“He gave me a look”: how Stanley Kubrick made Paul Thomas Anderson feel like an “asshole”
They say you should never meet your idols, and I’d argue that’s pretty good advice.
Even if the interaction you have with your favourite musician or director isn’t bad, more often than not, it’s not how you expected – they inevitably haven’t asked to become your new best friend – and you’ll probably find yourself in a vicious cycle of overthinking the experience.
Is there something else, something better, you could’ve said? Should you have played it cooler? For Paul Thomas Anderson, who has recently received considerable buzz for his film One Battle After Another, it was an interaction with Stanley Kubrick that left a sour taste in his mouth. Like practically every other filmmaker in Hollywood, Anderson loves Kubrick’s oeuvre, which significantly helped to shape the course of modern cinema.
With 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick popularised sci-fi epics, while A Clockwork Orange challenged screen violence and Barry Lyndon delved into the biopic genre with as much intricacy as an oil painting.
There’s something about the visual appearance of Kubrick’s films that is enough to make you understand why he became such a visionary and influential director. Look at the futuristic set design of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the surreal horror of The Shining – who can forget those bathrooms? But Kubrick was far from being all style and no substance; each film is loaded with some of life’s biggest mysteries – the irony of war, the endless quest for fulfilment, the dangerous development of technology.
Anderson learned the art of cinema from watching Kubrick films, citing Dr Strangelove, The Shining, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket as his favourites. I guess it is goddamn impossible to just pick one. So, when he got the chance to meet the director during the shooting of Eyes Wide Shut, which featured Magnolia star Tom Cruise, he was incredibly excited. Instead, he walked away feeling like a “Hollywood asshole”.
It was the start of Anderson’s career – and, unbeknownst to him at the time, the end of Kubrick’s – so you’d think that maybe the Eyes Wide Shut director would have some words of wisdom to give the new face on the scene. Instead, he did get advice, in a sense, just not in the way he would’ve wanted it.
“Kubrick had a really small crew,” Anderson said (via Vulture). “I asked him, ‘Do you always work with so few people?’”
The filmmaker was curious, considering that he was new to Hollywood. Unfortunately, Kubrick’s response was much more vitriolic than he was expecting. “He gave me a look and said, ‘Why? How many people do you need?’ I felt like such a Hollywood asshole.”
Perhaps the fact that Anderson was on set when he really didn’t need to be – it was Cruise who managed to get him in despite Kubrick’s desire to keep the production small – was enough to rub the auteur the wrong way. Still, Anderson is a huge fan of Kubrick’s work, and perhaps this interaction taught him the merits of keeping his crew down to just the essentials. He can’t say the same about casts, though; Anderson loves working with a large ensemble.
