Stanley Kubrick: the director Robert Duvall called “an actor’s enemy”
Aged 92, Robert Duvall perches proudly atop a colourful acting career of seven decades. His movie career began to take off in the early 1960s after he appeared alongside Gregory Peck as Boo Radley in Robert Muligan’s critically acclaimed adaptation of To Kill A Mocking Bird.
Throughout the 1970s, he received Oscar nods for two stand-out Francis Ford Coppola pictures, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, foreshadowing his ‘Best Actor’ win for his role in 1983’s Tender Mercies.
One of Hollywood’s most cherished and decorated living legends, Duvall has worked with some of the greatest directors of all time, including Coppola, George Lucas and Sidney Lumet. With his most prolific spell coinciding with that of Stanley Kubrick, one might have thought their paths may have crossed, but they never did.
Perhaps a factor in this is that Duvall is one of Kubrick’s very few outspoken detractors. Speaking at the 2010 THR’s Awards Watch Roundtable alongside fellow actor Ryan Gosling, Duvall opined that Kubrick always brought the worst performances out of his cast.
“To me, the great Stanley Kubrick was an actor’s enemy,” he said. “He was an actor’s enemy. I can point to movies he’s done, the worst performances I’ve ever seen in movies: The Shining, A Clockwork Orange.”
Despite Gosling’s sniggering next to him, Duvall continued his rant. “Terrible performances,” he reiterated. “Maybe great movies, but they’re terrible performances. How does he know the difference between the first take and the seventieth take? I mean, what is that about?”
In this statement, Duvall refers to the late director’s reputation for copious retakes. These sentiments have been echoed through the years by several frustrated actors. Understandably, The Shining crew were yawning clock-watchers approaching the last of the 148 takes it took to get one scene just right.
In defence of his meticulous nature, Kubrick once lamented that actors were often ill-disciplined and blamed the painstaking process on lack of competency. “Actors are sometimes undisciplined enough not to go home and go to sleep at night and learn their lines, and they go out,” Kubrick said. “They cannot act without knowing dialogue. If you have to think about anything when you’re acting, you cannot work on the emotion. It’s happened in every film. There’s really not much you can do about it.”
