‘The Corridor’: The story of Stanley Kubrick’s long-lost music video
A surprising amount of the time, you’ll find a movie director’s greatest work comes away from feature film. The likes of Tarsem will tell you they have more artistic freedom doing Pepsi commercials than a Hollywood picture, and one look at David Lynch’s amazingly creepy PlayStation 2 adverts shows just how true that really is. Arguably, though, the best place a Hollywood director has to flex their creative muscles is in the weird, wonderful world of the music video.
Even after you pass the obvious choices, like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and (to a much lesser extent) John Landis doing Michael Jackson videos, some of the absolute greats cut their teeth making them. David Fincher, Spike Lee and The Daniels all got their start making music videos, and if you see the same name making clips for up-and-coming artists, you can bet studios will be trying to tie them down even today.
However, did you know that in the late 1990s, one of the absolute pinnacles of Hollywood signed on to make a music video? Shortly before starting work on 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick was actually in conversation to direct a music video for ‘Lonely Souls’ off Unkle’s second album Psyence Fiction. A massive coup for James Lavelle’s trip-hop outfit, but it goes even deeper than that.
Lavelle himself is a lifelong Kubrick die-hard who would later curate festivals of his work. In a conversation with Dazed, Lavelle said, “Kubrick chose themes that constantly repeat in the human cycle. Also, his attention to detail, his techniques, and everything else that went into the films have made him a classic filmmaker, and his work is always going to be referenced.”
Tragically, Kubrick passed away before work on Eyes Wide Shut could be completed. The project joins the ranks of AI and his Napoleon movie as projects the great man pursued but didn’t have the time to complete. Happily, like AI, a video for ‘Lonely Soul’ was created in the end. Commissioned for Lavelle’s Kubrick exhibition ‘Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick’, it’s a loving tribute to four of Kubrick’s most celebrated works.
Titled The Corridor and directed by longtime Lavelle collaborator Toby Dye, the video is a tribute to four of Kubrick’s best-loved films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining. Starring Aiden Gillan and Joanna Lumley, the video consists of four tracking shots down the same corridor (very Kubrickian), in which choreographed dance scenes play out, paying homage to each classic.
It would be enough to simply be a loving tribute to the great man’s work, but I feel it goes deeper than that. The Corridor is a testament to his influence and how it will echo in the future. This is no accident; Lavelle himself talks about it in the same interview as before, saying: “In the same way that people continue to reference Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Hitchcock, Kubrick is just one of those great artists and is still relevant in the world that we live in today.”
