Interview [Written]: Stanley Kubrick

In honor of the 15th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s death, today a 1987 interview in Rolling Stone with the famed writer-director. Here is how the interview starts with Kubrick taking charge right from the beginning:

I’m not going to be asked any conceptualizing questions, right?

All the books, most of the articles I read about you — it’s all conceptualizing.
Yeah, but not by me.

I thought I had to ask those kinds of questions.
No. Hell, no. That’s my … [He shudders.] It’s the thing I hate the worst.

Really? I’ve got all these questions written down in a form I thought you might require. They all sound like essay questions for the finals in a graduate philosophy seminar.
The truth is that I’ve always felt trapped and pinned down and harried by those questions.

Questions like [reading from notes] “Your first feature, Fear and Desire, in 1953, concerned a group of soldiers lost behind enemy lines In an unnamed war; Spartacus contained some battle scenes; Paths of Glory was an indictment of war and, more specifically, of the generals who wage it; and Dr. Strangelove was the blackest of comedies about accidental nuclear war. How does Full Metal Jacket complete your examination of the subject of war? Or does it?”
Those kinds of questions.

You feel the real question lurking behind all the verblage is “What does this new movie mean?”
Exactly. And that’s almost impossible to answer, especially when you’ve been so deeply inside the film for so long. Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you’d read in a magazine. They want you to say, “This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.” [A pretty good description of the subtext that informs Full Metal Jacket, actually.] I hear people try to do it — give the five-line summary — but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it’s usually wrong, and it’s necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary. If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s vanity, this idea that the work is bigger than one’s capacity to describe it. Some people can do interviews. They’re very slick, and they neatly evade this hateful conceptualizing. Fellini is good; his interviews are very amusing. He just makes jokes and says preposterous things that you know he can’t possibly mean.

I mean, I’m doing interviews to help the film, and I think they do help the film, so I can’t complain. But it isn’t…it’s… it’s difficult.

Classic Kubrick. He was promoting his newest movie Full Metal Jacket. As a reminder, here is the trailer:

Try and sum up the ‘truth’ of that in five lines!

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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