The Stanley Kubrick movie he called “boring and pretentious”
Popularly known as having one of the most impressive filmographies of all time, even director Stanley Kubrick had regrets over his staggering career that stunned art cinema in the late 20th century. Rubbing shoulders with the best directors of all time, including Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Speilberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, you wouldn’t think that Kubrick would have much to regret.
What we do know about the late American filmmaker is that he was a tireless perfectionist, picking apart his own work with a fine comb to iron out all potential issues. It’s for this reason that such films as A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey remain such classics even decades after their release, impressing critics and audiences for their meticulous attention to detail.
Such was a skill that Kubrick only developed later in his career, however, with his early films being just as rough around the edges as any debut director. It’s for this reason that the filmmaker’s first feature remains his most hated piece of work, despising the 1953 anti-war movie Fear and Desire, which told the story of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who are forced to confront their own morality in order to escape to safety.
Made up of a production team of just 15 people, Kubrick experienced some serious budgetary issues during his debut shoot, constantly needing a financial boost to help him finish the film. Remarkably, this led the director to raise money by hustling chess games in Central Park, yet most of the funding came from his pharmacist uncle, to whom Kubrick demanded thousands of dollars.
Still, despite his dogged determination while making the film, Kubrick would later denounce his work as “a bumbling amateur film exercise,” according to an interview conducted on the radio show All Things Considered in 1994. Disowning the film soon after its release whilst trying to prevent any future re-releases, Kubrick, as stated in the show, “had Warner Brothers send a letter out to all the press in town saying that the picture was boring and pretentious”.
He even hated his own creation so much that, according to the film’s young star, Paul Mazursky, “Stanley tried to have the negative burned. He hated the movie. Hated it”.
Though whilst Kubrick tried his hardest to scrub all knowledge of the film from the face of the earth, Kodak, who made prints for the film, had a policy of making an extra copy for their archives, meaning that despite his efforts, Fear and Desire would always exist somewhere.
Now, thanks to the beauty of the internet, Fear and Desire, likely the director’s least-watched movie, is available to watch on YouTube. Clocking in at just over 90 minutes long, the film is a quick watch for any superfan of the director, though certainly pales in comparison to his other anti-war movies, 1957’s Paths of Glory and the dark 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Watch Stanley Kubrick’s “most boring and pretentious” movie below.
