The story of how UNKLE almost made a music video with Stanley Kubrick
Famed for his unique provision to the world of cinema with classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick died nearly a quarter of a century ago and left a gaping hole in Hollywood. When the filmmaker passed away, aged 70, he had just completed Eyes Wide Shut, his final film, based on the novel Dream Story, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Eyes Wide Shut premiered on July 16th, 1999, to generally positive reviews. As Kubrick knew it would be his final effort and his lasting legacy, he wanted it to be his greatest contribution yet. Some critics and fans regard it as such, but according to Kubrick’s friend and Full Metal Jacket actor R. Lee Ermey, the director believed the movie was an unmitigated disaster.
This perfectly illustrates Kubrick’s nature as a perfectionist of refined taste. All the same, Kubrick’s bulletproof oeuvre has energised creative minds both inside and outside the film industry for over six decades and shows no signs of waning. Intriguingly, Kubrick has had a notably intense impact on musicians.
Not only did the pop group JLS name one of their hits ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, but Alex Turner revealed Kubrick’s furtive influence on the 2018 Arctic Monkeys track ‘One Point Perspective’. It’s not surprising, based on the soundtrack scores of his movies, that Kubrick had a discerning taste in music, but it may surprise some to discover that the ageing filmmaker was very close to collaborating with the progressive electronic outfit UNKLE.
In 1998, about a year before Kubrick’s death, UNKLE released their highly praised debut album, Psyence Fiction. The record benefitted from collaborations with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft of The Verve, Ian Brown of The Stone Roses and more, but imagine if Kubrick had stuck an oar in the action.
As it turns out, this most unlikely artistic pairing almost occurred, with UNKLE founder James Lavelle in talks with Kubrick’s representatives about a possible music video collaboration in 1999. “I’ve always been a huge Kubrick fan, and a while back, I tried to get a hold of him to see if he’d be interested in making a video with us, and so there was a dialogue between me and his company at the time, but unfortunately he passed,” Lavelle revealed in an interview with Hero Magazine.
Although this proposed project never materialised, Lavelle paid homage to Kubrick in 2016 by curating an exhibition called Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick at Somerset House. The project sought to bring Kubrick’s creations under a contemporary light in a series of multi-media art pieces.
The exhibition showcased 50 artworks by various fine artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians, including Doug Aitken, Haroon Mirza, Michele Lamy, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Jarvis Cocker, Sarah Lucas, Beth Orton and Anish Kapoor.
“I’d been working with UNKLE on placing music in more of a gallery environment, and I was working with lots of different artists and encouraging them to react to my work,” Lavelle said of how the project came about. “From there, a curator friend of mine is very good friends with the guy that runs the Stanley Kubrick estate, and he asked to organise a meeting about coming up with an idea to contemporise the estate”.
“And that’s how it happened; he asked me for some ideas, and I came up with this exhibition on the basis that the family would support it and allow us to have access to the archive and to support what we’re doing,” he added. “Christiane [Kubrick’s widow] is an artist and very much supported our vision, and now, five years down the line, we have an exhibition.”
See highlights from the exhibition launch party below.
