Napoleon-Box

Lost Kubrick - The unfinished films of Stanley Kubrick

Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, this short documentary examines 

the films Stanley Kubrick developed but didn't live long enough to make. 

Features interviews given by Kubrick's longtime producer Jan Harlan, 

Jack Nicholson,Sydney Pollack etc. 

Through interviews and abundant archival materials, this documentary examines 

these "lost" films in depth to discover what drew Kubrick to these projects, 

the work he did to prepare them for production, 

and why they ultimately were abandoned. 

Some of the unfinished project discussed here are "Napoleon" , 

"The Aryan Papers" and also "A.I" 

(which we know finally made by Steven Spielberg).

Transcript 

Jack :

You know when you work for stanley he's not going to stop 

until it's exactly the way he wants it right wrong or indifferent.

How many films did stanley make in his lifetime…? Very few.

He took a long long time between the films he was obsessed with those films; 

Stanley always admired Woody Allen for turning out every year, a new film I mean —

it's wonderful, he would have loved to do it but he couldn't; it wasn't his style.

he was a man of such varied interests that he was always busy 

and went through sequential obsessions 

I would talk to him sometimes every day you know 

and there were endless endless interests 

What he really wanted to make was a film about Napoleon because 

Napoleon was someone he revered, Napoleon was one of 

the abiding interests of Stanley's Life along with 

Extraterrestrial Intelligence 

The Holocaust 

Concentration Camps 

Julius Caesar 

English place-name etymology 

and 3000 other things —

Stanley had a tough time keeping up with his interests you know it was a full-time job being stanley so he is considered by many the greatest film director the medium has ever known yet in a 45-year career stanley kubrick's films number only a dozen that he strove for perfection is well established what is less known is that he lavished years of energy on several films that never saw the flickering light of the silver screen the most famous of these a.i artificial intelligence was made by steven spielberg with kubrick's blessing but there were two other films that came tantalizingly close to creation after the success of 2001 a space odyssey a success which means that kubrick had an opportunity to do what he wanted and what he wanted to do was napoleon now kubrick was fascinated by napoleon he was this man who changed the political landscape of the modern world stanley was always interested in things military and i think he was very interested in those campaigns and so forth it's really interesting when he was talking about making um his film in napoleon he describes these battle scenes as ballets as violent ballets and he has this image in his in his mind of choreographing violence 

Even then, Kubrick was fascinated by this man, 

by what he did politically and culturally 

but also personally —

Kubrick wasn't just interested in 

the big fight sequences, the big wars,

he was interested in what Napoleon did the night before 

and usually it was paperwork, because you don't 

run An Empire by telling people what to do 

you've got to Do The Paperwork 

and I'm sure that aspect of Napoleon 

appealed to Kubrick, who did quite 

a lot of paperwork himself —

He compiled the screenplay, which is very interesting because 

it is not entirely about Napoleon as a military genius, 

a lot of it is about napoleon's early days, when he he was in Paris 

and he was the protege of various other rich and influential people 

and there's an enormous amount of sex in it which is surprising and 

the descriptions are all of these women with décolleté gowns and 

people having it off in closets and so on and 

the battles of course take place but they're not — 

it's not like a film like Waterloo. 

bold brilliant and exacting obsessed with detail the phrases have been used to describe both napoleon and the director who yearned to tell his story well it's an easy parallel to make i don't know if it tells us much about stanley or napoleon 

Napoleon also had a technique among his staff 

which was that he would rotate them in and out of his regard,

so one week he'd have one favorite and he'd defer to this person 

and give them all the good jobs, and then 

the next week this person would notice they were pushed 

a little to one side and someone else was being brought in 

and he would rotate these people all the time so that 

everybody was was on tenterhooks and 

everybody was desperate to to do what he asked— 

In fact the thing you heard over and 

over again in The Kubrick Unit is, 

“But what shall I tell Stanley…?” 

napoleon would have been a very very typical kubrick film his downfall was self-inflicted now he was a man who was enormously gifted for his job colossally successful from a small officer who came from a foreign country namely from corsica and was trained in the south of france uh he crowned himself emperor of france in 1804. 

Now you know this is just quite astonishing 

and this man, however, in the end 

was governed by his emotions 

more than by his intellect 

and this is an old story of Stanley — you know this is this conflict between emotion and intellect as with any kubrick project the first step was to accumulate exhaustive and meticulous research he had teams going around all over the place gathering up huge quantities of a visual material documentary material he sent off andrew burke and his assistant to paris to find actual artifacts of napoleon andrew arrived with notable ill timing in may 1968 at the height of the student revolution so they're walking around in the streets with you know cars on fire and police shooting at students and so on looking for napoleon's portable lavatory so obsessive was Kubrick that andrew brought back a sample of the earth of waterloo so that wherever they recreated the battle they could do it with exactly the same colour earth!

He bought thousands of books in every language about Napoleon, 

everything he could find…. now, there's research and there’s research —

now Kubrick got it to a point where he had a filing cabinet 

full of cards and on these cards were every day Napoleon's Life;

he could pick a card and he would be able to tell you 

where Napoleon was, what he was doing, why he was doing it….

That's the level of research detailed research that he did on Napoleon.

One of Kubrick's challenges in developing the project 

was realising the enormity of his vision 

within the confines of a realistic budget —

Well, he had designed it so that it was reasonably inexpensive considering the fact that it was Napoleon and 

had vast battle scenes and so what Kubrick did, 

he came with this great idea of having paper costumes,

so you would have like 4 000 people in proper costumes,

the people you would be able to see, but in the background 

you would have 10, 20, 100,000 people 

in paper costumes 

and so it would just be a disposable costume; and 

he did camera tests on these to see how they 

would register and they look just the same 

as a normal costume close-up 

“One of the problems with doing Napoleon the way Stanley wanted to 

would be access to these great rooms at Versailles and things like this 

which nobody's going to let you shoot it, and so he realised that 

with the front projection, the technology we had used for 2001 

for the ape sequence he could use that same technology and be able 

to tell the story of Napoleon like it had never been told before 

because you could be there at The Battle of Austerlitz 

you could be there in the hall of mirrors of Versailles 

so he was very excited about that.

In the late 1960s, Kubrick saw an actor he immediately realised 

would be perfect to play his Napoleon :

Jack :

 He called me, like he does many people out of nowhere; 

I didn't believe it was him on the phone and 

as he is to almost all other people very flattering and 

very nice about your work, and you know still….

Being Stanley, he tried to he wanted to make sure 

I could speak other than as A Southerner;

he had seen Easy Rider so he had me read 

something from a play and put it on tape,

make sure I spoke regular English, you know but —

The Problem was that this went on too long and some 

other people had the idea of doing films about Napoleon….

The Film was pulled by MGM because the Rod Steiger movie Waterloo — 

not a bad film at all, was not really as successful 

as the studios had hoped and mgm then didn't want to proceed and the film wasn't green lighted we had an enormous amount of pre-production cost already in it but not the rest and so stanley was very very disappointed he was really quite depressed for a few days but you know life has to go on then the question of course arose well why didn't stanley just do it it's public domain for crisix it's napoleon so mgm can't own napoleon but he could never do it again because if he tried to do it at warner's for example mgm would come after warners and stanley and say hey wait a minute you're infringing upon our story and say no this is another screenplay to sam europe and they'd say yeah but napoleon's napoleon you know you can't get the guy to do it twice and there would be no way because his concept was so brilliant and so much a part of his enthusiasm for doing it that he could not do another version that would be satisfactory to him so it just languished there the thing does strike you is how much Barry Lyndon was to become in a way a summation of of everything he was thinking in in those days,

this very hierarchic form this very slow, 

even adult way of making films,

this long looks at things slow movement…

you know all that stuff that that you can see in scraps in some of these other movies it all comes together in Barry Lyndon. 

Though he would return to Napoleon on occasion in the coming years, 

Kubrick never got the film as close to production as he did 

in the heady days following the release of 2001. 

in the meantime he continued to develop a number of other projects including what he hoped would be the definitive film about world war ii and the holocaust stanley would have loved to make a film about this topic yeah it was an important topic the holocaust and the whole nazi period i 

I'm not sure that even Stanley could tell you 

why he wanted to make a film about 

The Holocaust…

i mean beyond — it's interesting it's dramatic it's shocking it's awful it had always fascinated him i mean what happened in in germany in in the 30s and 40s and this is a kind of theme that sort of also echoed in clockwork orange the culture and civilization doesn't preclude savage irrational behavior he felt that he could make a very important film about the nazis the the whole issue of of that nightmare so he looked around for an existing book and he read a book by an american-based but polish-born writer named louis begley called wartime lies i gathered from what jan harlan told me was that kubrick had always wanted to make a movie about the war in europe and he decided that wartime lies was the book that he wanted to use i have always admired kubrick as a filmmaker just boundlessly so when i was told that it was he who was acquiring the rights i practically jumped up for joy kubrick determined to call his film the aryan papers a reference to the documents sought by jews in occupied countries to avoid internment the theory on which hitler and the nazis proceeded was that there was the aryan race of which they were the splendid examples and non-aryans such as jews were a vermin-like species that as was finally decided that vansay should be exterminated so if you got papers to establish you as a non-jew the point was really to establish you as an aryan airing papers is about a jewish boy and his aunt trying to survive in nazi occupied poland during world war ii it's a film about survival kubrick liked to do films about people in extreme situations people making life and death decisions for the key role of the young boy in his story kubrick chose joseph mazzello fresh off his co-starring role in steven spielberg's jurassic park i think that the first time i remember airing papers being talked about was um on the set of jurassic park what happened was stanley kubrick saw radio flyer which was the movie i did when i was seven my first real big movie and from that he was really interested in me for the role of the aunt uma thurman was an early favorite ultimately however kubrick sets his sights on dutch actress johanna terestea he just rang me up one day and said i'm starting preparation for this film could you come out and do some tests for three or four days so i said yes of course you know what's it about and he said i'll tell you when you get here and i said well who's in it he said a young actress i said what's her name he said i'm not gonna tell you i said okay and i went out there and we did all these tests he wouldn't tell me the name of this girl he just wouldn't tell me i finished up jurassic park and stanley kubrick wanted to meet me i was flown out to meet him i was flown out for my mom to read the script she had read the script and stanley came in and i remember um most of the meeting consisted of him um staring at me he even commented at one point he said um i'm sorry joe don't feel uncomfortable but i'm just i'm just looking at you i'm just looking at your eyes i have to look at your eyes it was really important to him i remember to get a three-year-old that looked like me and so he was looking at me to make sure he got the right person to play me as a as a younger kid meanwhile kubrick and his team were immersed in their research i did a lot of work on that for about 18 months two years i did most of the initial research when it was when stanley had read the story you know tracking down books going to photo libraries this that and the other producer jan harlan made frequent calls to novelist lewis begley compiling the rich tapestry of detail that fed kubrick's creativity kubrick rang up and said there's a song mentioned in chapter six or something what is the song begley he's a very very formal lawyer had to sing the song down the telephone lines so it could be transcribed by kubrick teams were dispatched throughout europe to scout locations we went mainly into czechoslovakia found some wonderful locations a fantastic town on the border with poland that was still bombed it was perfect for bum town and then we went over to our house and it was perfect we found wonderful apartments we found this old army barracks they had an even we had a stage with a dirt floor so we could have built forests and things in there they had offices parade ground you could use it a lot and build streets whatever you know everything we found everything he began researching in denmark went to the danish film institute acquired enormous quantity of films of the period documentaries and dramas started looking for for people to play in the material brought in huge quantities of papers the mayor of arkhus i think wrote him a letter of warm appreciation at the expectation of a lot of work coming to the country little realising that kubrick would never have shot there at all he would have recreated it we were as far as getting permission from the city of bruneau to have the trams from the tram museum on on the street for a weekend to close the center city for a weekend and have nazi flags hanging down the buildings and all this as pre-production dragged on kubrick was in danger of losing his young star the film kept getting pushed back and pushed back and i did another movie called the river wild where they wanted to darken my hair and this is how close we were really doing is that they wanted to darken my hair and somehow his agent got wind of it and told him and he called the production and said you cannot touch joe's hair and so for a while after i was signed to do it there were he there were negotiations between the movies that i was doing and him as with napoleon circumstances beyond his control force kubrick to abandon the aryan papers and move on to other projects schindler's list came out we had a similar topic and warner brothers terry semel and and stanley decided not to come you know a few months or a year after schindler's list with a a similar film we had been burned already in full metal jacket because platoon was ahead of us and it was an excellent film platoon so um and you know normal moviegoers they they don't want to necessarily see two vietnam or two holocaust films in in one season or whatever so that was the reason why it was postponed in fact we got to the point where stanley had to say yes or no to shoot the film suddenly anya his middle daughter got pregnant and i said to phil who i was with that's the end of this film because stanley would go nowhere without christiana christiana would stay with anya so i said we're going to do this film so we know we look but what put it over the edge ironically is that jurassic park came out with jurassic park stanley kubrick saw how technology had advanced and he said well i think i'm going to do ai instead ultimately kubrick turned a.i over to steven spielberg focusing his own energies on eyes wide shut it was during the final stages of post-production on that film that stanley kubrick died on march the 7th 1999 in his passing cinema lost one of its greatest artists and with him the films he might have made you