Jan Harlan thinks he must have had about 50Â 000 phone calls from Stanley Kubrick in a quarter-century as his executive producer. The director could be demanding, even difficult. But if the experience left him scarred, it doesn’t show.
“Yes,” Harlan says with a smile. “He could be a bit of a dictator. But then he was also a genius. That surely means he had every right to be on occasion. And you could argue with him. It was sometimes like a ping-pong match. He generally won, as the better player usually does. But not always. And he was a surprisingly good loser. To me and to many others, he was a very warm and decent friend.” Though Harlan doesn’t mention the fact, Kubrick was a little more than that: for over 40 years they were brothers-in-law.
Which is one reason Harlan was more furious than Kubrick when rumours went around about the film-maker’s “secretive”, “hostile” nature. Especially the one that had him taking potshots at inquisitive tourists wandering in his patch, then bribing them not to tell anyone.
He isn’t happy about the way the British press treated Kubrick over the last 10 years or so of his life – a kind of resentful hostility that sometimes pitched into outright aggression. But he admits that Kubrick may have brought it on himself by not dealing with the press at all. And he positively hated being asked why he chose his subjects or what his films were really about. “For him it was like asking why he loved his wife.” (The wife, by the way, is Harlan’s sister Christiane, whom Kubrick married in 1957.)
Harlan, who became Kubrick’s executive producer on the 1975 movie Barry Lyndon, has now made a three-part documentary called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. He rather agrees with Jack Nicholson, one of the many stars and movie-makers who pay Kubrick tribute in the film. “He was the man. And I’m inclined to think that underrates him.” He is anxious that his film should not be seen as a hagiography, although one of the few critical remarks is Woody Allen’s statement that he was utterly baffled by 2001: A Space Odyssey the first time he saw it.
Introducing a new 70mm copy of the film in London earlier this week, Harlan tried to help out. “On a bad day Kubrick wouldn’t answer the question. But on a good day I think he might have said the film was made by an ignoramus about the unknowable. He might have said – if he didn’t think it was too pompous – that he wanted to take the audience into a place that he actually couldn’t imagine himself all that well. He was really a self-taught and very learned man and he guessed that, even then, he knew very little. He wasn’t at all religious but he had a very strong sense that there were mysteries, within and outside our world, that he could never begin to solve.”
This was Kubrick’s modesty. His conceit was an obsessive desire to solve the mystery of making films, which was why he frequently took so long to shoot them. But though he often went wildly beyond schedule, notably with Eyes Wide Shut, he seldom went badly over budget. That was why Warner trusted him. They knew he would in the end provide something exceptional and that he would never abuse them financially.
Actors felt the same way. He had the complete support of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on Eyes Wide Shut. They never once complained, despite the length of the shoot. “You see,” Harlan says, “actors invariably liked him, and I think he liked them. He gave them room to improvise and think their own thoughts about the part. OK, it’s tiring doing 25 takes, but the point is that he was trusted.”
He hated bad films, but his enthusiasms could be boundless. He loved Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a kind of metaphysical relation to 2001, but also the totally different films of the Spanish director Carlos Saura, particularly Blood Wedding, which he sat through again and again.
His favourites included Heimat, Edgar Reitz’s vast 15-hour film about the inhabitants of a remote German village, and Kieslowski’s 10-part Decalogue. He was even persuaded to write the foreword to a book about the Polish director. The point is, Harlan says, he seldom stood as a judge on others, just on himself.
What about those 50Â 000 telephone calls? “Well, he was certainly no pushover. On the other hand, it’s good to work for someone who actually wants to get things absolutely right. He’d often give you a whole list of questions and, if you couldn’t answer one of them, he’d go on at you till you did. But you couldn’t resent it, because you knew he should have asked them. He was the boss, and I was there to help him. If that sounds boring, I must say I had an amazingly good time working for him.”
German-born Harlan started working with the American Kubrick in 1969, despite having no knowledge of the film business. Kubrick invited him to join him in Romania, where he was scouting locations for Napoleon – a subject the director had researched for years. But the film was never made because no one wanted to risk another historical flop after Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 epic Waterloo. Both then came to live in England. Harlan says Kubrick fell in love with the country and wasn’t simply attempting to escape from the constraints of Hollywood. “That’s why he was so upset when the press seemed to turn against him.”
So what’s Harlan going to do next? “Well, people say I should make my own films, but they forget one thing. You have to be talented – and I don’t think I am. Whatever they say, film-making can’t be done by committee. There has to be an autocrat around, and if he or she is no good, the film won’t be either. But I do want to make another documentary, this time about young classical musicians. My son is a pianist and it’s a fascinating world. But features after Kubrick? I don’t think so.”