Stanley Kubrick: He never stopped worrying...

[DB7]

He never stopped worrying, or learnt to love the bomb

In a rare interview, Christiane Kubrick tells James Christopher about her husband, his work and his epic Cold War satire
The gravel drive leading up to Christiane Kubrick’s mansion near St Albans in Hertfordshire is protected by three sets of electronic gates and “Strictly Private” signs that must put the fear of God into the paper boy.

Inside the front door of Childwickbury House there are more printed orders to the effect of: “Shut and bolt this door at all costs.” Christiane clings to her privacy like a hot-water bottle.

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It’s a rare honour to be invited into her vast, tiled kitchen with its views of white iron fences and lush green pastures. It is even rarer to stroll through the glass-roofed courtyard littered with paintings, past the creepy feathery masks for Eyes Wide Shut, and into a blood-red library crammed with art books, Thackeray, De Sade and the well-thumbed volumes on witchcraft that Stanley Kubrick collected for The Shining.

Unfortunately, his widow can’t stroll anywhere at the moment. In August a collision with one of her dogs shattered the 74-year-old’s right leg in five places. To negotiate the three steps leading from the kitchen she has to clamber off a wheelchair and inch herself across a floor which, when I meet her, has just been washed. The German-born artist refuses to be helped by her wary assistants, and thus leaves a damp mark on the seat of her chic dress.

She married Stanley in 1957, and the couple settled into this quirky house and splendid isolation in 1979. Christiane admits that she doesn’t much enjoy the attention of strangers, particularly journalists, but she feels a duty towards her husband’s extraordinary legacy, if only to spike the popular misconceptions that still haunt his biographies.

It feels strange to grill Christiane about Stanley. But a newly restored print of the American director’s masterpiece, Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is one of the centrepieces of the 50th Times BFI London Film Festival, and the opportunity to discuss the movie at Fort Kubrick with a woman who lived with him for 42 years is not to be dismissed lightly. Christiane will not be drawn on which of Stanley’s films she admires most, but she does acknowledge how “hideously pertinent” Dr Strangelove is now. This terrifying black and white satire, starring Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott, is a cynical vision of weapons technology and human stupidity in which the world comes to an end thanks to an American general’s paranoia about women and communists.

“Dr Strangelove is not only a documentary, but an extremely innocent one given today’s possibilities,” says Christiane. “There are so many more things that can go wrong. Weapons are a hundredfold more dangerous. Giant mistakes are easier to make. We don’t have the mental tools to make critical split-second decisions.

“I remember when Peter George’s book Red Alert came out around the time of the Cuban missile crisis [in 1962]. Stanley said: ‘We’re not anywhere near scared enough.’ He thought we were being as blinkered as the Germans under Hitler. He even bought tickets to Australia.

“Then he called Terry Southern [the screenwriter who was to work with Kubrick on Dr Strangelove, their adaptation of Red Alert] and they rolled around the floor in hysterics reading out loud the things that could happen. Stanley decided he had to shoot it as a comedy because you simply couldn’t swallow it straight.”

What’s interesting is that Kubrick didn’t think that his films might make the slightest bit of difference. “He was never that naive,” says Christiane. “He couldn’t make a film unless he fell in love with the story. Then he couldn’t wait to get it on screen. But it had to be just perfect, which is why he left long gaps between films. If he didn’t have an absolute crush on a story he said: ‘I won’t survive the filming. I’ll get bored.’

“He abandoned many projects — sometimes after one or two years — because he suddenly ran out of excitement. He hated himself for doing so but, like a poker player, you can’t play a bad hand simply because other people are winning.”

As Kubrick grew older, good stories became harder to find. “He did get more self-critical,” says Christiane, “and, as we all do, more jaded. He also had some bad luck. He couldn’t get the finance to do Napoleon, and the film he wanted to make around 1993 about the Holocaust [based on an adaptation of Louis Begley’s novel, Wartime Lies] he gave up because he couldn’t stand it any more.

“It was far too dark. The SS papers were too much to bear. Stanley would lie in bed all day after researching this stuff because he didn’t think it was worth getting up. It’s the only film I persuaded him to leave alone.

“He gave up officially after two years’ work because Steven Spielberg [a good friend] had started shooting Schindler’s List. But I think in truth he would have given up anyway and I was very glad of that.”

This can’t have been easy for a director with legendary stamina. “Even though he died at 70 he probably lived much longer than most people because he only ever slept for four or five hours a night,” says Christiane. “If people were ever exhausted by him it was never intentional. He just didn’t get tired.”

Did she find that difficult? “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she admits. “Yes it was. During most of our marriage I fell asleep first and woke up after him. He didn’t like that very much. He would end up talking to people in California in the middle of the night.”

Kubrick is arguably destined to be most keenly remembered for his provocative visions of the future in films such as Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A.I. — a movie he hatched with Spielberg in mind to direct as long ago as 1989. Spielberg eventually shot and filmed the final version after Kubrick’s death on March 7, 1999. “If there is a theme that runs throughout Stanley’s films it involves people making enormous mistakes even though we’re aware that the choices they make are probably wrong. We are betrayed by brains that are too small. Our frustration and wickedness possibly derives from that fact.”

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I ask her if she has ever been tempted to make a film herself. “No. My brother, Jan Harlan, made a very good documentary about Stanley called A Life in Pictures (2001). Warner Brothers wanted to make a picture about Stanley after he died, and we were just sitting here crying,” she gestures around the library, “and we realised that if we didn’t respond, some total stranger would do it. So we decided to do it ourselves. We knew at least it would be true.

“You have to realise that the press enjoyed portraying Stanley as a sour, woman-hating hermit, which was semi-funny when he was alive, but incredibly painful after his death. The reason Stanley didn’t give press interviews is that he thought he had absolutely no talent for it — certainly not chat shows or anything scary like that.

“It wasn’t coyness, or ‘I’m too wonderful to speak’ arrogance. Nothing of the kind. One day he was sent an article to correct and he said OK. He sat at his desk and after an hour he said to me: ‘Perhaps I should just cross out the lot and say No, no, in truth I’m good, kind, wonderful, charming, and brilliant.’ ”

She laughs. “You can’t praise yourself, and yet you feel a complete Charlie about how you are going to appear in print.”

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb will be screened on Oct 27 on TCM (3pm). The Shining will be shown by TCM on Oct 27 (9pm).

Dr Strangelove will be shown at the The Times BFI London Film Festival on Oct 29. See: timesonline.co.uk/lff