Listening to Kubrick

A director who was as precise orally as he was in writing: as proof, we offer these excerpts from interviews carried out by Michel Ciment in 1975 (Barry Lyndon), 1980 (The Shining), 1987 (Full Metal Jacket). Listen to Stanley Kubrick!

Tracking the 18th Century (Barry Lyndon)
Kafka at Hotel Overlook (Shining)
Recreating Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket)
Man and His Double (Full Metal Jacket)
"An arrogant, flippant film" (Fear and Desire)
Virtues of Silent Films

Jan Harlan, the executive producer of Stanley Kubrick's films, evokes the filmmaker's fascinating system of order.

"An orderly desk is a sign of a sick mind" is one of those silly observations one embraces in the face of despair. Stanley was a textbook case of a highly organized mind surrounded by chaos. Total concentration on priorities existed next to complete disorder. There were simply too many items he wanted to deal with, and the inability to delegate any of these resulted in a growing mountain of papers, letters, projects, ideas in general which remained untouched and which eventually drifted off into oblivion. [...]

Stanley loved systems, systems for creating order. The very act of designing or acquiring a system – and he tried many without necessarily implementing them – demonstrated his wish for order. It was the first step towards the never achieved goal. Stanley fantasized about systems that would allow him instant access to his notes and papers, to the Great Unfinished Works in which he had invested fleeting thoughts or intense hours. He embraced computers and databases – he had waited all his life for them.

It is very true to say that Stanley was not orderly, but this statement does not do him justice. It is also true that chaos reigned next to utmost precision and order. Physical order was simply too slow to catch up with him. We met regularly for almost three decades to address "things to be done" and to define priorities. "Shovelling shit" was what he called the process and it was usually great fun to work with Stanley also in this capacity, even if the result may have added to the mountain instead of making it smaller. But on many occasions, if things did not go well, he stopped with" I've got to do some work now." [...]

The prevailing system used was simply open boxes, hundreds of them, on shelves and tables. He labelled them by hand, writing on the box. "To be done", "read", "urgent", "dogs", "file", "shred", "script", "WB", "financial", "discuss with..." (followed by names or initials), and so on. The same system, often with the same labels, was repeated in other rooms. In 1980, the family moved into a large house with seemingly endless space. A dream had come true and Stanley thought he finally had more space than he could possibly fill. He purchased 140 cabinets from Ikea, bookshelves and dozens of tables and other office furniture. Ten years later every room and every surface was full again and we had to get "Portakabins" for outside storage. Stanley's wife Christiane put it very well when she said: "In this" house we do not look for needles, we look for haystacks".

Jan Harlan