Jan Harlan © TC
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a creative professional keeps. The ensemble, or the community of likeminded ‘clever’ and serious people on a given studio, set, or stage, is what Frears reckons as the irreplaceable asset to his creative work. Frears’ film repertoire is notably catholic. One looks in vain for a common tone, subject, or style. To gauge from this interview, this eclecticism stems primarily from the stream of new material - new literary matter, chiefly, and new faces on new actors - that keeps him well-furnished with raw matter from which to select the high quality he seeks. Asked at one point why so many of his film projects began life as novels (THE GRIFTERS, DANGEROUS LIAISONS, TAMARA DREWE etc), Frears answered that the choice to adapt existing source-matter to the screen was never deliberate. “There are just so many wonderful books about.” The theme of the value Frears places in supportive creative environments resurfaced in one of the interview’s more affecting passages, when the director shared his wry, rather bleak impressions of Hollywood (gained, there could be no mistake, through repeated harsh personal experience). “It’s very, very formal,’ he mused, ‘and very hierarchical. It’s a closed insider community - it’s like the eighteenth century! [And] it’s like a sort of game they play… they decide who you’ll get [for the film]. It’s all rather beyond your control.” Returning to the UK seemed much the sensible move. This keenly interested man, an inveterate observer and documenter of human relations however humble, clearly had better things to do with his time. Emma Firestone Stephen Frears: Looking Back took place on Tuesday 21 September
F E AT U R E
Kubrick Unboxed Ian Christie and Jan harlan lift the lid on cinemas unmade dreams
The great unmade films have seldom been the object of study in themselves, but rather a footnote in cinema history. But this year two truly fascinating looks at their history have taken place at the Festival. The first saw film historian Ian Christie give a talk on the history of unmade cinema, in which he suggested that not only does the study of unrealised projects provide an important insight into how all movies are made, but also that these projects can often help reshape our view of certain filmmakers. It was this latter point that the second event really delved into, with a talk dedicated to arguably the greatest of all the unmade movies: Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously researched Napoleon biopic. A project MGM pulled the plug on mere weeks away from shooting in Romania, due to the oncoming presence on the 1970 film WATERLOO; although Kubrick’s film was set to be far more extensive than that movie, as he planned to show Napoleon as a man, serving as the ultimate example of humanity’s capacity for equal amounts of genius and stupidity. Kubrick’s producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan was on hand to discuss his personal experience working on the project (which actually provided his first occasion working with the filmmaker). He was joined by Alison Castle, the author of the groundbreaking Tachen volume, The Stanley Kubrick Archives – as well as a more recent, and even more extensive book focussed on the doomed Napoleon project. The talk provided a tantalising glimpse of images from the Napoleon archive: a work of unprecedented research for a film, containing thousands upon thousands of reference drawings, history books, location photographs and an entire
trunk of screenplay treatments. Most impressive of all is the great wooden chest of drawers which contains a number of small cards accounting for every single day in Napoleon’s life – which allowed the filmmaker to find out where the emperor, and any member of his extensive entourage, were at any given time and with relative ease. Castle described it as being the 1970s equivalent of Google, and it is indeed a towering monument to Kubrick’s dedication (or even obsession) for the project. It is a sadness that we will never see what he declared would be the greatest film ever made. Although Harlan revealed that he and Spielberg oversaw an attempt to resurrect it a few years back with Ang Lee at the helm. Lee decided to make HULK instead. But whilst he arguably took a wrong turn (at least if the audience laughter was anything to go by), sometimes missed opportunities can be a blessing in disguise, argues Christie. Had NAPOLEON gone ahead as planned, we perhaps would have been denied another remarkable work: “Kubrick had immersed himself so much in the 18th century that he wasn’t going to throw all that away – and he’d become fascinated by it. I’m sure BARRY LYNDON owes a lot to that!” Whilst on other occasions, projects that a director finds themselves falling into, perhaps at the expense of more personal fare, may bring their own rewards: “Scorsese is a good case in point... he was very ambivalent about making THE DEPARTED, even though that one finally got him the Oscar!” Thanks to people like Ian Christie, Jan Harlan and Alison Castle, unmade projects need not be viewed as total disappointments, and may now find a new life as objects of study and research. Even providing great enjoyment in their own right. Hopefully other unmade projects, such as Michael Powell’s THE TEMPEST, may soon find themselves objects of similar interest. We can only hope so. Robert Beames