“An inspiration and a cautionary tale”: the director Stanley Kubrick adored but never wanted to end up like
When Stanley Kubrick was honoured by the legacy of his biggest cinematic hero, he was busy working on the film that perhaps best connected to his influence.
Kubrick was no stranger to pushing boundaries. In fact, from start to finish, that’s what his entire career was based on. The director seemed to only be interested in divisive projects, regularly choosing to take on stories that no other filmmaker would dare to touch, like the highly controversial Lolita, adapting it for the screen for the first time, or the banned book A Clockwork Orange.
Even with his tamest film in terms of scandal, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a feat. Made before space travel was understood or before the world even really had any visuals of what space looked like, Kubrick spent over $6.5million on the special effects alone for that film. He spent a budget of approximately $12m on the two and a half hour sci-fi film with no idea if audiences even wanted that. Clearly, if he wanted to do it, he did it.
He was also pushing boundaries behind the camera. The director’s methods for coaxing a good performance out of his cast were questionable to say the least, and so too were the behaviours he was showing on camera, specialising in assault, deviance, violence or at least a good amount of deception.
But when it comes to his heroes, they were never one-note, easy-to-figure-out characters. Instead, he revered people like DW Griffith, the equally revered and scandalised director Kubrick looked up to for guidance on both what to do and what not to do.
In 1997, he was honoured with the DW Griffith Award while he was busy pushing Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise to their absolute limits for Eyes Wide Shut. Unleashing another wild film that this time would touch on the cultism of the super-rich, it was a fitting moment for him to be honoured by the legacy of a director who was at once both important and shameful.
“I think there is an intriguing irony in naming the lifetime achievement award after DW Griffith, because his career was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale,” Kubrick said in his acceptance speech.
On one hand, Griffith changed the game. “His best films will always rank among the most important films ever made, and some of them made him a great deal of money. He was instrumental in transforming movies from a nickelodeon novelty to an art form,” Kubrick said, laying the modern movie world at Griffith’s feet thanks to the impact of films like Way Down East or the divisive Birth Of A Nation.
Birth Of A Nation was one of the most financially successful films of all time, but it’s also filled with problematic representations and an overarching, disgusting celebration of the KKK. It caused riots, and the NAACP fought hard to have it banned when it was released. It’s undeniably a landmark moment in cinema, but for the worst.
However, difficultly, there was good to Griffith’s career, like his work launching the studio United Artists alongside the likes of Charlie Chaplin, fighting for movie-makers to be able to make art for the screen, not just cash-grabs. But obviously, there was also a lot of bad, or times when his controversy clouded everything else.
For Kubrick, that’s a fascinating figure to consider. “Griffith was always ready to take tremendous risks in his films and in his business affairs. He was always ready to fly too high,” he said, adding, “In the end, the wings of fortune proved, for him, like those of Icarus, to be made of nothing more substantial than wax and feathers.”
Like the tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun, Kubrick was mostly influenced by Griffith’s collapse as he stepped over the line and became too controversial to the point where his entire career was tainted by Birth Of A Nation. Though Kubrick clearly admired bold choices, Griffith’s was more an inspiration to remind him to be cautious, stating, “I have never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high’, or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings’.”
