The reason why Stanley Kubrick regretted making ‘Fear and Desire’
It should come as no surprise to any movie fan that the American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was known as one of the most particular directors of all time, demanding to shoot scenes countless times even after perfectly filming the moment already. Still, it is for this reason that Kubrick is considered to be in the same league as other iconic directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
That said, even Kubrick is capable of making mistakes, regretting his time creating his debut feature film, Fear and Desire, which differed greatly from his meticulous work on later projects. Much like Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick’s debut was an anti-war flick, with the film telling the story of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who are forced to confront their own morality in order to escape to safety.
Piecing the film together with the help of just 15 crew members, Kubrick found the production of Fear and Desire incredibly tricky. He experienced major budgetary issues that required him to make pocket change hustling chess games in Central Park whilst also demanding thousands of dollars from his generous uncle. Still, his perseverance paid off, and the film was released in 1952 to decent critical acclaim.
Despite the dogged determination he put on show to get the movie made, Kubrick hated the film and would call it “a bumbling amateur film exercise,” according to an interview conducted on the radio show All Things Considered in 1994. Hating the film to the event that he even tried to prevent any future re-releases, Kubrick “had Warner Brothers send a letter out to all the press in town saying that the picture was boring and pretentious”.
If this wasn’t enough proof to demonstrate just how much Kubrick disliked the movie, according to the film’s young star, Paul Mazursky: “Stanley tried to have the negative burned. He hated the movie. Hated it”. Alas, his efforts to scrub the film from the face of the earth came to nothing, with Kodak keeping an extra copy of the film in their archives, meaning the movie could live on forever.
The director’s near-neurotic attention to detail led him to several difficult on-set occasions, too, with his experience working with Shelley Duvall during the 1980 movie The Shining being a prime example of this. According to the actor, who was 30 at the time of filming, the director subjected her to psychological and emotional torture by demanding to shoot the demanding ‘stairway sequence’ 127 times.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Duvall explained how she got into the mindset of the scene, stating: “You just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family or friends. But after a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry”.
Watching Kubrick’s self-proclaimed “bumbling amateur film exercise” couldn’t be easier, with the movie available to watch on YouTube. If you don’t fancy taking on the full feature film now, check out the trailer below.
