Film Can's Open Salon Blog

you too

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:06:54 -0400

It’s not well known, friendship, but I spent 20 years of his life at the side of the great director (who passed away Sunday, March 7, 1999). On my kitchen walls hang a few framed photographs of Kubrick's family in their garden in St. Albans, near London, on my refrigerator, a picture of Nicole Kidman on the film set. I have a huge album full of photographs; pages and tells the stories of my friendship with Stanley Kubrick's. "It was 1968. I was 20, I was called to Abbots Mead, at the time the house of Stanley Kubrick, to Elstree Herts, an area outside London, where there were cinematographic studios. That first meeting with Kubrick left me with an indelible impression, just as strong today, of a calm man who never yelled. ("If he had to tell you something, he never said it to you in the heat of the moment but instead would let a few days pass and then bring up the subject, letting you know how he was thinking.") But he was also a solitary, insecure man, full of fears, above all in his relationships with other people. When he made 2001: A Space Odyssey, he saw both George C. Scott and Peter Sellars quite often. And he also really liked Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota. At that point he became friends with George Lucas and then there was Steven Spielberg. In 1980 Stanley Kubrick was very busy indeed with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in the making of the film The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, on the set of The Shining shooting of the scene in which the boy is chased through the labyrinth by Nicholson with an axe. 'It will be fun, I promise!' he said.", Kubrick appears as a perfectionist in his work. "Towards the end of the making of Barry Lyndon," I reassured him, but he asked me to stay next to him throughout the interview. At the end of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick began to think again about one of his old projects, a movie about Napoleon, the costumes for Barry Lyndon could be used again for Napoleon." after almost 20 years together "I advised him to look for another person, but he wouldn't have any of it. Only when I told him that I was going to work with George Lucas that I had accepted. George Lucas began filming Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1997, the custom-set builders and mold makers who'd polished their craft on the original Star Wars. Stanley phoned me on the film set meny times. It was Jan Harlan. That told me, that Stanley's dead.'" great film director (who passed away Sunday, March 7, 1999). When Kubrick died suddenly in 1999, Spielberg reconsidered, taking a 90 page script treatment and conceptual art from Kubrick’s estate and fleshing them into a film, as a tribute to his late friend.Spielberg at least tries to make a Steven Spielberg film out of this, instead of doing the greatest hits of Kubrick. The majestic camera movement, swelling John Williams score, and sentimental ending are all straight from his repertoire. The best parts of the movie are the visual effects by ILM, which render decomposing robots, amphibiocopters, and the sunken city of Manhattan with breathtaking splendor.In “stranger in a strange land”Â movies, the ones that work - E.T. for example - introduce a lost, misunderstood character who reacts to the world around them. These stories usually have a lot of humor, and at least some pathos, as the stranger tries to make sense of our ways. In the ones that don’t work - like Short Circuit - the humans react to the stranger, but inevitably, just get annoyed with it for making a mess.

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:06:28 -0400

In all those years of friendship with Stanley, it was impossible for me to distinguish the owner of an idea. This community, this union is one of the secret and fundamental aspects of the man and artist Stanley Kubrick, yet that never interested people. I can't imagine the work, the style, the quality of Stanley's life, without Christiane. It was a true model of life within a couple, more fascinating of anything else. Going to Kubrick's house was, every day, a show of familiar life spent sincerely. I remember Christiane painting "the green" of England, hot-colored works; essential that show the deep and sentimental relation between man and nature. I remember Stanley solacing his daughter Vivian, sad because she saw a cat killing a bird. "This is nature, honey" said the father to the girl. "We'll have to get another bird, Vivian." Kubrick's solitude and reserved ness can suggest he was a snappish, asocial and pessimist guy. There isn't anything falser. Stanley, really, was a happy man and he was full of humor. The truth is that he had found out the value of privacy. He had understood that only preserving his own private life he could keep the relation with his beloved woman pure, or enjoy his daughter's love for him and stay with his relatives and few friends. Always ant conformist, Stanley, with the extraordinary complicity of his wife Christiane, was able to build something our society has almost completely destroyed: a perfect model of familiar life. His greater and passional masterpiece. I miss the guy!!!! I was a young man just starting out in the film industry. I was just 20 years old I worked on the following film with Kubrick. 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) (additional photography) 1971 Fangio (Hudson); A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick) 1973 David Niven (Burder—doc) 1974 Little Malcolm (Cooper) 1975 Barry Lyndon (Kubrick) and yes only a genius of Stanley Kubrick could get away with staging Vietnam in London's Isle Of Dogs. The entire film was shot in England (Pinewood studios and military barracks). Footage of an actual graduation ceremony at Parris Island was used in the film, with an insert from England added to it. For the final battle scenes set in Hueh, Kubrick was able to use the abandoned gasworks town of Beckton on the River Thames. Researchers painstakingly went through dozens of shots of the real Hueh in order to make sure Beckton looked authentic, and palm trees were brought into the area to create a tropical effect. Kubrick also shot a scene in the Norfolk Broads where a Westland "Wessex" helicopter (flown by a stunt pilot) was required to fly low down along a canal (the area doubling for paddy fields) while someone fired a heavy machine gun out of the doors. The scene was shot at dawn and the local police were supposed to have warned fishermen but there was a communications problem. The many fishermen were awoken by a US helicopter apparently machine gunning their "positions". The Wessex itself was subsequently damaged during filming when the tail rotor got pushed into an obstacle while the copter was parked.

Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:06:44 -0400

Before working with moving images I was a still photographer. Then I moved into filmmaking, in 1968 and fished up in 2005. I now have a studio is on the outskirts of Greenwich Village in New York. The studio is a corner of the mid-19th-century warehouse-cum-stable ''I kept looking and looking, and I kept coming back to Charles Street. One particularly sunny day I walked up to the roof and the sun was moving across the water and I said: 'O.K., let's think about this place.' It was pretty hypnotic.'' 162 Charles Street is a red brick building it is now a studio, office. The 2,750-square-foot studio (empty except for an enormous roll of white paper hung from the 16-foot ceiling) from the mezzanine and say, ''I never thought I'd ever own anything like this.'' In May of that year moved in, a late 19th-century building, which contained close to 10,000 square feet of usable space in the then-four-story space. (We have since eliminated a floor and added a mezzanine, bringing the total down to 13.750 square feet.) When we started doing the build work first two Meier towers, sheathed in green glass, house many notable New Yorkers and household name celebrities including Calvin Klein (triplex penthouse at 176 Perry), Vincent Gallo (at 173 Perry) and Scott Resnick (also at 173 Perry). Even Big Miss Martha once owned in these buildings. She paid $6,100,000 for the duplex penthouse at 173 Perry, but never moved in and sold the unit just prior to her imprisonment in 2004 that was around about the that the time third and final Meier tower, at 165 Charles, has been completely sold and many of its residents also have recognizable names including Natalie Portman and gallerist Barbara Gladstone. We stated moving in, I had all my own equipment, a truck complete with most basic lighting equipment the extra lighting equipment equipment we would rent as needed. On the day we moved in to the studio there was still building work going on inside the building and we had to park the truck across the road from the studio, on one of the many time taken the equipment into the studio, we had just come out of the build to see a dog with it's leg cocked up on one of our light stands, as we shout out at the dog we did not behind the truck was it's owner and the owner was Nat Portman with her dog Charlie she was just going for a walk down the street. Oh I am so sorry she said. I said if Charlie needs to go then he needs to go, she looked at me a said, do I know you from some were! At this point you will have to remember that the film crew is all ways told that you must never speak to the cast. This is the big thing the gap between the film crew and the cast. So I said something like, Oh yes we have worked together in three film, and Nat said. But that another story.

One More Time

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:06:27 -0400

In addition to the digital work done at ILM studios Episode one's far-flung locales called for special sets and home bases for the production. To this end, the filmmakers took over Leavesden Studios in the United Kingdom, creating a virtual movie factory under its sprawling roof. The facility's 850,000 square feet were converted to ten stages and sixty sets, plus extensive areas for floor effects, special creature effects and costume manufacturing. It even had its own rigging and fire departments.Leavesden, which was once a Rolls Royce aircraft engine factory and has the largest backlot of any studio in the world, truly was the ideal choice for the scale and rigors of much of the Episode I filming. "We were able to shoot and build at the same time, effortlessly and seamlessly." Filming on Episode I began in Leavesden in the summer of 1997, almost three years after Lucas started writing and his design team started putting together initial concept drawings and a year since construction had begun on the sets. The production then moved to the Caserta Royal Palace near Naples, Italy, for scenes set in the Queen's palace on Naboo. Several other locations had been scouted, but the filmmakers agreed that the Caserta Royal Palace, one of Europe's most beautiful and elegant structures, would lend an important realism and authenticity to the sequences. In the heat of summer, the Episode I team made the move to the edge of the North African Sahara -- Tunisia, home of the Tatooine scenes. Tunisia's distinctive traditional architecture once again adds exotic richness to the film's cultural tapestry, as it did over twenty years ago for Star Wars. The crew made minor changes at some locations, with only a little set dressing needed to complete the illusion of Tatooine in these otherworldly Berber structures. For logistical reasons, this move and subsequent filming had to be done in July and August, the hottest months of the year in the sun-baked desert. Under average temperatures of 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the crew built not only the set of a large town, but also constructed a village that would serve nearly 200 members of the cast and crew. One late July evening, cast and crew watched with fascination and then alarm as lightning flashed over the desert sky, followed by a wall of sand that raced toward them. By the time the team had reached their hotels, heavy sheets of rain began pelting the sets. The aftermath of this night storm gave the Tatooine set the feel of a post-tornado trailer park: Hundreds of costumes had been scattered across the desert, and various structures were twisted or even torn to shreds. Even some droids lay all about, broken and scattered like fallen soldiers on a battlefield. Early on the morning after the storm, producer Rick McCallum arrived in the middle of the wreckage and immediately began finding ways to put the production back in order. The cast and crew got into action along with R McCallum's we had the impossible under control by last afternoon. George Lucas took the main unit to find a relatively undamaged area where it could shoot. Costumes were dug out of the desert and cleaned while buildings and vehicles were repaired. Everyone provided help wherever needed and, miraculously, filming remained on schedule. Lucas himself provided perhaps the most hopeful assessment of what had been perceived as a devastating situation when he pointed out that the same thing had happened over twenty years ago on the set of the original Star Wars. Maybe, he reasoned, the fact that it happened again was a good omen. The production then returned to Leavesden, where principal photography was completed in the early Fall. Months later, and well into the editing process, the massive studios again served as home base when the filmmakers came together for dialog dubbing sessions and pick-up shots, whose need was identified by Lucas' evolving rough cut. Indeed, editing, which is Lucas' favorite part of filmmaking, took on an ever more exciting dimension, courtesy of ILM's digital technology. Lucas and his editors, Martin Smith and Ben Burtt, now enjoyed tremendous flexibility: They could actually create shots in the editing room by digitally cutting people and even locations out of one shot and moving them to another. "I could completely reconstruct and rewrite the story in the editing process," says Lucas

One More Time

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:06:23 -0400

Raiders of the Lost Ark is historically important because it marks the first collaboration between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the two most financially successful of American filmmakers. Released in the summer of 1981, the film garnered some of the best critical accolades in either man's career; it also continued their phenomenal success: it is now one of the top ten money-makers of all time. An homage to old movie serials in much the same way as are George Lucas's Star Wars films, Raiders is also derivative of westerns, horror films, war films and James Bond films. In fact, Lucas reportedly mentioned his Raiders story to Spielberg in 1977 after Spielberg said that he had always wanted to make a James Bond film. Raiders even opens with an initial adventure scene unrelated to the main story of the film, a device used in the James Bond films. Relying on Spielberg's TV experience and extensive "storyboarding," the elaborate action film was shot in 73 days in France, Tunisia, Hawaii, and the famed Elstree Studios in England, which Lucas also used for his Star Wars films. Special effects for the film were made at Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilms' own facility in northern California. Spielberg used English cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who worked on his Close Encounters, and editor Michael Kahn, who edited Close Encounters and 1941. Spielberg also brought screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to Lucas's attention. The primary distinction of Raiders, in addition to its constant high level of thrills and chills, is the vivid portrayal of its hero, Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford. As Spielberg himself has said, Ford in this film is a combination of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. A vulnerable but heroic figure, Ford's Indiana Jones also has a shadowy side. Indiana's search for the Ark which contains the original Ten Commandments becomes a dark obsession, a passion that causes him twice to abandon the film's heroine, Marion Ravenswood, played by Karen Allen. Around this larger than life hero, Lucas and Spielberg weave a tale of intrigue and adventure, full of Nazi villains, a nasty but engaging Frenchman who is Indy's rival and shadowy double, and numerous references to Biblical and Egyptian mythology. There is an atmosphere of evil and mysterious power, and a demonic transformation of many of the film's settings and props. Thus, the ancient city of Tanis in Raiders has become deserted wasteland, an Egyptian temple becomes the prison full of snakes for Indy and Marion, and the mysterious Ark of the Covenant brings fiery destruction to the Nazis. In the end, the Ark eludes Indy's grasp and is tucked away in an immense warehouse, a scene reminiscent of the last shot in Citizen Kane. Through the course of the film, Indy discovers that he is both free and bound—although he loses the Ark, he does get Marion. In this respect the film seems to be saying, True love or friendship is its own reward.