Stanley Kubrick, Uma Thurman, and “the part of my career” that never was
Uma Thurman has worked with many great directors in her time, with one of her earliest roles coming in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons, before several collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, starting with Pulp Fiction, brought her into the Hollywood mainstream for good.
She, of course, reunited with Tarantino for Kill Bill, a project that she was deeply involved with, even co-creating the character of The Bride with the filmmaker. Then there’s her various collaborations with Lars von Trier, who directed her in Nymphomaniac and The House That Jack Built, allowing her to assert herself as an actor unafraid of some considerably more subversive parts.
With other notable filmmakers under her belt, like Gus Van Sant, Richard Linklater, and, slightly more controversially, Woody Allen, it seems like Thurman has ticked off many impressive names within the cinematic canon. But there’s one iconic filmmaker that she laments not working with, although she got very close. And that’s what makes the failed opportunity so painful: she very nearly got to star in a movie that could’ve changed everything for her.
You see, back in the 1990s, before Pulp Fiction, Thurman was set to appear in a Stanley Kubrick movie. Surely it’s every actor’s dream to work with the legendary filmmaker, who’d of course already found acclaim with the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining. For Thurman, this was a huge deal, but the project sadly never made it into production in the end.
“I was going to make a film with him, for a long time I was scheduled to make a film with him,” the actor told MTV, “I was contracted to do it, and things happened, and he shelved the film. He never made the film.”
The movie was set to be a war drama based on the 1991 Louis Begley novel Wartime Lies, which explored the story of a young Jewish boy and his aunt, who escape persecution by the Nazis by pretending to be Catholic.
It was certainly going to be a moving film, albeit a rather mammoth undertaking, but a certain Steven Spielberg movie stopped it in its tracks. Kubrick had been working on his ideas for the movie, which was to be called Aryan Papers, for a while, but when Schindler’s List went into production, he knew that it was no good also making a Holocaust-themed movie at the same time.
So, Kubrick instead focused on Eyes Wide Shut, which would become his final movie, the director passing away in 1999, shortly before its completion. It’s a shame that Kubrick never got to make a movie about the Holocaust, because he’d been interested in doing so since the 1970s, and his approach would have surely been much better than the shiny Hollywood approach that Spielberg took with Schindler’s List.
Thurman was hugely disappointed that she never got to work with Kubrick, but sometimes, that’s just how these things pan out. “It was devastating because it was an incredible part. It would have been the part of my career, the best part I ever had been offered or had written for me, or anything,” she said.
