The iconic 1979 movie scene that blew Stanley Kubrick’s mind: “How on earth did you get that?”
For any filmmaker working at the same time Stanley Kubrick was around, compliments can’t have come much higher than having him call you up to ask how the hell you pulled off a certain scene.
After all, pioneering new techniques was like second nature to the inimitable auteur. Whether it was Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick had a habit of doing something with the medium that nobody had attempted before, and making it look effortless.
Somebody has to boggle the boggler, though, and it must have been the ultimate badge of honour to answer the phone, find one of the greatest directors in cinema on the other end of the line, and have them admit they’ve got no fucking idea how you’ve managed to accomplish an instantly iconic moment.
It hasn’t happened to many directors, but it did happen to Ridley Scott. His lengthy conversations with Steven Spielberg were famously one-sided, but his chat with the Alien architect was much shorter and sweeter, with Kubrick dying to know the mechanics behind John Hurt’s blood-spurting demise.
The initial chest-bursting sequence is one of the most unforgettable in sci-fi, horror, and cinema in general. 2001 revolutionised visual effects forever with its groundbreaking work, and that was set in the same genre, so it’s a testament to how skilfully Scott put the creature exploding out of Hurt’s abdomen together that a guy who won an Academy Award for his cutting-edge VFX was flummoxed.
“The first time I talked to Kubrick was a week after Alien came out,” the Blade Runner mastermind recalled. “Somebody said, ‘Stanley Kubrick is on the line’. I said, ‘Hello?’ ‘Hello. Stanley Kubrick here. How are you? I just saw Alien. How on earth did you get that thing coming out of his chest?'”
There was something ironic about a filmmaker who took an increasingly sweet time between their pictures to waste so little in this instance, with Kubrick demanding to speak to Alien‘s director almost as soon as the credits rolled, and the first thought when he did was that he wanted to know how the sci-fi sausage was made.
“I’ve got a print, and I’ve run it on the machine, and I can’t see the cut,'” he inquired. “So I said, ‘Well, I had John Hurt cut a hole in the table, lie in a horrible, awkward position, and I made a fibreglass shell’. He said, ‘I got it, I got it, I got it’. Brilliant.'” And with that, he hung up the phone, his question having been answered to his satisfaction.
As far as introductions with icons go, few are better than Scott’s, who managed to do what very few movies had ever been able to do: not only blow Kubrick’s mind, but pique his curiosity to such an extent that he needed to know as soon as possible how it was done.
