The only actor to get an apology from Stanley Kubrick: “He felt really terrible”
Many great geniuses are notoriously hard to work with – their perfectionism and intense drive for success cloud their vision and prevent them from taking the wants and needs of others into consideration. Throughout cinema history, countless filmmakers have been labelled as difficult, and it’s not surprising why. When everything needs to be just right, you can’t simply appease people so that you don’t hurt their feelings when lots of money and public opinion is at stake. Stanley Kubrick came to be known as quite the controversial director, standing as one of the most meticulous filmmakers of his generation.
This approach evidently worked for him, with Kubrick’s oeuvre embodying a career of cinematic innovation, boundary-pushing ideas, and bold and ambitious stylistic and thematic choices. From the era-defining 2001: A Space Odyssey to his damning Eyes Wide Shut, he was a fearless filmmaker who truly paved the way for every director who came after him.
Yet, to achieve such greatness, he dragged a few people down on his quest for success. Most notably, his direction of Shelley Duvall in The Shining, his iconic Stephen King adaptation, earned widespread backlash. Once a widely-seen Hollywood star, after The Shining, Duvall’s time in the spotlight was much less frequent, and she found it hard to recover from the emotional turmoil the movie put her through.
She told The Hollywood Reporter about the demanding takes that Kubrick required of her, explaining that “After a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry.”
Kubrick never apologised to Duvall, even when she was widely panned for her performance. However, there was one actor who was lucky enough to receive a sincere apology from the director. In fact, he found working with the filmmaker a completely different – and positive – experience compared to Duvall.
The actor and filmmaker Tony Spiridakis was meant to be in Kubrick’s brutal anti-war film Full Metal Jacket, but he was eventually cut, yet that didn’t stop him from praising the director. Spiridakis revealed, “He called me and said there was a 50 per cent chance I would be out of the film, and he was very sorry. That’s how he did it—he didn’t let me go to the movie and find out. I really appreciated it.”
So, while he was not lucky enough to be in the film, he found that Kubrick treated him with complete respect – something that various other actors could not relate to. “A friend of mine is friendly with his daughter, and Vivian said how much her dad hated cutting me out and that he adored me. I adored him. He knew how hard it was for me to get cut out and he felt really terrible. I have a soft spot in my heart even though it devastated me. What happened was unavoidable and he was a complete gentleman. He showed that we had a connection. I couldn’t have asked to be treated better than that,” Spiridakis concluded.
