On the occasion of the DVD release by Warner Home Video of seven of Stanley Kubrick’s films in restored and resmatered versions with brand-new extras, we have interviewed with Jan Harlan in Paris.
How did you start to work as a producer with Stanley Kubrick?
I had know Stanley Kubrick before I started working with him for many years because he married my sister in 1966. I worked in a different profession then as a business planner, in Switzerland, in Vienna and in New York.
When I lived in New York, I got to know him very well because he was preparing 2001 with Arthur C. Clarke. I’ve really done nothing on 2001. I only made a music suggestion -Richard Strauss- and I don’t take any credit for that because I just happened to know it. So, I went back to Zurich, and then, much later, we stayed in touch all the time, he called me and asked me if I would join him to go to Rumania for one year on Life of Napoleon. I agreed and I looked forward to it. I got a leave from my company. My wife and our baby went to England and we intended to go to Rumania six months later. But Dino de Laurentis was preparing Rod Steiger’s Waterloo. MGM eventually got cold feet, pulled out and it didn’t happen. We had already the huge archive we still have, Stanley was a real scholar on this topic.
I thought I’d go back to Zurich but I liked to work with Stanley, I liked England, he liked me, so I stayed on to see what happens and… the rest is history. I learned a new profession through Clockwork Orange and also through Barry Lyndon. I always did job music, and legal and financial, that was easy, but the specifics of the film industry, I really had to learn. And then after Barry Lyndon, I really did what I did for the rest of my life, that is I negotiated, I got things and peoples, commissions and rights, it had nothing to do with what you see on screen. We were not a committee, no committee has ever created a great work of art, a painting, a novel, a string quartet or anything, or a film. It’s a cooperative form of working, that is true. But it was Kubrick’s films and he made all the decisions. Other people suggested things, I suggested music, I never made the decision. I liked this role, I liked it very much and I enjoyed myself.
So, that’s how I started with him and stayed with him and then even after we prepared several films that were never made, not only Napoleon but also a film on the holocaust and A.I. of course -a story he liked very much but after he worked on it for a long time, he decided that Steven Spielberg would be a much better director for this. Steven came right away and he looked at it but nothing happened and only after Stanley’s death Steven finally did it, and did great, thankfully to Stanley’s script, including the Pinocchio’s story about all things exactly as Stanley had planned it but of course he had to make it into a Spielberg’s film -it was absolutely necessary- and he succeeded and I think Stanley would have applauded it. It’s again a typically Kubrick film because it has many layers: it seems to be just a nice fairy tale when it’s a very bitter story. Humanity has disappeared, all gone, it’s not even mentioned why, it doesn’t matter. At the same time, the middle section of A.I. shows how people destroy computers, robots, and Stanley always said nothing can be stupid enough that it couldn’t be real as far as our species is concerned. We are able to do unbelievably stupid things, like that, and unfortunately he’s right there.
While he was a great optimist in daily life, he was very pessimistic about our species and he was convinced that we had no chance of survival. We are wonderfully made, we are miracles, the fact that evolution is possible, it’s the greatest compliment to creation that we can make. Still, it’s our emotions that control everything. That’s why we have no chance.
Do you think that sort of defiance towards emotions may explain why Stanley Kubrick’s cinema is sometimes referred to as ‘cold’?
He tried to be as factual as possible. It’s cold only at the surface: look a the end of Full Metal Jacket, there’s these poor boys… In reality they’re twenty years old, they’re boys, they’re not men yet, that’s why they are so good for the marines. We wanted to have eighteen years old actors because an eighteen year old man is almost a child -they just can’t handle it, emotionally speaking- but we couldn’t find them. So we had to go up to the age of twenty five and that was fine. So at the end of Full Metal Jacket you have these poor guys going finally home, singing Mickey Mouse, dreaming of the girls they want to hold in their arms, that’s what it is, that’s all there is.
What was Stanley Kubrick’s opinion about the video release of his movies?
He didn’t like VHS at all nor did he like ‘doublage’ (dubbing). He didn’t really particularly like television. But he would very much like now at least that modern TV [he shows the widescreen TV set of the room], good plasma screens, that format has improved a lot. But he still would like people to go to the cinema. No telephone, no interruption, no food, you know, because it’s a much better focus, particularly since his films need concentration. It’s interesting, for example, on Eyes Wide Shut, that in Europe, I always tell people, you have to see the film twice, it will be a different film. I would never tell this to a Japanese because Japanese people are able to concentrate and they can take everything at the first time. The Koreans as well. It’s an observation I made. There’s total silence, there’s complete focus when you go in a cinema. But in Europe there’s so much noise: popcorn for instance… I talked to many people about that and they said: ‘Yes, you absolutely right. When I saw it the second time, it was a totally different film’.
It took Stanley three years to make Eyes Wide Shut, you know. He found it incredibly difficult to make this film. Such a difficult topic. And have Tom Cruise -very good in this film- playing this permanent loser, whenever he opens his mouth he goes one step further into the hole, and his wife being really the saving grace, she’s like a guardian angel. But you can’t put it like that and he probably wouldn’t even like me saying it like this because it has to be more subtle, much more ‘vague’.
Who supervised the transfer from film to DVD?
The big problem his to determine the ratio. That’s the problem, and of course the ratio now, the new standard is 16/9, all the television sets are like that. So you have to live with the real world and you have to make a compromise and Stanley would have made a compromise. That is the only decision you have to make, the rest is just about cleaning the negative and doing it as well as you can, that’s the technical department’s job, they know how to do that, they don’t need me. So the only decision is the ratio and I’m always trying to really think in the way that Stanley would have decided. And he was somebody who went with the time, no doubt he would have applauded a big plasma screen and high definition. It’s so much better then it was ten years ago, no comparison. I can very much enjoy a film on television as well as on DVD but I also enjoy the theater experience -when I see Harry Potter for instance, I like 500 children in a theater, that’s much more fun! I probably wouldn’t watch it alone…
Would you think about any another director who would be able to direct Kubrick’s script of Napoleon?
Very tricky. Because Stanley’s scripts were made to be read by film executives. His scripts were not really a representation of the way he had the film in mind. I know from his others films that the scripts and the end result where very different things. Now, what interested him in Napoleon, is something that is not really reflected in his script and that was this man who was both tremendously talented, brilliantly successful militarist and politician with an enormous charisma and at the same time a fool, who only had himself to blame for the debacle for almost ruining is country, for destroying ‘La grande armée’ -that was the finest army that Europe has seen up to this point and he lost it all in Russia. Totally unnecessary. He took revenge for the tsar breaking the continental blockade, which he stupidly enforced to bankrupt England. He was a terrible statesman in the end and Stanley was interested, again, in the fact that we all are governed by emotions and not by our ability to be intelligent, educated. Knowledge, rational thinking, it’s all very important to have but when it really comes to the test, we are governed by emotions. We are not objective. That’s how we are, that’s our species, it’s a great strength -the fact that we are governed by emotions- and it’s probably the base for all great art but it’s also our Achilles’ heel. And he himslef would not exclude himself from that.