"Stanley Kubrick" by Donald Clarke (The Irish Times)
A few years ago, I got to meet the distinguished production designer Sir Ken Adam. Though most often identified as the man behind all those underground lairs in early James Bond films, Adam would acknowledge that his most delicious creations were dreamed up for Stanley Kubrick. The work was, however, far from easy. Indeed, the experience of designing the war room for Dr Strangelove proved so traumatising that he swore never again to sign on the director’s dotted line.
“I was very good friends with Stanley,” Adam told me. “But when I first met him I thought him rather naïve. Nobody could say: ‘This couldn’t be done.’ They would have been fired immediately.”
Adam duly resisted all entreaties to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, when Barry Lyndon came along, gave in and agreed to (quite literally) go back to the drawing board. He won an Oscar, but nearly lost his mind.
“Oh yes, I had a terrible mental breakdown,” he said. “We were working these incredibly long hours. And there was the closeness to Stanley, who was so completely disorganised. We didn’t have a script as such. He had just Xeroxed pages from Thackery’s novel.”
Who’d put up with Stanley Kubrick?
Well, Warner Brothers for a start. For 30 years – from the icy 2001: A Space Odyssey to the vulgar Eyes Wide Shut – the American studio never faltered in its commitment to indulge Stanley’s every whim. Years went by during the production of 2001 and, when the film was eventually released, it received poor notices and (before its reinvention as a midnight movie) modest box-office returns. Undaunted, they allowed him to make the nasty A Clockwork Orange and, apparently unmoved by the director’s decision to withdraw that film from distribution, bankrolled the conspicuously leisurely Barry Lyndon. Even that commercial disaster didn’t cause Warners to flinch. The money kept coming.
The truth was that, for all Time Warner’s rapaciousness, they quite liked the idea of having their own pet genius. Just as medieval princes used to keep court painters on a retainer, the studios sometimes indulge a supposedly highbrow director in the expectation that he will lend a bit of class to their operation. “We don’t really understand what he does,” they might say. “But what ordinary mortal can hope to grasp the working practices of a genius.”
Is there any other director whose work could inspire an exhibition such as this? Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps. Orson Welles’s films were too often compromised by the chaotic nature of their production. You could find artists who would enjoy addressing the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Renoir or Jean-Luc Godard, but good luck trying to draw audiences towards the gallery.
No. Stanley Kubrick has somehow become the first face we see when we imagine a cinematic genius. Despite the catastrophe that was Eyes Wide Shut – a film made for people who think having a bidet makes you sophisticated – internet forums still bandy the g-word around whenever Mr Kubrick’s name is mentioned. Genius is an annihilating word. Go up against somebody so identified and, it is suggested, you go up against Newton, Goethe, Leonardo, Shakespeare and all the other people in the same distinguished club. You’d better have your arguments sharpened.
None of which is to suggest that Ken Adam was wrong to risk his sanity or that Warners should have pulled the plug or that this exhibition should really be about Alfred Hitchcock. One signifier of genius in cinema may be the ability to produce a flow of images, any one of which, if viewed in isolation, carries the unmistakable signature of its creator. Kubrick had that talent. When he came to make Barry Lyndon – a near-perfect hymn to the beauty of stasis – it seemed inconceivable that the Kubrick of A Clockwork Orange and 2001 would survive the journey to 18th century Ireland. Yet the film seemed more spookily alien than anything in those two futuristic fantasies. Any three seconds looks like three seconds of Kubrick.
Those who care about this genius nonsense and think Kubrick a lesser being than Newton (and Goethe and Leonardo and so on) might point out that, for all the big themes, there is no nuanced thinking in the films. True enough. But these are the sorts of masterpieces you’d expect to emerge from the psyche of someone who, like Kubrick, was both a stills photographer a superb chess player. The images have a precision and a logic that could drive you crazy if you allowed them to tarry too long. Ask Sir Ken (still with us at 88). He only just escaped with his mind intact.
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