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Rare Dutch Documentary on Stanley Kubrick

Part of a Dutch documentary about Stanley Kubrick surfaced recently on YouTube and offers tantalising glimpses into his working methods.

Part of a Dutch documentary about Stanley Kubrick has surfaced last December on YouTube and offers tantalising glimpses into his working methods.

I’m guessing it would have been made and broadcast on Dutch TV as a tribute in the months after the director’s death in March 1999.

You can watch the 13 minute piece here:

Among the things it features are:

  • Rare footage of Kubrick talking to the press at the premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where he reveals production actually began in 1965
  • George Sluizer, director of The Vanishing (1988), with wise words about the genuine emotion in Kubrick’s films
  • Kubrick spent several hours on the phone to Sluizer trying to persuade him to edit digitally – this was the pre-Avid days of the late 1980s when he was using Montage to edit Full Metal Jacket (1987)
  • How Belgian director Harry Kรผmel, who made Daughters of Darkness (1971), met Kubrick and found him to be charming and open about the filmmaking process
  • Actress Johanna ter Steege describes Kubrick’s pre-production work on his abandoned adaptation of Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies
  • Malcolm McDowell at the Venice Film Festival in 1997 on how Kubrick encouraged Steven Berkoff to spit all over him on A Clockwork Orange (1971)

If you watch the documentaries Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001) on the most recent DVD and Blu-ray box sets of Kubrick’s work and Jon Ronson’s Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2008), you’ll see a pattern emerge of great passion, technical obsession, restless curiosity and affable charm.

I love the fact that if you went into the St. Albans branch of Ryman‘s stationary store sometime in the 1990s you could bump in to one of the greatest directors in cinema history buying some ink and pens.

> Buy The Stanley Kubrick Blu-ray collection at Amazon UK
> More on Stanley Kubrick at Wikipedia