The stuntman Stanley Kubrick was willing to sacrifice in the name of cinema: “Leave him up there!”
As one of cinema’s most storied perfectionists, there’s little that Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t do to realise his creative vision, which includes potentially sacrificing an innocent stuntman’s life in the pursuit of greatness.
Of course, this is the same guy who suggested that perhaps it would be in Ryan O’Neal’s best interests to have his leg amputated to lend Barry Lyndon an added air of authenticity, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that he was willing to let a crew member become starved of oxygen on another picture.
Not just any picture, though, but 2001: A Space Odyssey, arguably the iconic auteur’s magnum opus. Mounting a sci-fi film the likes of which had never been seen before, Kubrick innovated and pioneered several cutting-edge techniques to leave audiences with their jaws on the floor, which wasn’t always the most fun for the folks who’d been tasked to bring those sequences to life.
In the scene where Keir Dullea’s David Bowman replaces the antenna on the Discovery One, stunt performer Bill Weston was attached to a bracket that was mounted on the ceiling of the soundstage, which was also bolted onto a pivot to give the illusion that he was rotating weightlessly in outer space.
The issues arose from the fact that Weston was also kitted out in a full spacesuit, and the helmet only provided him with ten minutes’ worth of oxygen, spending the entire time filling it up with his exhaled carbon dioxide. When he felt himself getting lightheaded, he recited the alphabet backwards to stay awake, and he had a system in place with the crew to let them know if he was in trouble.
He’d extend his arms horizontally if he was running out of air and needed to be brought back, and if he did it twice in quick succession, it was an emergency. Naturally, this being Kubrick, he didn’t give a fuck about safety or life preservation, with Weston recalling his complete disregard for the protocols.
“The first time I went out, Kubrick was really sort of agitated, because it had been explained to him that I had limited time,” he explained to Michael Benson. Funnily enough, that first time culminated in the stuntman making the two-time signal that he needed to be retrieved, which the filmmaker ignored.
Weston remembered “someone tacking up to Stanley and saying, ‘We’ve got to get him back,'” an opinion he disagreed with: “Damn it, we just started. Leave him up there! Leave him up there!” He repeatedly extended his arms to make it patently clear to everyone in the vicinity that he was in real danger, and eventually, he passed out, which finally convinced Kubrick to call a halt.
“They brought the tower in, and I went looking for Stanley,” he added, completely understandably, as well. By the time he’d regained consciousness, the director had vanished, and he wouldn’t return to the set for at least two days, by Weston’s recollection. Which is just as well, “Because I was going to do him,” as he succinctly put it.
