Scorsese on Kubrick
When Eyes Wide Shut came out, a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (exc (excep eptt the the earl earlie iest st ones ones), ), you’ you’ll ll see see that that all all his his film filmss were were init initia iall lly y misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since. If Kubrick had lived to see the opening of his final film, he obviously obviously would have been disappointed disappointed by the hostile reactions. But I’m sure that in the end he would have taken it with a grain of salt and moved on. That’s the lot of all true visionaries, who don’t see the use of working in the same vein as everyone everyone else. Artists Artists like Kubrick Kubrick have minds expansiv expansivee and dynamic dynamic enough to picture the world in motion, to comprehend not just where its been, but where it’s it’s going. Take Eyes Wide Shut. Many people were put off by the film’s unreality – the New York streets were too big, the orgy scene was a total fantasy, the action was slow and deliberate. All of this is true, and if the movie were designed to be realistic, it would be absolutely reasonable to judge these as failings. But Eyes Wide Shut is based on a Schnitzler novella called Dream Story, the story of a rift in a marriage told with the logic of a dream. And as with with all all drea dreams ms,, you you neve neverr know know prec precis isel ely y when when you’ you’ve ve ente entere red d it. it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it’s impossible to escape. Audiences really had no prepa preparat ration ion for a dream dream movi moviee that that didn didn’t ’t anno announ unce ce itsel itselff as such, such, with withou outt the the usua usuall sign signal alss- hove hoveri ring ng mist mists, s, peop people le appe appear arin ing g and and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, another film severely misunderstood in its time, Eyes Wide Shut takes a couple on a harrowing journey, journey, at the end of which they’re left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And And they both end tentatively, tentatively, yet hopefully hopefully.. Honestly. Honestly. Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high? There are emotional passages and images and spaces in his films that have an inexplicable inexplicable power, with a magnetic force that draws you in slowly, mysteriously: mysteriously: the boy’s rides on his Big Wheel through the endless corridors of the hotel in The Shining; the monumental silence of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the inhuman pace of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, building up to its logical, murderous conclusion; the grandeur of the war room in Dr.
Strangelove, at once scary and comical; the brutal pop future of A Clockwork Orange; the raw intimacy of the exchanges between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favourite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn’t get it when it came out. Many still don’t. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you’re watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness – and it’s all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It’s a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it’s real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society. Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had, and this final edition of Michel Ciment’s definitive book is an invaluable resource. Personally speaking, I’ve watched and studied Kubrick’s work repeatedly over the years. He was unique in the sense that with each new film he redefined the medium and its possibilities. But he was more than just a technical innovator. Like all visionaries, he spoke the truth. And no matter how comfortable we think we are with the truth, it always comes as a profound shock when we’re forced to meet it face-to-face. - Martin Scorsese, June 2001 (Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Michel Ciment)
Scorsese on Full Metal Jacket
When Full Metal Jacket was first released, many viewers and critics were thrown off by the unusual structure. They wondered why director Stanley Kubrick had split the action in half — the gruelling and relentlessly-paced basic training scenes on Parris Island, and the more leisurely but ultimately devastating tour in Vietnam for Matthew Modine's Private Joker and his friends. But then, it's often taken about a decade for people to catch up with Kubrick. Neither 2001: A Space Odyssey nor Barry Lyndon nor The Shining were greeted with approval when they first appeared, and Eyes Wide Shut is still misunderstood. What's interesting in Full Metal Jacket, which Kubrick and the great writer Michael Herr (the author of Dispatches) adapted quite faithfully from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (along with Hasford himself), is the way that the two halves seem so different, and the manner in which they
finally converge: two different roads to eruptions of terrible violence. As in all Kubrick films, there is a profound sense of mystery at the core, but he's also exposing a deeply disturbing truth. The shaving of the young men's heads, the physical and psychological punishment of their training, the terrible humiliation perpetrated on Vincent D'Onofrio's Private Pyle, the horribly obscene language spouted by every single character, the callous attitude toward the dead and the dying, the ultimate horror of the battlefield….it's all violent, from start to finish, and you're left wondering to what degree war is embedded in our DNA. And, as always with Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket is a physically powerful experience. Once you've seen it a couple of times, every cut, every movement, every vista of the devastated city of Hue (recreated in an abandoned London gasworks) becomes indelible. -Martin Scorsese, December 2006
Scorsese on The Shining
When Stanley Kubrick set out to make a horror film, we were already terrified. Kubrick's films are terrifying enough as it is. What would he come up with? We saw the trailer, a single image of an elevator from which a torrent of blood slowly spilled and blanketed the screen...and the terror mounted. And, of course, as always with Kubrick, when the film finally came out, it was like no horror film ever made. Really, it almost didn't belong to the horror genre; it was like nothing we'd ever seen. But of course, that was Kubrick's genius: He created movies that were essentially unclassifiable, endlessly provocative and profoundly disturbing. And no matter how many times you see them, they remain disturbing. Of course, many horror fans were put off by The Shining, and I don't believe that Stephen King, the author of the novel on which it was based, was ever very happy with the movie. Kubrick and his co-writer, the novelist Diane Johnson, kept many elements from King's novel, but they wrote their own work, turning to Freud's The Uncanny and Bruno Bettelheim's book about fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, for inspiration. In their film, the horror came from within the family — the violent father (Jack Nicholson) suffering from writer's block and having a hard time staying on the wagon, the mousy mother (Shelley Duvall) trying to believe that everything is okay for as long as she can and the quiet son (Danny Lloyd) with an extrasensory gift called "shining" that allows him to see terrors past and future. They're all cooped up in an enormous luxury hotel in Colorado that's been shut down for the season and where they've agreed to stay for the winter as caretakers. The halls and corridors seem to extend to infinity, like the shots of
interstellar travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the sense of space itself is terrifying, particularly in those justifiably famous Steadicam shots following Danny as he careens down the corridors on his Big Wheel. In The Shining, Kubrick made potent use of ambiguity. You never really know what's happening: Is the father hallucinating or is he the reincarnation of a murderer from an earlier era? Are there real ghosts in the hotel or are they imagined by the traumatized son? Is the son sensing the horrors that will be committed by his father or just projecting them onto him? Few movies create such a powerful feeling of unease. I love the score for this picture, put together by Kubrick from a variety of pieces by Ligeti, Bartók and Penderecki (it's clear that the music inspired Johnny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood). I also love the visions —the maze, the elevator, Nicholson bouncing a rubber ball across the vast expanses of the hotel lobby to kill time, the enormous golden ballroom, the red Formica bathroom in which Nicholson "meets" the butler. And, perhaps most frightening of all, the vision of an ordinary American family, beautifully acted, who've wandered into deep psychic waters. Kubrick was a giant and I keep going back to most of his pictures, The Shining included. - Martin Scorsese, 2008 http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id93.html
