An interview with Stanley Kubrick
By Vicente Molina Foix
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This film that Claudia Weill did, I think she did on an amateur basis; she shot it for about a year, two or three days a week. Of course she had a great advantage, because she had all the time she needed to think about it, to see what she had done. I thought she made the film extremely well.
Were you ever interested in the so-called "underground" American cinema, either in its politicallyminded directors (Kramer, Di Antonio) or the more explicitly avant-garde New York names (Warhol, Anger, Mekas, Markopoulos)?
Well, I haven't really seen any good underground movies. I mean, one of the problems with movies is that it does require some degree of technical ability to keep the film from looking foolish. And most underground films are poorly made. But I wouldn't call, for instance, Girlfriends an underground movie, that was really just a low-budget professional film. I certainly haven't seen any underground films that I thought were important or particularly interesting. I mean, they are rather interesting in a way because people are doing things that no one would ever think of doing. But I couldn't say that they are very stimulating or important in creating new ideas that are going to be taken up by other people.
Most of your films are based on novels. Do you find it easier to make a film taking literary material as basis?
There's one great advantage taking it from literary material, and that is that you have the opportunity of reading the story for the first time. I've never written an original screenplay myself, so I'm only theorizing as to what I think the effect would be, but I suppose that if you had an idea yourself that you liked and you developed, your sense of whether or not the story was interesting would be almost gone by the time you wrote it. And then at that point, to try to make it into a film you'd have to trust only your own first interest and instincts. The advantage of a story you can actually read is that you can remember what you felt about it the first time you read it; and that serves as a very useful yardstick on making the decisions that you have to make directing the film, because even with somebody else's story you become so familiar with it after a while that you can never really tell what it is going to seem like to somebody seeing the film for the first time. So at least you have that first impression of the story and your first ideas, which are very important.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
This film that Claudia Weill did, I think she did on an amateur basis; she shot it for about a year, two or three days a week. Of course she had a great advantage, because she had all the time she needed to think about it, to see what she had done. I thought she made the film extremely well.
Were you ever interested in the so-called "underground" American cinema, either in its politicallyminded directors (Kramer, Di Antonio) or the more explicitly avant-garde New York names (Warhol, Anger, Mekas, Markopoulos)?
Well, I haven't really seen any good underground movies. I mean, one of the problems with movies is that it does require some degree of technical ability to keep the film from looking foolish. And most underground films are poorly made. But I wouldn't call, for instance, Girlfriends an underground movie, that was really just a low-budget professional film. I certainly haven't seen any underground films that I thought were important or particularly interesting. I mean, they are rather interesting in a way because people are doing things that no one would ever think of doing. But I couldn't say that they are very stimulating or important in creating new ideas that are going to be taken up by other people.
Most of your films are based on novels. Do you find it easier to make a film taking literary material as basis?
There's one great advantage taking it from literary material, and that is that you have the opportunity of reading the story for the first time. I've never written an original screenplay myself, so I'm only theorizing as to what I think the effect would be, but I suppose that if you had an idea yourself that you liked and you developed, your sense of whether or not the story was interesting would be almost gone by the time you wrote it. And then at that point, to try to make it into a film you'd have to trust only your own first interest and instincts. The advantage of a story you can actually read is that you can remember what you felt about it the first time you read it; and that serves as a very useful yardstick on making the decisions that you have to make directing the film, because even with somebody else's story you become so familiar with it after a while that you can never really tell what it is going to seem like to somebody seeing the film for the first time. So at least you have that first impression of the story and your first ideas, which are very important.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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