Stanley Kubrick names the only genius he ever worked with: “It was quite clear”
As a filmmaker who earned a reputation for being cold and distant, Stanley Kubrick was never regarded as somebody who’d shower his cast and crew with adoring praise for their contributions to his string of seminal movies.
He was an auteur who knew exactly what he wanted and how he planned to realise his vision, with the actors, camera crew, production team, and post-production unit cogs in the machine that he used to hone and refine his ideas until the finished article emerged on the other side as the best possible representation of itself.
The word “genius” is arguably bandied around more than it should be, but there’s no denying that Kubrick deserved the moniker. After all, he built his career on pushing the boundaries of cinema and is responsible for a handful of features that deserve all-time status, never mind the fact multiple generations of filmmakers to follow in his wake worship the ground he walked on.
He worked with many big names on either side of the camera, but how many of them would fall into the genius camp? Well, that’s entirely in the eye of the beholder and down to personal preference. Kirk Douglas? An integral figure in Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, sure, but maybe not quite.
Tom Cruise? Again, a superstar and an immensely dedicated performer, but probably not. Jack Nicholson? A three-time Academy Award winner and one of the best actors to ever grace the silver screen, which definitely puts him in with a shout. Peter Sellers? In terms of nothing but his impact on comedy, absolutely.
However, it was none of those vaunted thespians that earned the genius tag from Kubrick. In fact, it wasn’t even an actor. Or, rather, it was somebody who wasn’t a professional actor until they worked with the maestro, after which they turned their attention to the industry full-time and spent the remainder of their working life playing thinly veiled imitations of the same character.
When Kubrick realised that what Full Metal Jacket needed to do justice to the part of hard-ass Gunnery Sergeant Hartman wasn’t necessarily the intangibles a trained actor brought to the table, he put R Lee Ermey through his paces in what should have been an exacting audition process, which was really just an excuse for the military veteran to show how perfect he was for the role.
As Kubrick reflected, he’d “always found that some people can act and some can’t, whether or not they’ve had training.” Ermey hadn’t, but he blew the filmmaker away and established himself as the only person worthy of doing justice to the man who verbally eviscerates his charges with some wonderfully foul-mouthed one-liners and putdowns.
Hitting the nail on the head, Kubrick said, “It was quite clear that Lee was a genius for this part,” and it takes one to know one.
