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Cast | Notes | Pictures | Transcript

Cast

Notes

• Special is 48 minutes long in Italian, played on Italy's channel LA7 in widescreen

• It is a history of the film, the time it was made and the problems surrounding it.

• Clips from - Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, The Scent of the Night (1998), 60s newsreels, Andy Warhol, Napoleon script, 2001: A space odyssey making of, Pulp Fiction, Blur - The Universal music video, Trainspotting, Clockwork Orange Gang (1974), The Warriors, Brazil, Escape from New York, The Matrix, Singin' in the Rain, Walter Carlos in studio, video games

Pictures

Alex in Korova opening artwork

Transcript

I'm only interested in those who worked directly with Kubrick.

Christiane Kubrick - With all that is shown on television now, what you see in ACO seems like child's play, it's nothing compared to what is happening today. You know, if a bad person does out something terrible based on an old film, it is not our fault, because if a person is bad you can't do anything. That person will use that as an excuse.

Jan Harlan - I think that the ending of ACO is absolutely fantastic. I think the sentence, "I was cured all right" is fantastic. It's a very cynical concept, very bitter, but the film itself is bitter, so it must be. Stanley has been attacked for having shown, for example, a woman raped in such a raw way. But I think that if you choose to represent anything like that, you must be terrifying. On the contrary you should be criticized if you show rape in a watered down way, because this is the reality, this is something terrible.

Christiane Kubrick - Stanley was absolutely determined with his producers. He was very interested in the strategy of publicizing the film; not as much as making the film, but almost. He was very careful to make it good. All of this fascinated him and he very much liked to play with these things. Several people thought, "but that's a lot of work" or that he would have found it boring. Not at all.

We had no idea that ACO would have caused so much outcry. Of course we thought that it would be successful, but the huge reaction it  had in England and the fact that religious groups wrote menacing letters against us, no, we didn't expect that. Months after the film was out, journalists were again in front of our house and we started really worrying about the whole thing. The police had asked them to be more discreet, but both I and our daughters were harassed several times and eventually it became impossible to even put our noses out of the house. It was very unpleasant. Warner Brothers was very generous when Stanley asked for their help and asked them to ban the film. They could've earned more money, but they said, 'OK, let's stop showing in it England' and we were all very grateful. No, no one could've imagined that.

Our daughters did not see ACO until they were grown because the film was forbidden to minors and Stanley was pretty strict with them because they scared and cried easily. So he was very attentive to what they saw on television, the books they read and the movies they watched. When children are 7, 8, 9 and 10 years old, you must be very careful and we were. Years later, when they saw the film they became dazzled and our middle daughter said, 'Dad, when people see your movies they have no idea how boring you are in reality", because she thought that he was barely interesting unlike the film.

Stanley heard about the ACO book for the first time from Terry Southern, the writer. He had just given up the idea of shooting the film Napoleon and had started to read Traumnovelle by Schnitzler and he did not know what he wanted to do. We were in America, on Long Island when I read the book and thought it was much more interesting than Schnitzler, which seemed very old-fashioned...in other words...I didn't like him at all. So I said, "This is an incredible book, please read it." He would have read it in any case, but he did so a few days earlier. It must be said that Stanley was on fire immediately from its plot because it contained all the fears that the country had at the time, all those things that we thought were going to happen.

Jan Harlan - We shot everything on location and we used a small factory room to create the Korova Milk Bar and the prison. Everything was done in Borehamwood. The street where the droogs frolic was between here and Borehamwood. So it was all a maximum of 2 or 3 miles from Stanley's house, except the University where we shot the scenes of the Ludovico cure. That was with a real doctor who was the assistant, so the man who you see put the drops in Malcolm's eyes was really an eye doctor.

Christiane Kubrick - Stanley liked having a real doctor put the drops in Malcolm's eyes. And when he complained Stanley said, "Come on, you can do it again!" because he thought that Malcolm was safe. When Malcolm was suffering and Stanley asked him to continue, it was because he had already asked the doctor, "Is it ok if we do it again?" and the doctor had already replied, "Of course, it's OK. Malcolm has not hurt anything." Only when he heard from the doctor IT'S NO PROBLEM Stanley insisted on going ahead, otherwise he wouldn't have ever continued.

Jan Harlan - Stanley heard the record "Switched-on Bach" which was a real revelation because for the first time a record had used the moog synthesizer and sold many copies and Stanley liked that idea a lot. It's the same reason why he liked the costumes, or the eye make up because it's stylized.

Christiane Kubrick - If you have a son who wears an ACO shirt, you must ask him why. If one day you think O MY GOD HE LIKES THAT MOVIE, Stanley would be very sad about it, because he wanted the film to be a critique, not as a work that would have some fans. Nobody could've predicted 30 years in the future and now children, for example my grandchildren, are exposed to a different world that did not exist then. They didn't sit alone in their rooms with their chairs, their computers, their easily bought DVDs. This simply did not exist.

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