Kubrick: The Making of a Genius

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1:33Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:07Anyways, let's get to it.

2:17Today, we're exploring the genius and the mystery of one of cinema's most iconic directors with Nathan Abrams and Robert Kolker, authors of Kubrick and Odyssey. Their book takes a deep dive into Stanley Kubrick's career, from his groundbreaking films to his meticulous creative process. We'll discuss the themes that define Kubrick's work, the personal stories behind his perfectionism, and how his films continue to shape modern cinema. Whether you're a lifelong fan or new to Kubrick's world, this conversation will give you a whole new appreciation for his work.

2:59Well, joining me now on Open Book, a real treat for me is Nathan Abrams and Robert Kolker. Both of these gentlemen are professors. Nathan Abrams, a professor in film at Bangor University, and Professor Robert Kolker, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. I think it's the Terrapins, right? Go Terrapins, right? But the book is called Kubrick, an odyssey. And this is one of the reasons why I tell all my viewers and listeners, you got to go to bookstores because you got to see what's in the shelves. And there I saw the Kubrick and Odyssey. I said, oh, wow, okay, I got to buy this. My son and I are big friends of Stanley Kubrick.

3:39And the book is literally incredible. It's a great rendition of a lot of things that happened in the film industry over the last 50 years. But in addition to that, you guys are great writers. So I enjoyed it a lot. Why don't we start with you, Bob? It's great to have you on, Nathan as well. What a book. Why? Why did you guys decide to write the book? Tell us a little bit about your friendship or business relationship. Relationship with Nathan goes back a few years. We had already collaborated on a making of Eyes Wide Shut that was published, what, five years ago, something like that. And we were in constant contact.

4:19In fact, we're both fanatic Kubrick fans and more than fans deeply involved in trying to figure out what Kubrick is about and what his work is about. I had been interested in starting a biography in the early 90s, but there was no way to get into the archives, not to mention to speak to Kubrick himself. He was busy and he was keeping everything close to the vest. By the time Nathan and I really got going in thinking about the biography, the archives had opened to the public at the London School of the Arts. And Nathan had gone through them practically beginning to end. And we also spoke to Jan Harlan, who is Kubrick's brother-in-law and was his producer on all the films since The Shining.

5:31And he was very helpful to us. And the things just began coming together. You know, this long quest on my part of 10, 20 years of wanting to do this and Nathan's great facility at research and putting things together. The book emerged and it emerged fairly quickly in about two years. We were lucky to get Faber and Faber as publishers in England and luckier still to get Pegasus to publish in the U.S. So there are two versions of the same book available depending upon where you are. So Nathan, you did, obviously you both did, but you did a tremendous amount of research on this, but there was new information that you had access to that you referenced.

6:28So tell us about the new information that enabled you to put this full life narrative together of Stanley Kubrick. Certainly. I mean, just one correction, not to think that we've just been working on this for two years. Bob and I have been studying and teaching Kubrick for decades combined. The new information. Well, there's this archive at the University of Arts London that Bob mentioned that's just jam packed with boxes. Kubrick kept everything pretty much. And that isn't just the stuff related to the filmmaking and the films he made and the films he didn't make. There's all the sort of trivia, the miscellaneous of everyday life, you know, bills for alarms, receipts, that kind of thing.

7:02And this stretches back to the 40s, mid-40s. So, you know, I mean, some examples, he was a camp photographer for a Jewish summer camp in, what, 1944. And he kept the newspaper in which he was the photographer. And it's just little things like that that gave us a window into his world and a bit more understanding of the person. And it's interesting that he decided that was worth keeping, either because he was a hoarder or because he valued that particular item. But as we went through, there's all kinds of stuff that came across. Well, as a fellow hoarder, I have appreciation and fondness for hoarding.

7:34So, you know, I mean, he grows up in the Bronx. He has a comfortable Jewish upbringing. His father's a local doctor. He's close to his mom. He buys a camera at a young age. He's absolutely fascinated with the art of filmmaking. But he struggles in school. So he doesn't fit the mold. But one of the things that Kubrick says, you guys referenced it in the book, if you want to learn how to make a film is make a film. So he goes right into filmmaking, right? It's pretty amazing, right? He was a terrible adult. And his parents even sent him off to California for a year with relatives to see if a change in scenery would help.

8:14It didn't. And he just made it out of high school. and most of the time he spent watching films and taking pictures in this early stage of his life. And even at a young age, kept repeating that he could make better films than what he saw at the local theater or at MoMA. But he, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but he was an autologidact basically. He was doing this on his own. He was almost like he had a block of granite, and he was chiseling into the granite his artistic creation, it being his filmmaking. And because of this, I think he has his own personal fingerprint of filmmaking. You know, you guys teach film.

9:04I'm more of an observer of film. But I don't think there's anything like a Kubrick film. So let's say I landed from Mars. I'd like you each to answer this, if you don't mind. I come off the spacecraft and I say, OK, why is Stanley Kubrick so different than these other directors? Why are his films so unique? And you could watch them five or six times and still see things in them that you may have missed the first time. Just to add to what you said before, Anthony, is that there was a lot of chutzpah involved in Kubrick's film. And just, you know what, he was watching these films the whole time.

9:36And then he was saying, you know, I can make a film as good or as bad as this. So I might as well give it a go. And that's exactly what he did. I mean, I've got two points that I think make Kubrick's films stand out and survive. And one is most of them, at least the mature ones, have some kind of technical innovation where he pushes a technology, either invents it, like shooting in natural light using that NASA lens for Barry Lyndon is one example. He might not have invented the Steadicam on The Shining, but the way he used it really developed how one might use a Steadicam on a film set. So each of his films has some kind of innovation.

10:09But the other thing is Kubrick did this legendarily pre-production research. He really immersed himself into a topic and became an expert, whether it was nuclear warfare or Napoleon and the other topics. And because of that, his films contain ideas and the amount of text he read around. So when he made The Shining, he was reading Freud and Bruno Bettelheim, as well as Gothic literature, as well as Stephen King. And right, while there might not be direct references to those authors, apart from King, obviously, in the movies, the ideas stay. And I think as you watch them and re-watch them over the years and as your life changes and as we teach them to new generations of students, different ideas from our backgrounds emerge.

10:48And I think that's what distinguishes, those two things are what distinguish a Kubrick film. There's also a tremendous passion in his films. They're always being blamed as being cold, but they're not cold. They are perfect. And the perfection sort of encloses this deeply felt emotion, even if it's emotions of dread, like in The Shining, or of loss, as in The Killing, or Eyes Wide Shot and Full Metal Jacket. Still, they reach out in ways that other films don't. And in that reaching out, they take you by your mind and by your heart in ways that ordinary films don't do. you know i i mean i was always fascinated by his his work if you had to identify one film you say okay i'm gonna i'm this is the number not not in the order chronologically but the one film you say okay this is quintessentially kubrick this this has everything in it what would that be robert for me it would be barry linden barry linden yep nathan dr strange love interesting Interesting.

12:11Okay. So, I mean, and again, for my viewers and listeners, Barry Lyndon is a contemporary, it's a piece that it's a, how do you say it in your world, but it takes place, I guess, in the mid 18th century, right? Is that correct? And Dr. Strangelove is a parody a bit, right? I mean, it's about the nuclear holocaust, the potential annihilation. Peter Sellers is a star in that movie and he's capturing what exactly? Let me ask you, Robert, what does he capturing in Barry Lyndon that you'd want your students or film buffs to understand? How you make a costume drama that is really about the moment and how you go about seeing the past cinematically and using all the technological possibilities to make that past immediate.

13:03Most famously in Barry Lyndon, lighting interiors by candlelight without any artificial intervention, any artificial light intervention. Using the zoom lens, which is a very modern invention, but using it in a way to comment upon the characters and their environment. And also deeply feeling it's his most sentimental film. And it's a sentiment about loss and about the past and about not belonging and imminent disappearing. Barry just disappears from the film. The narrator says we have nothing more to say about him. Yeah, it's fascinating. And Dr. Strangelove? Well, Dr. Strangelove really spoke to the period in which it was made.

13:57You know, it's the early 60s, the new left is revising the sort of orthodox views of the Cold War and the counterculture is rising. And you've got you've got novels like Catch-22. And Kubrick makes a film that speaks to the times. Not only is nuclear, potential nuclear holocaust on people's minds after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he decides he can't make a serious film. He says the only way to treat this topic so serious is by treating it as a black comedy. and it's one of those films where you know you start to watch it and even though you know all the lines that are coming you just can't help but be absorbed yeah in in the zingers that keep coming at you and you think of peter seller's improvisations on the telephone you actually forget that he's not talking to someone you know it's um there's the look on um the mark um the disarsky's face when when peter said as dr strange stuff is choking himself like a naughty schoolboy trying not to laugh and then like i said behind the film there's the he recreated a B-52 bombers interior so accurately, especially the CRM 114, that the US Air Force was scared that the secrets had leaked.

15:00And there's just so much detail in there, so many ideas, the amount of reading he did around it that you can see in the film. So it brings together everything that I said in my last response about technical innovation and ideas, but with a fantastic sense of humor. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs.

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15:42Raise the rudders! Raise the sails! Raise the sails! Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. I'm going to add one for you guys, which I'm sure is also another one of your favorites, is 2001 Space Odyssey because you watch the movie.

16:18He's predicting the future. Sure. It's our it's the story of our lives unfolding for us. The last 55 years, you know, since the film came out or 56 years. And of course, the the very famous artificially intelligent computer, which is named Hal, which is a little bit of a joke there, right? Because it was IBM, but he took the I and he moved it to the H and he took the B and moved it to the A. And he had all of these little things that he was doing from an artistic point of view to get film buffs like two of you and an amateur film buff like me excited to see what he was doing in the film and how to unpack it from his brain.

16:58But talk for a moment, both of you, if you don't mind, about 2001 Space Odyssey, because, man, did he get so many things right about where we are today, even, and what we fear, what we fear today. I think 2001 is sort of outside of competition, which is why I don't name it as my favorite. It is the great Kubrick film. Is it his opus? Would you say that, Robert? I would say that none of the other films have as intense imagination and innovation and prophecy as 2001. Nathan may disagree but it's a film that keeps speaking to us Strangelove does the same thing I mean it does in terms of history it doesn't get old it's always the same world with different characters playing the same deadly games 2001 is the result of just intense work of many, many people.

18:08I mean, one of the things that we try to point out is that Kubrick was the master of a huge army of doers and thinkers, of scientists and sculptors and sketch artists and model makers. And we can't forget Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, who was a tremendous influence. in fact was the catalyst for the film. Nathan, what do you think? Well, for me, I mean, adding to everything that Bob said and then all the technical innovation in the movie, front projection and the fact that, you know, he filmed the Dawn of Man in Namibia and then, but he shot the apes in a studio and you wouldn't know, like even when you got on a big screen, you can't see the joint and this is in the mid 60s.

18:57But what I really like is you can see Kubrick's sense of humor in the film. So the monolith appears, looks like the two tablets of stone or at least one of them, but with no writing on them, like Ten Commandments with no commandments. But where do we see the Ten Commandments? On the toilet door of the zero-gravity bathroom. And there's just so many moments like he invents this supercomputer, but he gives them a really banal name, Hal. You imagine these days, they wouldn't call any computer Hal. It would have some amazing supercomputer 3000. And when they're on the moon ship and they just want a sandwich and they keep saying ham, ham, ham, It's like these banal moments, but also very funny moments in a movie that, unlike Dr.

19:35Strangelove, wasn't directly speaking to its times explicitly in the way that Dr. Strangelove was. But yet, you know, so clearly was speaking to what was happening in the United States and abroad in 1968 and during the Vietnam War. And where are we going as a species? And is violence what motivates evolution as one of the key questions in the film? And I think the beauty of that film is we still debate what it means now, as well as admire its craft. There's a wonderful disconnect in the film between the absolute banality of the human figures and the absolute wonder of their surroundings, both in the universe and in the equipment that they use.

20:19And Hal himself, who refers to himself as a conscious entity and who has the knowledge of what they're about to do before they do. So it's a sort of play of human passivity against technological progress. Listen, I mean, you know, to me, I love the fact that you guys have put this book out there because we don't make films like this anymore. We don't craft them this way. I'm sure someone will come along that does this. Scorsese has a certain style. De Palma has a certain style. But when you look at them, even Spike Lee, they all went to film school. And so they've got certain things that they're doing.

21:06I don't want to say it's box checking because they're all brilliant directors, but it's different from Kubrick. Kubrick is coming at the filmmaking. It's almost as if the lack of influence from teaching, It's almost as if his lack of being a good student professors aided and abetted his filmmaking. I don't know. Does that make sense to you? When I read your book, that's what comes across to me, that he couldn't probably sit in your class. So he had to do it himself. And it created all of this great innovation. What did I miss? They're homemade films. Homemade films. Exactly right. The other thing is he didn't like theory.

21:42I mean, he read maybe one book of film theory in his life, the book on editing by Podovkin. And that was about it. And he mocked the French theorists and people like us who come along and read meanings into his films. He didn't care for that. So in a way, he wasn't scarred or ruined by academic film studies that made everything into a sort of, like you say, Anthony, a tick box exercise. And the other thing about him is a lot of it was trial and error. He didn't think it all through beforehand in the way that Hitchcock did. So he made mistakes and he learned and sometimes didn't learn from those mistakes.

22:15whereas you know the later directors can learn from the mistakes of others whereas Kubrick had to make them along the way and learn the hard way where I think the way other directors didn't. So I I'm a film buff I've not really you know I've only been in one movie in my life I was in Wall Street 2 Oliver Stone let me play myself this is 2009 in Wall Street 2 and I got fairly close to Oliver I still see him for dinner and so forth and at one of the dinners he said that the director that had the best visual wit, the best visual wit was Stanley Kubrick. Okay. And, and I want you to describe what visual wit is, if you don't mind.

22:56And then if you can give us some examples of what it means to have visual wit and examples in his work. And by the way, do you agree with that? By the way, do you agree with Oliver Stone? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I would take Take an example from The Shining, where the sequence in which Jack is staring at the model of the labyrinth, and zoom down and you see the little figures moving around. And then he plays handball against the floor of the hotel. And on the soundtrack is a very particular piece of classical music, Bella Bartok's Concerto for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste. and at exactly the point where there is a percussive sound on the music, Jack hurls his ball down on the floor of the hotel.

24:01So there's this double bang, the bang of the music and the bang of the ball on the floor. And it's just a wonderful idea, a witty idea. And his films are full of those. Anything you want to add, Nathan? I'll give you one tiny example, a sort of blink and you miss it moment in Eyes Wide Shut. So Tom Cruise, as Bill, is meeting the sex worker Domino. And as the camera tracks him around the corner, they stand in front of a bakery. And it's called Joseph Kreibich's Bakery. And it's an exact replica of Jonas Schimmel's on the Lower East Side, which for some reason we don't know why put in there. And this is right bang in the middle of Greenwich Village.

24:38So it's anachronistic. But that aside, it's a conichery. And we're like, well, why has Kubrick stuck this conichery in there? you know and obviously i wrote a book called stanley cooper at new york jewish intellectual where i really wanted to put him in that milieu so i wax lyrical about the reasons for that but for me where the visual wit here is is that what i learned doing that book was that knish is is um a euphemism you know a sex worker might say you're looking for some knish and you know that one little moment if you have the knowledge you get the joke and if not it's just a nice part of the scenery and you can move on but it must have been important to him because he had that set built and recreated either from photographs from some childhood memory because his grandparents lived down the street.

25:17But yeah, it adds layers and textures. To me, it's the most fascinating part of him. You know, I don't know if you guys remember when the Beatles put all those little riddles in their albums. You know, there's an artistic expression that Kubrick has. You almost have to be a Kubrick detective to catch that. You know, now I've got to go back and watch that movie and catch that. I missed it, obviously. and even the numbers of the room that you're entering into in The Shining all have different meanings as an example. What would he have worked on? He had an untimely death unfortunately. I guess if I remember correctly he died in right around this time of the year 1999.

25:53It was right after Eyes Wide Shut came out I believe. What would he have done next had he not had such a sudden end to his life well he had two films that he was working on in the 90s um one of them wartime lies which from the novel wartime lies which he called arian papers his holocaust film was very very close to production extremely close to production uh locations were scouted the uh Players were chosen. Everything happened except for two things. One of them was the appearance of Schindler's List, and Kubrick and Warner Brothers were afraid that the two would not be able to do well together.

26:44The other was Kubrick himself feeling depressed over what he had learned And the amount of research, the amount of reading that he had done about the period simply got to him. So the film never got made. The other film that was not as close to production was AI, artificial intelligence. And that was because he couldn't find the perfect CGI computer graphics. He couldn't find the perfect boy who could stay as a sort of mixture of human and robot. and he couldn't get a good script. I'm going to interrupt you there. And so that dwindled away. The problem wasn't the actor. The problem was Kubrick knew he took so long to make a film that if he was going to film a boy, he said, by the time I've finished shooting, he'll have a beard already.

27:37One of the things we discovered from the archive is when he shot Danny and the Shining, he had two pairs of shoes or two pairs of outfits for when he grew because he was aware of how long he took. But he knew Stephen, so they were friends by that point, Stephen Spielberg. He said, look, Stephen can shoot a movie in six months. It won't be an issue. And he didn't want to use CGI because it wasn't good enough to recreate a human. But, you know, if he used a human, he would obviously age during the film, which is why he never made it. Interesting stuff. I mean, anybody out there right now? I'll ask both of you this question.