over a million feet of film for Full Metal Jacket,

which ended up as not even six double reels.

It was astonishing.

Every word of dialogue was listened to.

Every single take was looked at.

And before, you know, computer editing systems, of course,

everything had to be cut, spliced, tried,

and then there were so many combinations of it.

If a character sort of had a simple line like "I love you,"

just for argument's sake, okay,

and it was 40 takes or 50 takes,

he'd listen to every single "I" in isolation,

every single "love" in isolation, and every single "you" in isolation.

And then bit by bit, he'd start knocking out the ones that sounded like nothing.

He'd find the right combination of "I love you."

So you could only thank God on Full Metal Jacket,

yeah, that we actually had a computerized editing system.

♪♪[classical waltz]

He used to play music through the editing process.

Close to something that he thought might work.

And then, you know, the choices would narrow down, narrow down.

He used to say that the biggest music library in the world is the world.

So, you know, try and find it there.

[Christiane] Stanley was an extremely musical man.

He was often accused that he didn't use enough composers and so on

because he was playing music around the clock,

and he was always hooked on something.

He was himself a drummer, and he liked anything from Dixieland and jazz

and modern music and classical music.

Hugely catholic tastes in, I mean,

enormous range of music that interested him.

He always had a tune in mind.

So, for instance, to have the waltz in 2001.

He said, "Everything in space turns.

You can't be out there without going in circles, like a waltz."

[Vitali] It's giving you such an atmosphere,

which you just put the picture into that context

instead of the other way round.

It's not reinforcing a mood of drama or humor or anything.

It's just, this is where we are.

It set up a whole different feeling

and different understanding of what was going on.

He did it with all of them.

[Kaplan] He'd get as much pleasure out of dealing in the distribution and marketing

of his films as he did with making the movie.

So he was watching them grow,

grow from their, you know, birth at the opening through the release

and making sure that every stage was done to benefit the film.

[Senat] Stanley made a point, quite how he managed to do it, I don't really know,

of studying and learning and coming up with alternative ways of doing things,

or at least questioning the old ways of doing things.

So as a result of that,

he learned his way around different aspects of the contractual advertising

and distribution issues as well.

[Kaplan] Stanley wanted to control advertising.

He didn't want the studios to have anything to do with it.

He would want to see which of kind of three ways could be better.

So you'd have to get all of the information

from each of the three ways

and present it to him before an action could be taken.

♪♪[pensive electronic]

The great example was the film poster for Clockwork Orange.

He had found a couple of newspaper illustrations,

and one of them, that I found out that he found, happened to be Philip Castle.

They set up a screening

of very rough footage.

I took a little writing pad, a Basildon Bond writing pad this size,

and I was drawing in the dark,

you know, ideas as they came from the screen,

'cause he was leaping with ideas.

Mike would take the drawings and we'd look at them,

and then he would take them to Stanley.

They looked at them together, and he would have chosen that format

of the A in Clockwork Orange.

One directive that was really interesting that Stanley told me

was to ask Philip to do the logo as well.

I found that if someone is creative in one area,

they could be just as creative in a related area,

even though they won't know it.

And I said, "Philip, we need a title treatment.

Just give it a shot."

And he said, "I don't really do it." And then suddenly he comes up with it.

And then Stanley had him do the title treatment

in every single language.

So Philip was working on the title treatment

of Clockwork Orange for a year.

I found he didn't really know what he wanted until he saw it,

at least as far as artwork.

I knew that he wanted to see lots of ideas

rather than one lukewarm idea developed.

With Full Metal Jacket, of course, he knew he wanted that helmet.

It was just the means of getting to it.

I've come across a lot of directors

who want to get involved in the process

and have demanded certain approval rights,

but none of them had the authority that Stanley did.

I do remember on one occasion when we were working on The Shining,

I'd been involved in some very complex discussion

on the telephone with Stanley.

And so I got up and started wandering around the office, as one does,

and I wandered into the office of the theatrical supervisor

for Europe, Middle East and Africa at the time.

This is about three minutes later.

And he goes, "Stanley, Stanley."

And I can see that he's looking at a newspaper,

or a photocopy of a newspaper,

from France,

and he's looking at the timing of the screenings at a cinema in Lyon,

and he's talking about:

"Yep, if we move that by ten minutes,

we could then start ten minutes earlier, we'd get an extra screening in."

And of course, he was probably supposed to be shooting a film

at the time for Warner Bros.

[laughing] instead of doing all of this stuff,

but that didn't stop Stanley.

♪♪[somber]

[Harris] When you were choosing to make movies that appealed to you

and not being concerned about the box-office potential,

whether they're commercial, whether they're mainstream,

you're gonna have trouble.

Stanley and I always liked pictures that were not mainstream.

Not because they were not mainstream,

they just happened to be...

esoteric or away from the popular type of movies.

What can you do about a bad review? Nothing.

If you're a creator, once you've put your work out there,

it's kind of not yours anymore.

You then open yourself up to all the criticism there is.

And if people interpret it one way, that's their interpretation.

You mustn't explain it, because you did it,

and now it's out there,

and let people take from it what they will.

[Smith] He did like people to enjoy his work, to like his work.

You can criticize it, by all means,

but that wasn't a problem to him, I'm sure.

But he liked-- I think he liked to feel that once he delivered something,

then look at the film, you know, examine it, and be critical, yes,

but, you know, see what I've tried to do.

It's interesting, for example, the reaction to 2001.

There is a man who did just Dr. Strangelove

and Lolita and Paths of Glory,

and now he takes a bow to the unknowable creator of the universe.

And many people over 40 or 50 were angered by this.

It got very mixed reviews.

It was not the iconic film that it has now become.

There were a lot of bad reviews for this film.

[McDowell] Stanley told me that when they first showed it in Washington,

for the sort of politicos,

there was a guy from MGM at the back with a clicker.

And Stanley goes, "What are you doing?"

He goes, "I'm counting how many people leave."

And there was like 380 left the movie!

Just... [whistles] ...didn't get it.

[Jan] 2001 was saved by teenagers. Yeah, there's no doubt about it.

Or "teenagers." Let's say, by people between 12 and 30.

Particularly young boys were absolutely enthused by 2001.

For the first time, we see a so-called science-fiction film

as something which is really philosophical, almost spiritual.

That hasn't been done before.

Pauline Kael didn't like it. She thought it was incredibly boring.

But 12-year-olds and 14-year-olds saw something that is indirectly

a very, very strong presence, but it isn't talked about.

♪♪[stirring]

Eyes Wide Shut was the most difficult film of his life.

But he also considered Eyes Wide Shut his greatest contribution,

his greatest contribution to the art of filmmaking.

I remember a fax from the Japan office

which said how wonderful this film was

and that couples are leaving the cinema holding hands.

So many people have come to me

over the last four or five years and said,

"You know, I just saw Eyes Wide Shut again.

I hadn't seen it since its release. And I get it now, where I didn't before."

And it was exactly the same with Barry Lyndon,

exactly the same with 2001,

people who didn't get it when they first saw it.

♪♪[classical]

The critical reaction to Barry Lyndon hurt him for years.

I mean, he was upset, disappointed, depressed about it.

He was very, very disappointed that the film wasn't successful,

because one of the things he wanted to be sure

is that Warner Bros. get their money back.

It was much more important to him that the backers get the money back

than that he got paid, which is good.

So that was part of his character.

So, yes, that was the biggest disappointment on Barry Lyndon.

He was also disappointed that not enough people liked the film.

I know when Barry Lyndon came out,

it wasn't wildly--

People were saying, "My God, it's three hours long,"

you know, all this sort of thing.

But the latest release in London gave it five stars across the board.

And, you know, I meet people who say, "It's my favorite Kubrick,"

which is a little bit heartwarming.

BBC, BBC Television, they ran a series of his films,

everything from Lolita on to Full Metal Jacket.

And so the Sunday they showed Barry Lyndon, he watched it.

I think it's the first time he'd actually watched that film

from beginning to end without a break.

And the next day he came bouncing into my office and he said,

"It really is a great movie, isn't it, Leon?"

I said, "Yeah, we've been telling you that for years."

♪♪[somber]

[Smith] One of the big tragedies for me,

one of the most upsetting things for me,

is that he's never been honored in any way by the Academy.

I doubt that it'll come now

'cause I think it's just gone on-- It's too long now.

But, I mean, his body of work, come on.

Surely... [chuckles] ...somebody, somebody, somewhere,

even if it was a posthumous award

of a Lifetime Achievement Award, I mean, or whatever...

If any director should be awarded something by the Academy,

it has to be Stanley Kubrick.

[Katharina] Daddy had died, and the house was full of stuff.

Shelves, cupboards, rooms, famously boxes,

statues, awards, scripts, you name it.

♪♪[solemn, pensive]

[Christiane] He would take everything out of his office

when the film was finished, give it to the driver,

and he would dump it at home.

He said, "Just put it in the bloody ballroom."

And because we have enough room, it was just put somewhere.

"I'll tidy it up."

He had good intentions, but it was a total lie. He never did.

Which, in a way, was good,

because had he tidied it up, he would have been ruthless.

You don't value your own rubbish around everywhere.

Stanley famously kept everything.

Everything was labeled in boxes,

and there were whole storerooms full of stuff.

He never threw anything away.

[Christiane] I was very depressed when I saw it all,

because a person seems suddenly very long dead

when the paper starts to go yellow.

It's the most depressing thing to do, to open up and: "Oh, my God, yes,"

and you start reading old letters,

and sooner or later you start to cry,

and it's a horrible widow's fate, that one.

I had no idea what to do.

Then, through the Frankfurt Film Museum,

and I talked to Hans-Peter Reichmann, who ran it,

and we got the idea of doing the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition.

♪♪[upbeat]

He sent me an archivist, a very talented archivist,

because it takes talent to spot

what is interesting.

[Katharina] We had an archivist here for eight, nine months

with his white gloves, going through everything meticulously.

He became a member of the family.

And we found things that we didn't know were there.

[Christiane] He opened my eyes a great deal,

what people would be interested in.

In the beginning, I thought,

"Oh, would he find this embarrassing or that embarrassing?"

Once you start on that, you find almost everything embarrassing.

If it's written down on horrible paper, or if you doodled...

Even the old yellow pads with a ring of coffee stains

and horrible remarks on the side.

"You drank all my orange juice," it said on one. [laughs]

But, of course, that's what interested people.

This gives you a little bit of an idea of what this person was like.

And so we had to really go through it very carefully.

So that was a lot of work.

But in a way, it now gave me something to do that made sense,

so I could stop just sitting there and crying.

It was something positive to do, and it was very valuable in every way.

[Katharina] We knew that eventually, an exhibition,

or a traveling exhibition, as it now is,

where would that stuff go?

So it had to find a final resting place.

Several museums and countries, you know, were considered.

But, you know, we lived in England, and Daddy liked England.

And we're also very close to Europe, where his films are hugely appreciated.

So it enables anybody who's interested in the medium of film at all

to come and look at that archive and look at all his stuff.

♪♪[stirring]

We're sitting in the University of the Arts London

Archives and Special Collections Centre,

where we house the Stanley Kubrick archive.

The storeroom itself is kept at a constant 17 degrees centigrade,

50% relative humidity,

which is kind of about the optimum temperature and humidity level

for things like photographs and paper.

It's pretty much top of the range as far as archival storage is concerned.

The majority of the archive is paper-based or photography-based.

There's something like 820 linear meters' worth of material

in boxes and plan chests.

It spans the entire of his career,

so we've got everything from original copies of Look magazine

from when he was a photojournalist in the 1940s,

all the way through to material that relates to Eyes Wide Shut.

And obviously, because he was so involved in every aspect of filmmaking,

the film materials can relate to all of those aspects as well.

So everything from kind of draft scripts, his notes on the original novels,

all the way through to advertising designs and which quotes to use on the ads.

And we have a huge range of researchers come in,

anything from academics writing books

or our own University of the Arts London students,

students from other film schools,

even members of the general public

who are just interested in seeing a bit of Stanley's stuff.

[Katharina] I would love to see Renoir's palette.

You know, I would love to see Vermeer's brushes.

Whatever it is that you're into, you want to...

be in the presence, [laughs]

the ghostly presence,

and feel some of the mojo

of the people who have practiced the work that you love to do.

So I get that completely.

♪♪[stirring]

[Modine] I stayed in touch with Stanley

until he started production on Eyes Wide Shut.

And I called him up one day,

and I don't even remember why I was calling.

I said, "Hey, Stanley, it's Matthew."

"Yeah, what do you want?"

And it was the first time he'd ever said something like that to me.

I didn't want anything.

I was just-- Except conversation and to see how he was doing.

I spent two years with him working on Full Metal Jacket,

so him saying something like that to me,

while it was a punch in the gut, it was just because he was getting busy

on another project, and I had to respect that.

But that was the last time I spoke to him.

[Smith] For me, he died too young,

because there are times when you, you know,

you feel like you want to have a conversation,

not about anything in particular, not about work, about anything,

but those moments come back... to me,

more often now than they did in the early days, funnily enough.

I wish I could have spoke to him one last time,

just been in his company one last time.

He's just somebody that, if you were invited to sit with him,

you wouldn't turn it down.

You know, you would hang out.

He was such an interesting guy.

We were not only business associates,

but we were really best friends.

And we were together all the time.

We played poker together.

We went to the stock-market offices at 6 in the morning.

We played touch football.

He was dedicated to his family, dedicated to his work.

I know him as a regular guy.

I worshiped him. I loved him.

Stanley was... I think he's the best director ever.

I know his history, and I know where he came from

and how difficult the climb was

and how many noes he had had to put up with

and rejections he had had to put up with in his life.

I was quite shocked when he died.

All I could think of: What would have been all the great movies

that we're never gonna see?

What makes an artist?

My definition of an artist is somebody who does something that does not disappear,

that's relevant for the next generation.

Kubrick will not disappear.

You may not like him. It has nothing to do with it.

People didn't particularly like the French Impressionists,

and they changed the way people paint.

And so Stanley's films changed everything.

I feel, you know, my education didn't start

until I started working for Stanley.

And coming to work for Stanley, I mean, it was, you know,

like suddenly jumping on a roller coaster.

That was quite something, quite exhilarating.

He was funny, witty, tremendously stimulating,

and a good laugh, yeah.

Great guy.

People ask me if I miss him, you know, even now.

Well, yeah, I do. I mean, of course I do.

It didn't really hit me that he wasn't around

until the October of that year, because by then,

I'd kicked out the very last theatrical prints of Eyes Wide Shut.

So from March to October,

I was kind of... just keeping myself going.

October, it was the first time I ever went on Prozac.

[chuckles]

It was the first time I ever went on an antidepressant,

'cause I crashed so quickly.

That's when I realized he really wasn't around anymore.

He was...

a very passionate, loving,

concerned husband,

father, dog owner, employer.

He was probably one of the most caring people I've ever met.

If it was in his power to do something to help somebody who needed it

or an animal who needed it, he would be there.

And he would always try.

Yeah, not many like him.

So I miss him.

I miss him a lot.

♪♪[stirring]

[Christiane] I really considered myself extremely lucky.

We were people from the most opposite side of things.

And so in that sense, we both were lucky

that we were a good match.

When he was dead, I really suffered.

I didn't have his voice to give me the rundown on what he thought.

Anything that he ran across, he was very interested, and intensely so.

And it sounds like such a clichè,

but he was really engaged in life, every part of it.

That kind of energy and enthusiasm and intensity

made him very different from other people to me.

He was brilliant.

He was unique.

He was Stanley Kubrick.

♪♪[uplifting]

♪♪[pensive]