Original subtitles

♪♪ [dramatic music]

You know, when you work for Stanley, he's not going to stop

until it's exactly the way he wants it, right, wrong, or indifferent.

How many films did Stanley make in his lifetime?

Very few.

He took a long, long time between the films.

He was obsessed with those films.

Stanley always admired Woody Allen for turning out every year a new film.

It's wonderful. He would have loved to do it,

but he couldn't. It wasn't his style.

He was a man of such varied interests that he was always busy

and went through sequential obsessions.

I would talk to him sometimes every day, you know,

and there were endless, endless interests.

What he really wanted to make was a film about Napoleon.

Because Napoleon was someone he revered.

Napoleon was one of the abiding interests of Stanley's life,

along with extraterrestrial Intelligence,

the Holocaust, concentration camps, Julius Caesar,

English place name etymology, and 3,000 other things.

Stanley had a tough time keeping up with his interests.

You know, it was a full-time job being Stanley.

♪♪ [buoyant music]

[presenter VO] He is considered by many the greatest film director

the medium has ever known.

Yet in a 45-year career,

Stanley Kubrick's films number only a dozen.

That he strove for perfection is well established.

What is less known is that he lavished years of energy

on several films that never saw the flickering light of the silver screen.

The most famous of these, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,

was made by Steven Spielberg with Kubrick's blessing.

But there were two other films that came tantalizingly close to creation.

♪♪ [orchestral waltz]

After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey,

a success which means that Kubrick had an opportunity to do what he wanted,

and what he wanted to do was Napoleon.

Now, Kubrick was fascinated by Napoleon.

Here was this man who changed the political landscape of the modern world.

Stanley was always interested in things military,

and I think he was very interested in those campaigns and so forth.

It's really interesting, when he was talking about making his film of Napoleon,

he describes these battle scenes as ballets, as violent ballets,

and he has this image in his mind of choreographing violence even then.

Kubrick was fascinated by this man, by what he did politically and culturally,

but also personally.

Kubrick wasn't just interested in the big fight sequences, the big wars.

He was interested in what Napoleon did the night before.

And usually it was paperwork, because you don't run an empire

by telling people what to do. You've got to do the paperwork.

And I'm sure that aspect of Napoleon appealed to Kubrick,

who did quite a lot of paperwork himself.

[Baxter] He compiled a screenplay,

which is very interesting because it is not entirely

about Napoleon as a military genius.

A lot of it is about Napoleon's early days, when he was in Paris,

and he was the protėgé of various other rich and influential people.

And there's an enormous amount of sex in it, which is surprising.

And the descriptions are all of these women with décolleté gowns

and people having it off in closets and so on.

And the battles, of course, take place.

But they're not-- it's not like a film like Waterloo.

[VO] Bold, brilliant, and exacting. Obsessed with detail.

The phrases have been used to describe both Napoleon

and the director who yearned to tell his story.

Well, it's an easy parallel to make.

I don't know if it tells us much about Stanley or Napoleon.

Napoleon also had a technique among his staff,

which was that he would rotate them in and out of his regard.

So one week he'd have one favorite, and he'd defer to this person

and give them all the good jobs. And then the next week,

this person would notice they were pushed to one side,

and someone else was being brought in.

And he would rotate these people all the time,

so that everybody was on tenterhooks,

and everybody was desperate to do what he asked.

In fact, the thing you heard over and over again in the Kubrick unit is,

"But what shall I tell Stanley?"

[Harlan] Napoleon would have been a very, very typical Kubrick film.

His downfall was self-inflicted.

Now here was a man who was enormously gifted for his job,

colossally successful, from a small officer who came from a foreign country,

namely from Corsica,

and was trained in the South of France.

He crowned himself emperor of France in 1804.

Now, you know, this is just quite astonishing.

And this man, however, in the end, was governed by his emotions

more than by his intellect.

And this is an old story of Stanley.

You know, this conflict between emotion and intellect.

[VO] As with any Kubrick project,

the first step was to accumulate exhaustive and meticulous research.

He had teams going around all over the place,

gathering up huge quantities of visual material, documentary material.

He sent off Andrew Birkin, his assistant, to Paris,

to find actual artifacts of Napoleon.

Andrew arrived, with notable ill timing, in May 1968,

at the height of the Student Revolution.

So they're walking around in the streets with, you know, cars on fire,

and police shooting at students and so on, looking for Napoleon's portable lavatory.

So obsessive was Kubrick that Andrew brought back a sample

of the earth of Waterloo, so that wherever they re-created the battle,

they could do it with exactly the same color earth.

[Duncan] He bought thousands of books in every language about Napoleon.

Everything he could find.

Now there's research,

and there's research.

And Kubrick got it to a point where he had a filing cabinet full of cards,

and on these cards were every day of Napoleon's life.

He could pick a card, and he would be able to tell you where Napoleon was,

what he was doing, why he was doing it.

That's the level of research, detailed research,

that he did on Napoleon.

[VO] One of Kubrick's challenges in developing the project

was realizing the enormity of his vision within the confines of a realistic budget.

Well, he had designed it so that it was reasonably inexpensive,

considering the fact that it was Napoleon and had vast battle scenes.

And so what Kubrick did, he came up with this great idea of having paper costumes.

So you would have like 4,000 people in proper costumes,

the people you would be able to see.

But in the background you would have 10, 20, 100,000 people in paper costumes.

And so it would just be a disposable costume.

And he did camera tests on these to see how they would register.

And they looked just the same as a normal costume close up.

One of the problems with doing Napoleon the way Stanley wanted to

would be access to these great rooms at Versailles and things like this,

which nobody's going to let you shoot in.

And so he realized that with the front projection,

the technology we had used for 2001, for the ape sequence,

he could use that same technology and be able to tell the story of Napoleon

like it had never been told before.

Because you could be there at the Battle of Austerlitz.

You could be there in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles.

So he was very excited about that.

[VO] In the late 1960s,

Kubrick saw an actor he immediately realized

would be perfect to play his Napoleon.

[Nicholson] He called me, like he does many people, out of nowhere.

I didn't believe it was him on the phone.

And, as he is to almost all other people, very flattering

and very nice about your work.

And, you know, still being Stanley, he tried to--

He wanted to make sure I could speak other than as a Southerner.

He had seen Easy Rider, so he had me read something from a play

and put it on tape to make sure I spoke regular English, you know.

But the problem was that this went on too long,

and some other people had the idea of doing films about Napoleon.

[Harlan] The film was pulled by MGM because the Rod Steiger movie Waterloo,

not a bad film at all, was not really as successful as the studios had hoped,

and MGM then didn't want to proceed, and the film wasn't green-lighted.

We had an enormous amount of preproduction cost already in it,

but not the rest.

And so Stanley was very, very disappointed.

He was really quite depressed for a few days.

But, you know, life has to go on.

Then the question, of course, arose, well, why didn't Stanley just do it?

It's public domain, for Christ's sake. It's Napoleon.

So MGM can't own Napoleon, but he could never do it again

because if he tried to do it at Warners, for example, MGM would come after Warners

and Stanley and say, "Hey, wait a minute, you're infringing upon our story."

We'd say, "No, this is another script Stanley wrote."

And they'd say, "Yeah, but Napoleon's Napoleon."

You know, you can't get the guy to do it twice, and there would be no way

because his concept was so brilliant and so much a part of his enthusiasm

for doing it, that he could not do another version that would be satisfactory to him.

So it just languished there.

The thing that strikes you is how much Barry Lyndon was to become, in a way,

a summation of everything he was thinking in those days,

this very hieratic form, this very slow, even, adult way of making films,

long looks at things, slow movements.

You know, all that stuff that you can see in scraps in some of these other movies,

it all comes together in Barry Lyndon.

[VO] Though he would return to Napoleon on occasion

in the coming years,

Kubrick never got the film as close to production as he did in the heady days

following the release of 2001.

In the meantime, he continued to develop a number of other projects,

including what he hoped would be the definitive film

about World War ll and the Holocaust.

♪♪ [loud, dramatic music]

Stanley would have loved to make a film about this topic.

Yeah, it was an important topic, the Holocaust and the whole Nazi period.

I'm not sure that even Stanley could tell you why he wanted

to make a film about the Holocaust.

I mean, beyond: it's interesting, it's dramatic, it's shocking.

It's awful. It had always fascinated him.

I mean, what happened in Germany in the '30s and '40s

and this is a kind of theme that sort of also echoed in Clockwork Orange,

that culture and civilization doesn't preclude savage, irrational behavior.

He felt that he could make a very important film about the Nazis,

the whole issue of that nightmare.

So he looked around for an existing book,

and he read a book by an American-based

but Polish-born writer named Louis Begley

called Wartime Lies.

I gathered, from what Jan Harlan told me,

was that Kubrick had always wanted to make a movie about the war in Europe,

and he decided that Wartime Lies was the book that he wanted to use.

I have always admired Kubrick as a filmmaker, just boundlessly.

So when I was told that it was he who was acquiring the rights,

I practically jumped up for joy.

Kubrick determined to call his film The Aryan Papers,

a reference to the documents sought by Jews in occupied countries

to avoid internment.

The theory on which Hitler and the Nazis proceeded

was that there was the Aryan race, of which they were the splendid examples,

and non-Aryans, such as Jews, were vermin-like species,

that, as was finally decided at Wannsee, they should be exterminated.

So if you got papers to establish you as a non-Jew,

the point was really to establish you as an Aryan.

[Duncan] Aryan Papers is about a Jewish boy and his aunt

trying to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland

during World War Il.

It's a film about survival.

Kubrick liked to do films about people in extreme situations,

people making life-and-death decisions.

[VO] For the key role of the young boy in his story,

Kubrick chose Joseph Mazzello, fresh off his costarring role

in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.

I think that the first time I remember Aryan Papers being talked about

was on the set of Jurassic Park.

What happened was Stanley Kubrick saw Radio Flyer, which was a movie I did

when I was seven, my first real big movie.

And from that he was really interested in me.

[VO] For the role of the aunt. Uma Thurman was an early favorite.

Ultimately, however, Kubrick set his sights

on Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege.

He just rang me up one day and said, "I'm starting preparation of this film.

Could you come out and do some tests for three or four days?"

So I said, "Yes, of course." You know, "What's it about?"

And he said, "I'll tell you when you get here."

And I said, "Well, who's in it?" And he said, "A young actress."

I said, "What's her name?" He said, "I'm not going to tell you."

I said, "Okay."

And I went out there and we did all these tests.

He wouldn't tell me the name of this girl. He just wouldn't tell me.

I finished up Jurassic Park, and Stanley Kubrick wanted to meet me.

I was flown out to meet him.

I was flown out for my mom to read the script.

She had read the script, and Stanley came in, and I remember, um...

most of the meeting consisted of him, um, staring at me.

He even commented at one point he said, "I'm sorry, Joe, don't feel uncomfortable.

I'm just--I'm just looking at you.

I'm just looking at your eyes. I have to look at them."

It was really important to him

to get a three-year-old that looked like me.

And so he was looking at me to make sure he got the right person

to play me as a younger kid.

[VO] Meanwhile, Kubrick and his team were immersed in their research.

I did a lot of work on that for about 18 months, two years.

I did most of the initial research when Stanley had read the story,

you know, tracking down books, going to photo libraries,

this, that, and the other.

[VO] Producer Jan Harlan made frequent calls to novelist Louis Begley,

compiling the rich tapestry of detail that fed Kubrick's creativity.

Kubrick rang up and said, "There's a song mentioned in chapter six," or something.

"What is the song?"

And Begley, he's a very, very formal lawyer,

had to sing the song down the telephone lines

so it could be transcribed by Kubrick.

[VO] Teams were dispatched throughout Europe to scout locations.

We went mainly to Czechoslovakia. Found some wonderful locations.

A fantastic town on the border with Poland that was still bombed.

It was perfect for the bombed town.

And then we went over to Aarhus and it was perfect.

We found wonderful apartments.

We found this old army barracks that had an even--

It had a stage with a dirt floor.

So we could have built the forest and things in there.

It had offices, parade ground you could use as a lot

and build streets, whatever, you know.

Everything. We found everything.

He began researching in Denmark, went to the Danish Film Institute,

acquired an enormous quantity of films of the period,

Documentaries and dramas, started looking for people to play in the material,

brought in huge quantities of papers.

The mayor of Aarhus, I think, wrote him a letter of warm appreciation

at the expectation of a lot of work coming to the country,

little realizing that Kubrick would never have shot there at all.

He would have re-created it.

We were as far as getting permission from the city of Brno

to have the trams from the tram museum on the street for a weekend,

to close the center city for a weekend,

and have Nazi flags hanging down the buildings, and all this.

[VO] As preproduction dragged on,

Kubrick was in danger of losing his young star.

The film kept getting pushed back and back.

And I did another movie called The River Wild,

where they wanted to darken my hair,

and this is how close we were to really doing it,

is that they wanted to darken my hair,

and somehow his agent got wind of it and told him,

and he called the production and said, "You cannot touch Joe's hair."

And so for a while after I was signed to do it,

there were negotiations between the movies that I was doing and him.

[VO] As with Napoleon,

circumstances beyond his control force Kubrick to abandon The Aryan Papers

and move on to other projects.

Schindler's List came out. We had a similar topic.

And Warner Bros., Terry Semel, and Stanley decided not to come,

you know, a few months or a year after Schindler's List with a similar film.

We had been burned already on Full Metal Jacket,

because Platoon was ahead of us,

and it was an excellent film, Platoon.

So, you know, normal moviegoers say they don't want to necessarily see

two Vietnam or two Holocaust films in one season or whatever.

So that was the reason why it was postponed.

In fact, we got to the point where Stanley had to say yes or no to shoot the film.

Suddenly, Anya, his middle daughter, got pregnant.

And I said to Phil Hobbs, who I was with, "That's the end of this film,"

because Stanley would go nowhere without Christiane.

Christiane would stay with Anya.

So I said, "We ain't going to do this film. We know we're not."

But what put it over the edge, ironically, is that Jurassic Park came out.

With Jurassic Park, Stanley Kubrick saw how technology had advanced,

and he said, "Well, I think I'm going to do AI instead."

[VO] Ultimately, Kubrick turned Al over to Steven Spielberg,

focusing his own energies on Eyes Wide Shut.

It was during the final stages of post production on that film

that Stanley Kubrick died, on March 7th, 1999.

♪♪ [orchestral waltz]

In his passing, cinema lost one of its greatest artists

and with him, the films he might have made.

♪♪ [orchestral waltz]