"It was a matter of mutual appreciation that led author and physicist Jeremy Bernstein to first meet [Stanley] Kubrick in 1965, when The New Yorker sent him to interview the then 37-year-old director. Bernstein wrote a positive piece in the magazine on science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, and was then Clarke himself recommended that he talk to Kubrick. Bernstein and Kubrick met in the director’s Central Park apartment. Both men soon discovered that the other was a chess aficionado and soon a friendship was born , one which would later lead Bernstein to Oxford, where Kubrick was shooting “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or “Son of Strangelove” as it was amusingly codenamed at the time."
"Bernstein recorded these meetings, and the result, a 76-minute audio interview with Kubrick (via No Film School), is a compelling, informal, and hugely informative look into the director’s life. He covers his early films’ origins from script to screen, but also space travel, chess, and the nuclear bomb, which he calls “as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying.”
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7 comments:
Kubrick was a genius I suppose, but humorless, so no great shakes to me.
as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying
Of all the humans who ever lived, only 93% have died.
Don't give in to peer pressure!
People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction.
Chemistry and other physical sciences are full of abstractions. It's very rare to find people emotionally involved with those sciences, but they do exist and it's not a bad thing.
SK comes off as a fairly intelligent - if uninteresting - man of his times. NYC, Jewish, Liberal, obsessed with film, and fairly knowing about how to break into directing in Hollywood and make money.
Certainly much brighter than Welles in that regard, who was too much of egoist and/or dreamer to make the System work for him like SK.
I would hardly call Stanley a liberal.
I always find his films cold, intellectual exercises. Even his "humor" on Dr. Strangelove has an abstract quality too it and lacks humanity.
Chess player as Film maker describes him well.
"I would hardly call Stanley a liberal."
Yeah, I guess. Depends on what you consider "liberal". The Dude had a problem with women and seemed to be fascinated with war. OTOH, I don't see anything traditional or conservative in his work.
John Ford he ain't. But at least he wasn't Stanley Kramer.
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