The movie that showed Stanley Kubrick the limits of a director: “Proof to last a lifetime”
One word that seems to follow the all-encompassing and wholly impressive career of auteur and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is “meticulous”. Famed for requesting take upon take from his actors, creating scale models of all his scenes, and generally being fastidiously technical in every aspect of making his movies, it comes as some surprise that he has a less than favourable outlook on some of his movies.
The director notoriously struggled with the reaction to his ultra-violent reimagining of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, even campaigning to have the movie removed from cinemas across the globe. Many have suggested this may have been a marketing ploy. However, it’s not the only movie Kubrick has denounced along the way. He also intensely disliked his debut feature film Fear and Desire.
He was so possessed by his resentment toward Fear and Desire that, according to Marzursky, he aimed to have the picture eradicated from the history books of humanity: “Stanley tried to have the negative burned. He hated the movie. Hated it”. The director managed to succeed in pulling the film from circulation, so much so that for years, it was only available as a bootleg until his fame grew so large that his debut movie was a necessary addition to any cinephile’s filing cabinet.
There is another movie which Kubrick would label as “dumb” if only for the words he was given to work with. Spartacus is often considered one of the filmmaker’s outlier projects owing to the fact that he had less control over its creation than perhaps any other movie in his filmography. “I was hired to direct Spartacus with Kirk Douglas,” the director shared with a noted sense of disdain.
For a director who had the majority of his projects under lock and key, endlessly fussing over details until he felt they were ready to be released, being hired for a job instead of creating every aspect of the movie was always likely to cause issues: “It was the only one of my films over which I did not have complete control; although I was the director, mine was only one of many voices to which Kirk listened. I am disappointed in the film. It had everything but a good story,” Kubrick admitted.
Later, Kubrick said of the project: “In Spartacus, I tried with only limited success to make the film as real as possible but I was up against a pretty dumb script which was rarely faithful to what is known about Spartacus.” While Kubrick showed his devoted research to the subject, suggesting that only in the movie is the leader of the slave army defeated because of a deal gone bad, whereas in the history books, he simply returns to pillage Roman cities, he also notes how the movie defeated him.
He concluded: “If I ever needed any convincing of the limits of persuasion a director can have on a film where someone else is the producer and he is merely the highest-paid member of the crew, Spartacus provided proof to last a lifetime.”
Kubrick was a filmmaker who relied on total control to make his best work. While he would have likely succeeded to some degree in the modern world of making movies to strict budgets and trending audiences, there’s a good chance that an artist like him needed a firm hold of any production to make true art.
