AMAZING UNEARTHED 1987 AUDIO INTERVIEW W/KUBRICK BY TIM CAHILL!

This is pretty much the Holy Grail of Kubrick interviews. Definitely the latest in-depth audio interview we have from Stanley. The interview was run in the print version of Rolling Stone Magazine in the run-up to the release of Full Metal Jacket. THANKS, to TheKubrickSeries.com!

KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ FEB 25, 2017

How awesome do NASA's new tailored Starliner astronaut suits look, right?! Designed by Boeing, to be worn by astronauts going to and from the International Space Station on their new Starliner transport ship beginning in 2018, i09 wasn't kidding around when they said the suits were "straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey"! And they're not just stylish... they'll keep you alive! New features include an upgraded helmet, which is incorporated into the spacesuit, touchscreen-sensitive gloves, and built-in ventilation. Think they'll come in a size XXXXXXL?

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Feast your eyes on this custom drum kit based on the carpet patterns in The Shining!

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If any of you Kubrick fanatics out there have some spare change burning a hole in your pockets, the man's French vacation house in the Dordogne valley, about five hours south of Paris, has been put up for sale at an eminently reasonable $1.6 million. Photos and other details are available at the link. If you're reading this and you do end up buying it, kindly invite me over, as I speak the language and am a pretty decent cook, and I've been told I'm not too bad of a conversationalist, to boot!

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Last month, Michael Moorcock--another man whose work I greatly admire--wrote an intriguing essay about Kubrick's relationship with Arthur C. Clark for the New Statesman. Entitled "The Odd Couple of Science Fiction", the piece gained some notoriety on social media over a passing mention about Clark being "brought to tears" at the film's premiere over some of the changes Kubrick had made to the story without telling him. Of course, in context, this betrayal comes across as a lot less dramatic than the online click-hunters would have us believe. Anyway, it's a great remembrance that every fan of both Clark and Kubrick owes it to themselves to read. It's full of great insights and interesting moments, and Moorcock even addresses the sordid rumors about Clark's sexual proclivities in as decisive and definitive a manner possible at this late (i.e. posthumous) date. There is one moment that Moorcock relates that I'd like to share with you all, and it comes from the essay's conclusion:

I have one other memory of that visit to the 2001 set. After being given a tour of the studio by the MGM publicist, I was led towards Kubrick's office just as the director entered the main building. I prepared to meet the man who had contacted me a year or so earlier. I had many questions. Perhaps he would confirm some of my guesses.
Kubrick's eyes went straight to me and did not leave me as he spoke brusquely to the publicist.
"Get these people off the set," he said.
We were never face to face again.

Not very flattering to Stanley, for sure, but the authenticity of this account gives credence to everything that comes before.

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A short film, entitled Kubrick by Candlelight, aims to recreate the filming of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon in Ireland. Here's the film's Kickstarter, where you can learn more about the project. In this interview with the Irish Film and Television Network, director David O'Reilly--whose day job involves location scouting for such A-list projects as Star Wars: Rogue One--discusses all of the complexities and challenges of filming the project in the Irish midlands, as well as the lengths he and his crew went in order to be as true as possible to the source material. Finally, though there isn't much here of interest to Kubrick fans, here's a video of cast member Al Foran having fun impersonating various celebrities while in full costume and makeup:

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In this interview with the UK Independent, UNKLE's James Lavelle reminisces about his acclaimed project from last year, Daydreaming with... Stanley Kubrick, which saw more than 60 artists participate in a celebration of Kubrick's work, held at Somerset House. He also discusses his latest venture, Daydreaming with UNKLE presents... THE ROAD: SOHO. It looks pretty interesting. All my UK peeps, go check it out!

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Okay, so I've finally seen Passengers, Morten Tyldum's morally problematic deep space romance flick, and I have to say, I kinda dug it. And not because of the much ballyhoo'd Kubrick references, which, to be honest, pretty much boiled down to just the somewhat ghostly robot bartender in the vast ship's Shining-like ballroom bar. In this interview with Deadline Hollywood, however, Passengers sound editor Will Files explains how Kubrick inspired both he and the director:

I’m a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, and as it turns out, Morten is also a big fan. I’ve always liked the way Kubrick uses sound, as well as the image. He tends to have a sparse soundtrack—they tend to not be very cluttered— so we really wanted to try to use that, not maybe as a point of reference for how the actual sounds would sound, but in terms of the approach to the sound, keeping it elegant in its simplicity. We wanted everything to sound effortless, and like it was really there. A real sense of reality. As opposed to a film like Star Wars, which is all about being stylized for the point of having fun, this movie was all about being stylized for the point of giving the audience a certain feeling about this ship. We wanted this ship to really have a character.

So there you go. Personally, I thought Passengers was a somewhat intriguing story surrounded by an absolutely fantastic sensory spectacle, making it a very fitting second half of a double feature movie night alongside Prometheus. You can use the former to come down from the grisly exhaustion brought on by the latter, and also pretend that they take place in the same fictional universe!

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Here's a great video of Kubrick nut Peter Jackson telling the story about how fellow Kubrick fanatic Adam Savage helped him to understand just exactly how awesome his HAL-9000 prop from 2001 really was. This Nerdist article goes into a bit more detail.

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Guess which films take the Number One and Number Two spots on this Cheat Sheet list of authors who hated the movies made from their books? I'll give you two hints: One didn't like the fact that the last chapter was left out of the movie, and the other has been whining about it to whoever will listen for the better part of

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In this Telegraph UK account, Andrew Birkin describes going from being Stanley Kubrick's teaboy to being one his most trusted assistants. 

Kubrick had a horror of flying, so 2001 was made at MGM studios in Borehamwood. I was 19 when I started work as a runner. I was soon barred from the set because I got so distracted: the production office would send me to get 20 boxes of envelopes from the store and I would pass the set and be totally mesmerised and not come back for hours.

One night, Kubrick was having a meeting about the Dawn of Man sequence and I was on hand to supply cups of tea. Kubrick said, ‘Gee, fellas, I can’t believe there isn’t a desert in England.’ The art department said there wasn’t, but I said, ‘I know where there’s one.’
And Kubrick said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m the tea boy; here’s your cup of tea, sir.’ I vaguely remembered seeing a picture of Formby Sands in an old geography book. The next day they sent me off to photograph it with a Polaroid. 

Unfortunately the picture in the book had been taken 40 years earlier when it was all sand and no trees – but if you ducked down low enough and avoided the nuclear reactor in one direction and the high-rise flats in another, it could still arguably look like a desert. 

Somebody told me to bump up the photos with production ideas, so I stayed up all night in a Liverpool hotel, then caught the milk train back to the studio, put the lot on Kubrick’s desk – and then dashed back up to Liverpool because I wanted it to look like a miracle.

And indeed at 11am I got a phone call: ‘Come back to the studio – we’re getting you a union ticket [almost impossible to get at that time], and Stanley has doubled your pay.’ I arrived back and was summoned into the conference room. 

There were the art department, looking sheepish, and Kubrick, who was really enjoying himself. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Andrew? Is that your name?’ Then he asked the art department why they’d spent £40,000 and many months looking for a desert when the tea boy had come up with one in 24 hours at a total cost of £10, six shillings and eight pence.

Birkin went on to a very successful, Kubrick-influenced career as a producer, writer and sometime director. Among his films, the most Kubrickean are The Burning Secret and Cement Garden, both of which he directed, and Perfume, which he co-wrote.  Kubrick had expressed interest in filming both The Burning Secret, based on a story by Stefan Zweig, and Perfume, based on the novel by Patrick Suskind.

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Speaking of long lost Kubrick stuff, Cinephilia And Beyond brings us an interview with Kubrick from 1980, conducted by Vincente Molina Foix, and reprinted for the first time ever in that must-have Taschen tome, The Kubrick Archives. Purchase from the link!

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Goddamnit, here's yet another book I'm going to have to pick up, read, and write a review for: Kubrick's Game, which the linked i09.com review compares favorably to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Ernie Cline's Ready Player One. Compounding my misery over this is the fact that I, myself, have long wanted to tackle such a project. Thanks, procrastination--and also, most likely, a lack of the necessary talent and know-how--for ruining yet another life goal.

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In this Cumberland Pennsylvania Sentinel "Senior Moment" op-ed piece, William Parkinson describes the time he and his navy shipmates watched Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for the first time, the year it was released:

The audience was aghast. Moviegoers packing the theater at the U.S. Naval Facilities in Yokosuka, Japan, were literally stunned as Peter Sellers, playing the mentally deranged and physically crippled Dr. Strangelove, rose from his wheelchair to proclaim the benefits of global destruction — to the president of the United States — and shouting, “Mein Führer! I can walk!” There followed a cascade of nuclear explosions that blew the world to bits. 

That evening in 1964, the crowd that slowly left the theater was strangely silent; obviously disturbed by what they had witnessed on the screen. They had expected a comedy, of sorts, but coming less than a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the growing concern — and involvement — in the war in Vietnam and increasing sabre rattling by the Soviet Union, the sailors, Marines and their families wandering into that night more than half a century ago had been shaken. 

Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” played differently with a military and naval audience than it did with the critics back in the states or with the hometown movie house crowd. Those of us then in uniform had lived for years with the harshest of realities — that things could vanish in a nuclear instant. Such were the facts of the Cold War.

The rest of it is really great, too, comparing Kubrick's terrifyingly educational satiric take on the the technocratic Powers That Be to today's far more (apparently) chaotic situation, in the hope of finding either some answers, or a direction in which to look for them. The search goes on.

 

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And finally for today's edition of the KNIB's, I present 2001's HAL-9000 and Her's Samantha, having an interesting chat about love, consciousness, and human nature. Enjoy!

Reflections of HAL and Samantha - 2 channel video installation from Tillmann Ohm on Vimeo.

KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ NOV 6, 2016

A blurb from Kubrick (as well as one from Martin Scorsese) appears near the start of this absolutely stunning trailer for the digitally remastered version of Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon. Now, I realize that Kubrick also famously declared the film to be "really terrible" and "a crude motion picture" as far as story goes, but I suspect that might have had more to do with his own pet obsession, still a distinct possibility at the time of his being quoted, of bringing the Great Corsican's life to the screen. I can't imagine any fan of cinema finding the above trailer anything less than astonishingly good. That bit when "La Marseillaise" begins to play... shivers.

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If a review of Kubrick's version of The Shining begins: "Everyone remembers their first Stephen King experience. Mine was hunkering down in a corner of the basement of an empty house, feverishly turning the pages of The Shining", you can be pretty sure that review is going to have a title not unlike "The Shining Has Lost Its Shine - Kubrick Was Slumming in a Genre He Despised". And you can also pretty much guarantee it's going to be utter shit, just like this Guardian retro review by Anne Billson.

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Our next offering is entitled 2001: A Hate Odyssey, but don't worry; unlike the previous entry, above, this one doesn't feature the blinkered opinions of a cinematic philistine cracking her swinish teeth upon the pearls cast before her (Anne Billson can fuck right off). Instead, this essay by author and computational biologist John C. Wathey - written in early September of this year - mixes up a heady cocktail of social observation, historical analysis, religious criticism, and cinematic appreciation. It begins:

On this fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we remember the innocents murdered that day, the courage of police and firefighters, the deliberately shocking brutality of the act, and the wounded lives left in its wake. Osama bin Laden is dead, but Islamist terrorism lives on, the Middle East has descended into seemingly unending war and chaos, and a toxic mix of religion and tribalism fans the flames. We feel the heat even in America, where religious and racial xenophobia fuel the candidacy of an authoritarian demagogue. 

We have plenty to mourn, but this eulogy is for something else that died on 9/11. It may seem trivial at first, especially against the backdrop of the lives lost on that day, but this is a different kind of loss. It was an alternate version of the year 2001, and a piece of our American spirit, of our genius and hope, died with it on 9/11. For me it lives on in a memory of another fifteenth anniversary. 

I was fifteen years old when I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968... 

I realize it's a lot to ask from some of you to read something that was published in The Huffington Post, but why not go ahead and make an exception this one time? It's a really good essay!

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The Cinematheque series entitled This is Going to Hurt - A Cinema of Cruelty has come and gone already, closing its doors at the end of September, but the commercial they put together for it is so beautiful, and features images from so many of my favorite movies - both Kubrick and non - that I wanted to share it here with all of y'all. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

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In an OuterPlaces.com article covering a recent Reddit "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session by special effects legend Colin Cantwell, the following response is quoted:

I had great relationships with everyone. But Stanley kubrick and I became friends. I used to go to his house at midnight and discuss events related to the film over turkey sandwiches. This evolved into a discussion after he had fired his fourth composer. At that time I suggested that he use many of the pieces of music that became part of the movie 2001 Space Odyssey. This includes the now well known theme song.

Is Cantwell really taking credit for Kubrick's decision to abandon Alex North's completed score and go with the temporary tracks instead? If he really is the one who came up with this idea, this is the first I've heard of it.

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Australian psychedelic rock band Tame Impala's new video is visually stunning, thanks to an assist from our man Stan in the form of tons of footage from his most iconic film. Watch it here and see for yourself how it all works out.

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And finally for this update, this Kubrick mini-biography for the Daily Star Weekend website is pretty skimpy and slapdash, but it does have one thing to recommend it... this nifty sketch of our man Stan by artist Yafiz Siddiqui. It was new to me, and I'll wager it was new to you, too!

OBNOXIOUS KUBRICK INTERVIEW VIDEO HOAX

Considering the subject matter that I enjoy writing about in my blogs, the Daily Dirt Diaspora and the Useless Eater -- and taking into account the occasionally outré nature of some of my own speculations regarding elements of Stanley Kubrick's oeuvre -- I suppose it would be hypocritical of me to simply ignore the recent release of a video allegedly shot by "filmmaker T. Patrick Murray" in 1999 and kept hidden from the public until 15 years after Kubrick's death, which purports to contain the legendary auteur's confession to having faked the moon landing(s) at the behest of the United States government.

I do, however, refuse to waste too much of my dwindling time on this most lazy, easily refutable, and contemptible of hoax videos. For, despite the fact that it represents both a symptom and an end result of a certain virulent strain of the affliction known as Kubrick Obsession, and therefore falls under the purview of this blog's rubric, it is a weak effort, lacking in subtlety, and insufficiently innovative, subversive, or formally intriguing to merit much scrutiny.

Beyond the central performer's physical resemblance to Kubrick, this video is, in fact, offensively amateurish, particularly in its first incarnation, with its incredibly annoying habit of constantly cutting away from the interview to present us with random clips from Kubrick films. No wonder its creators have subsequently released numerous "new and improved" edits, in an effort to make their product more palatable to its intended audience: the easily distracted, the lowest common denominators, the vigilant citizens and Alex Jones fanboys of the "conspiritard" crowd. 

And so, if you are more intrigued than I, and as such wish to delve more deeply into this video's creation, its release, the public reaction to it and any other such topics, I suggest you make use of Google and search elsewhere for insights. If you find anything particularly interesting that I might have overlooked, kindly point it out in the comments section of this post.

In the meantime, here is a Youtube version of the interview minus all those annoying clips and interruptions. It gets particularly amusing towards the end, when "T. Patrick Murray" gets so annoyed at his "Stanley" for failing to recall why Apollo 12 was a worse failure than Apollo 13 (because nobody watched it!) that he starts yelling in frustration, at which point a clearly flustered Kubrick grovels a shame-faced apology. And if you need any further evidence than this that the video in question is a hoax... well then you don't know much about Stanley Kubrick.

BRET EASTON ELLIS INTERVIEWS MATTHEW MODINE ABOUT FULL METAL JACKET

Seminal 80's novelist Bret Easton Ellis presents us with a brilliant, incisive, absolutely necessary podcast interview with Matthew Modine, focusing exclusively on the time he spent in England with Stanley Kubrick shooting Full Metal Jacket.

The above is a model sculpt for a Full Metal Jacket project undertaken by model-fiend Peter the Painter.