A deep dive into the unrealised projects of Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick‘s films are considered some of the best of all time, from the mind-bending trip through the cosmos in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the exploration of the depraved sexuality of the upper classes in Eyes Wide Shut, via the story of the 18th Century rogue Barry Lyndon. Yet Kubrick also had several projects that never saw the light of day.
Back in 1956, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had rejected a proposal from Kubrick to produce Paths of Glory. As such, they offered the opportunity for the director to come in and discuss what else the studio had to offer. Kubrick and his producing partner, James B. Harris, found that the studio owned the rights to Stefan Zweig’s novel The Burning Secret. The novel tells of a young baron seducing a Jewish woman by becoming friends with her 12-year-old son. Kubrick asked Calder Willingham to write a screenplay, but the project was shut down by the Hays Code, a set of restrictions surrounding the censorship of film content. The script has since been lost.
Furthermore, following the high praise for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick had a desire to make a biopic of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Reportedly, Kubrick subsequently watched every film that had been made about the famous French military leader but did not particularly like them. After conducting further research, he wrote a screenplay and scouted potential locations for filming, with plans for much of it to take place in France and Romania for the battle scenes. In fact, the Romanian Army had offered 50,000 soldiers to perform in the film.
The film was set for production with David Hemmings to play Napoleon and Audrey Hepburn being preferred for the role of Josephine. Kubrick expected it to be the best film he would ever make. However, it was cancelled because of the cost of filming in the desired locations. The previously Napoleon biopics had also been commercial failures. The upshot was that much of the research would go into Kubrick’s excellent Barry Lyndon in 1975.
After Barry Lyndon was released, Kubrick again wanted to turn his attention to historical drama and, this time, focus on the Holocaust. He wanted a “dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell”. However, the film wasn’t initially realised. That was until the early 1990s when he began adapting Louis Begley’s novel Wartime Lies, a story about a boy and his aunt hiding from the Nazis. The film was titled Aryan Papers, with Johanna ter Steege playing the aunt and Joseph Mazzello playing the boy. A potential filming location was Brno in the Czech Republic.
However, in 1995, the production ended. Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List had unwittingly influenced Kubrick. According to Kubrick’s wife, he had also become depressed by the nature of the story – though this was something that had also happened to Spielberg. Kubrick subsequently felt that an accurate portrayal of the Holocaust was impossible in cinema.
In the early 1960s, Kubrick gave consideration to the radio serial drama Shadow on the Sun, which aired on BBC Radio – of which he was a regular listener. The story concerns a virus spreading through Earth from a landed meteorite. Kubrick eventually acquired the rights for a potential film adaptation from author Gavin Blakeney in 1988, though he would soon move on to working with Steven Spielberg on A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Kubrick had also written a screenplay for The German Lieutenant, a film about a set of German soldiers in the last days of World War II. When Kubrick planned for the film to be his next production, he said, “One of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallise and come out into the open”. However, the film remains unreleased.
Other projects of Kubrick’s that never saw the light of day include Lunatic at Large, based on a story by pulp novelist Jim Thompson, I Stole 16 Million Dollars, an account of a minister come safecracker, and Flowers in the Attic, a 1979 gothic novel by V.C. Andrews. The latter was binned due to the explicit incest between the two protagonists.
