Stanley Kubrick will be seventy next year. All things going to plan, he should see in his 70th birthday with the release of Eyes Wide Shut , starring those Hollywood darlings, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There isn't a project in Hollywood that wouldn't be green-lighted if Tom and Nicole agreed to star in it. But they've come to England to work with Stanley. Tom and Nicole consider it an honour to work with Stanley. They've adjusted their schedules to accommodate the fact that Stanley refuses to fly. He moved to Britain during the making of Lolita in 1964 and stayed. He got into the habit of monitoring the control tower conversations from Heathrow and decided that safety margins were too compromised to justify aviation.

All going well Eyes Wide Open should premiere at Christmas '97. It will be his first film in almost eleven years, and only his twelfth feature film in forty seven years of movie-making.

Kubrick is considered by the majority of film-critics to be one of the greatest film-makers of all time. His obsessive attention to every detail of his productions and his insistence on complete creative control are the stuff of legend. How he forced Ryan O'Neal, his lead in Barry Lyndon, to carry a man up a large flight of stairs forty-eight times, and then decided the shot didn't work and scrapped it. How he reduced Shelly Duvall to tears on the set of The Shining, with his military style perfectionism. How he personally oversaw the making of all the video merchandising releases for Full Metal Jacket , from the poster and video box designs, through to the Zippo lighter designs and the quality of the promotional army jackets with their 'Full Metal Jacket' logos. In an early edition of Film West we ran an advert for a local video emporium which listed A Clockwork Orange amongst its in-stock titles. Within a week they received a solicitor's letter demanding that the tape be sent forthwith to Mr. Kubrick. Reports flood the Kubrick website that Harvey Keitel walked off Eyes Wide Shut because of Kubrick's antics, that Tom Cruise threatened to quit after being forced to do a take 93 times. On top of the tales of intensity are the 'weird' stories. Like when he filmed Barry Lyndon in Dublin in '73/'74 he grew so paranoid about the IRA that he insisted on having armed guards on set. And when a disgruntled ex-employee phoned through a bomb hoax during filming in Dublin Castle, Kubrick left the set at lunch break without informing anyone, packed up and moved the whole production back to England. Five weeks early.

Stories abound of him showing up at cinema screenings of his films and refusing to allow them to sell particular seats because the screen was obscured or the acoustics were unbalanced from those positions. Then there was the dodgy old con-man, who travelled the world posing as Mr Stanley Kubrick throughout the early '90's being treated like royalty and becoming a minor celebrity in the process. The media painted Kubrick as a recluse, rarely seen, who spent all his time on his computers, checking on infringements, playing the markets and searching for the elusive 'next idea'. And there is the fascinating A.I. saga, which I'll get into later.

Let's face it; Kubrick is the nearest thing the film world has to J.D. Salinger, and like Salinger, his public has become more interested in the man rather than the work.

Most people with a reasonable knowledge of film history know that Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange (1971) from circulation in Britain and Ireland after a British high court judge ruled that the film had inspired two killings and the gutter press lit into him and upset his mum. Very few are aware that A Clockwork Orange won the New York Film Critics Prize for Best Film of the Year and Best Director of the Year and was nominated for Academy Awards as 'Best Picture', 'Best Director', 'Best Screenplay' and 'Best Editing'.

Of the twelve feature films he has made, Kubrick virtually disowns three of them. His debut feature, Fear and Desire (1953) (the only traceable print is in 'collector's hands') he dismisses as "undramatic and embarrassingly pretentious". The follow up film, Killer's Kiss (1955), an intriguing fairy tale dressed as a tough crime thriller, he also dismisses out of hand; "The only distinction I would claim for it is that, to the best of my belief, no-one at the time had ever made a feature film in such amateur circumstances and then obtained world-wide distribution for it." His only 'director-for-hire' project to date was Spartacus (1960) an experience he found fruitless and painful, though it taught him never again to relinquish creative control. Which leaves just nine films on which his reputation is built. But what films....

It's nice to know that you've a good chance of experiencing that wonderful moment when a cinematic image imprints itself on your brain forever when you go to see a Kubrick movie.

Be it a variety of futuristic vehicles performing a turning, orbiting, careering machine ballet against the vastness of space to the strains of 'The Blue Danube' or Malcolm McDowell, dressed like a perverse circus clown, soft-shoe shuffling his way through "Singin' in the Rain", while systematically stamping on Patrick Magee's rib cage with every alternate beat. Private Joker and his battle-weary cohorts marching against a dusky, Bosch-like Vietnamese sky singing the 'Mickey Mouse Club' theme song in perfect unison as the end titles fade up. Slim Pickens, wearing a ridiculous stetson, roars "Yipeeeee !" as he rides a H-bomb down to earth, Sue Lyons twirls her hoola-hoop under the watchful eye of James Mason and little Danny Torrance barrels along one of those oh-so symmetrical corridors in the Overlook Hotel, the wheels of his tricycle rattling out his progression on the wooden floor, then hitting a length of quiet carpet, then the wood, then the carpet then stopping dead before two symmetrical little girls in identical blue dresses....

Born in the Bronx in 1928, Kubrick worked as a photo-journalist for 'Look' magazine and spent four and a half years working for them before making a short film called Day of the Fight in 1950. It followed a day-in-the-life of middleweight boxer Walter Cartier in photo-documentary style and was bought for distribution by RKO. Delighted with his success, Kubrick quit his job and went back to college with a view to making more films.

His first love was chess, closely followed by photography. He played tournament chess but felt unwilling to make the total commitment required for championship level. Yet he sees a strong creative link between the two, with chess being a mental discipline and film-making an imaginative craft. " It (chess) helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive. Otherwise it is necessary to have perfect intuition - and this is something very dangerous for an artist to rely on. You have a problem of allocating your resources of time and money in making a film and you are constantly having to do a kind of artistic cost-effectness of all the scenes in the film against the budget and time remaining. This is not wholly unlike some of the thinking that goes into a chess game."

It is this logical yet lateral approach to his projects that many fans of the auteur theory find themselves drawn to in Kubrick's films. The symmetry of his camera framing, the symmetry of characters (or indeed objects) as they interact within the frame, scripts constructed on parallel patterns which themselves invoke chess games. An order and balance which connects formally with the spaceships movements in 2001 or the programmed responses of the young soldiers in Paths of Glory orFull Metal Jacket . Yet there is always a clinical feel that would not be out of place in David Cronenberg's films. Michael Herr, who co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket (1987) complained that he couldn't understand how a script that was so emotive on paper could have such an emotionally detached effect on an audience when transferred verbatim on to the screen. Alexander Walker, talking about the criminals in The Killing (1958) describes them as being "as human as Huston's but he (Kubrick) stays detached, cynical. Like a psychologist supervising a devilishly constructed maze, he knows it does not pay to get too fond of the rats."

Fans of film psychology point to the constant theme of brutalisation in his films, how his central characters always end up de-humanised by a society that has dangerously psychopathic tendencies. They point to his fascination with war stories; Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, Barry Lyndon., even the apes in 2001. Kubrick responds, 'Drama is conflict, and violent conflict does not find its exclusive domain in my films.' Alexander Walker calls him a humanist in that "he hopes that man will survive his own irrationality, but the intellectual in him doubts it." It is the combination of intellectual precision and narrative satisfaction that most clearly identifies a Kubrick film. The intellectual challenge of disrupting the time sequence in The Killing so that separate events overlap, while trying at the same time to push the narrative ahead in an engrossing manner. He is a fastidious researcher, arguing that 'film gives you an important reason to study a subject in much greater depth than you would ever have done otherwise, and then you have the satisfaction of putting the knowledge to immediate good use.' He spent months perfecting the quasi-English dialogue for Clockwork Orange, months modifying a Zeiss lens manufactured for NASA satellite photography, converting it so that it was 100% faster than any movie lens available at the time and all because the intellectual in him told him that to be effective as an historical piece Barry Lyndon had to be lit naturally, using only daylight and candles. But always he perfected his story, whether over two and a half years as was the case with 2001:A Space Odyssey,(1968) or over ten years, as would appear to be the case with A.I. In a 1974 interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick talked about having to fall in love with a story before taking it on as a film project. " I realise just how uncontrollable is the business of finding a story, and how much it depends on chance and spontaneous reaction." Though Paths of Glory and Lolita (1961) had won Kubrick critical acclaim it wasn't until Dr. Strangelove (1963) that he achieved widespread success. 2001: A Space Odyssey brought him to the top of his profession, but he hasn't had such an easy ride of it since. A Clockwork Orange caused an outcry, Barry Lyndon pissed off a youth audience who wanted more movies about 'little droogs' and 1980's The Shining was viewed by many as a flawed masterpiece. It took Kubrick seven years to come back with Full Metal Jacket, a film which has gained critical respect over the years but which received a fair bit of flak (no pun intended) on its release. And then ? So far, nothing....

When asked about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey , Kubrick replied, "There are about 150 billion galaxies in the visible universe. Eventually biological life forms will develop and one of these will be as ill-adapted to its environment as it is believed our ancestors were. To these creatures intelligence will become an evolutionary survival trait, and a process not entirely unlike our own should follow. Having physical mediocrity as the sine qua non for intelligence becoming a survival trait, these creatures will probably channel their intelligence along the lines of the tool-weapon culture and they will start on the relatively short road to modern science. "

That's not the way I remember it from the Christian Brothers.

Kubrick has used a computer since 1972 and had worked out his own 'Movie Magic' system twenty years ahead of the posse. In 'Stanley Kubrick Directs', Alexander Walker recalled;"The prospect of programming a computer would afford him the satisfaction of organising an intelligence fit for his needs - an intelligence without, he hopes, many common human shortcomings." The inter-action of man and computer first found its way into Kubrick's films in Dr Strangelove and it was this interest that promoted HAL 9000 from a bit player in an early draft of 2001 to being the pivotal character in the finished film. Many critics read the film as a meditation on the relationship between man's intelligence and the way he has used his tools to embody and extend it. Kubrick argues 'Once a computer learns by experience as well as by its original programming, and once it has access to much more information than any number of human geniuses might possess, the first thing that happens is that you don't really understand it anymore, and you don't know what its doing or thinking about. You could be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence." Twenty years later Kubrick was to return to this question with A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) a film based on Brian Aldiss's short story, 'Super Toys Last All Summer', or so the Internet rumours had it. There is such an air of secrecy over Kubrick that it is very difficult to confirm how many of these reports are true. Set on a futuristic planet earth the film would be a sci-fi thriller about a computer that becomes self-aware. No, it would be about a boy growing up in a society where artificial intelligence was the superior intelligence. Then it was rumoured that Kubrick was shooting the boy growing up in 'real-time', that is, that he had been filming it in chunks over the last number of years and has already completed a good section of it. The boy was played by Joseph Mazzello and when Kubrick showed the rushes to Spielberg, Spielberg cast him as the kid in Jurassic Park ! Kubrick was on the point of completing the project when he saw Jurassic Park rushes and was so seriously impressed by the digital image manipulation that he scrapped all his rushes and started re-shooting A.I. from scratch... from a script by J D Salinger ! (just kidding)

These rumours persisted, but no-one really knew what the story was until Warners issued a press release at the end of 1995 to say that Eyes Wide Shut had been green-lighted and that A.I. "believed to be one of the most technically challenging and innovative special effects films yet attempted is in the final stages of set design and special-effects development, and will follow Eyes Wide Shut."

What is known for sure is that Eyes Wide Shut is rolling if not in the can. Cruise and Kidman are married psychologists who are each having an affair with a patient. Nicole with Harvey Keitel (that is, until he walked and all his scenes had to be re-shot with Sydney Pollack ñ yeah, the film director) and Tom with Jennifer Jason-Leigh. A Warners release from Oct '96 confirmed that Kubrick is producing and directing it from his own screenplay and that it's a story of jealousy and sexual obsession. However a later report in 'The L.A.Times' by columnist Jeffrey Wells insisted that the script was by Frederic Raphael (who won an Oscar for Darling in 1965) and that it's based on an 'erotic' book called 'Rhapsody: A Dream Novel' by Arthur Schnitzler. Further rumours suggest Kidman plays a heroin addict with Britain's 'Independent' newspaper running a story about a Dr. Clive Froggart providing advice to the actors on how to act like they were preparing and injecting heroin. But the fact remains that to date Kubrick has produced only three films in 25 years. There is speculation that with A.I., the cinema's grand-master has finally met his Deeper Blue.

I'm sure the irony of it isn't lost on him.

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