”The German Lieutenant”
After delivering one of the most vital anti-war movies of all time in 1957 with “Paths Of Glory,” a year later Kubrick was tinkering with the idea of doing another one. Shifting focus to World War II, Kubrick wanted to tell a story from the German point of view, and he teamed with former paratrooper Richard Adams to pen “The German Lieutenant.” According to the book “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust,” studios weren’t too interested in the project, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating story.
Set in 1945 in the dying days of the war, the plot centers on Lieutenant Oskar Kraus and Lieutenant Paul Dietrich, friends and officers who are ordered to be dropped behind enemy lines to blow up a railway bridge. It’s widely viewed by the soldiers as a suicide mission, and Kraus even flirts with deserting but decides to stay with Dietrich who is enthusiastically embracing the job. But from the start, the mission goes awry, with the soldiers dropped in broad daylight instead of under cover of night, resulting in many deaths. But Dietrich plows ahead with the goal of destroying the bridge, even as Kraus argues its futility as the German army’s defeat is inevitable. The Germans are eventually taken prisoner, and kept waiting in the middle of the bridge by American forces, who believe (rightly) that it has been wired to explode but are still uncertain. Dietrich inspires his men to keep their plan secret, and when they are eventually ordered off the bridge by American troops, the bridge does indeed blow up. But is the mission a success? Was the cost of German lives worth it as the war is ultimately soon lost? With a coda that finds Dietrich in a tedious postal service job after the war, the implication is that his last heroic stand was meaningless.
While Kubrick would apparently later tell Jan Harlan he had no idea why he pursued this project, in an interview in 1959 with Film Quarterly’s Colin Young (collected in the book “Stanley Kubrick: Interviews”) the filmmaker shared what interested him about the subject matter.
“To begin with, one of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation,” he said. “Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallize and come into the open. Conflict is natural, when it would in a less critical situation have to be introduced almost as a contrivance, and would thus appear forced, or — even worse — false. Eisenstein, in his theoretical writings about dramatic structure, was often guilty of oversimplification. The black and white contrasts of ‘Alexander Nevsky’ do not fit all drama. But war does permit this kind of contrast — and spectacle. And within these contrasts, you can begin to apply some of the possibilities of film — of the sort explored by Eisenstein.”
Kubrick would move on to other projects, but you can see what he might have intended with “The German Lieutenant” by reading the script right here.
“A.I.”
The only “unmade” Kubrick project to get produced so far, this is still a sore spot for many fans of the filmmaker, with some unfairly criticizing Steven Spielberg for supposedly softening what they feel would’ve been a darker story under Kubrick’s guidance. But that isn’t necessarily the case.
The film, about an 11-year-old boy robot who longs to be real and earn the love of his human “mother,” first came onto Kubrick’s slate in the 1970s when he commissioned Brian Aldiss, who wrote the short story the film is inspired by, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” to pen a treatment. Development continued over the years, and it’s widely believed Kubrick was waiting for the right technology to come along to make the movie, but according to “Stanley Kubrick: A Biography” his interest was reignited in the material thanks to something else.
The director was approached by producer Julia Phillips to make “Interview With A Vampire,” with financing coming from record mogul David Geffen. Kubrick declined but decided to take another stab at the fantasy genre with ‘Super-Toys’ and contacted Aldiss once again. The two had previously disagreed on how to approach the material back in the ‘70s, with Aldiss sharing: “Stanley was intrigued by the story, but then ‘Star Wars’ came out…and it was clear he was very jealous of ‘Star Wars.’ He didn’t think it was as good as ‘2001.’”
Kubrick wished to make a better sci-fi film, but Aldiss soon saw through his intentions. “He said that what we really wanted was a whole lot of archetypical situations: a poor young boy who somehow had to make good, and had to fight some terrible evil in order to win the hand of the princess. Then we realized we were actually describing ‘Star Wars.’”
Aldiss and the filmmaker couldn’t seem to get on the same page, and the writer claims the influence of “E.T.” inspired Kubrick to take the movie into the territory of fable. “I couldn’t see how we could turn this vignette into a film. We stuck at it for a while, but it wasn’t working. Then, gradually, I realized; this wasn’t ‘Star Wars,’ it wasn’t ‘E.T.’ It was fucking ‘Pinocchio’! The Blue Fairy! I worked with him for about six weeks, and I couldn’t get rid of that Blue Fairy.”
Aldiss stayed on to consult, and Kubrick dialed up Arthur C. Clarke for his input, and on his suggestion, Bob Shaw was brought in to help with the script. According to Shaw, Kubrick gave him a copy of Aldiss’ story, “Pinocchio,” and the book “Mind Children” by famed robotics and artificial intelligence professor/scientist Hans Moravec, noting that he wanted elements from all in the script that would now center on David’s father, some kind of robotic butler.
That idea was scrapped, and after sci-fi writer Ian Watson made an attempt with the material, it was author Sara Maitland who refocused the story on David and his mother. And what she came up with was slightly different than what finally appeared on film. In her version, David’s mother is an alcoholic, and the film ends with David once again experiencing a reconstructed memory sequence, with the young boy making his mother a Bloody Mary one last time, something he did through his life to try and earn her love.
But Kubrick had something different in mind, with Maitland telling The New York Times that the director “wanted a coda in which the new race of robots, because of a technological limitation, cannot keep the mother alive after reviving her. The movie would end with David in his mother’s bedroom, watching her slowly disappear.”
Maitland didn’t like this twist. “It must have been a very strong visual thing for him, because he wasn’t usually stupid about story,” she said. “He hired me because I knew about fairy stories, but would not listen when I told him, ‘You can have a failed quest, but you can’t have an achieved quest and no reward.'”
According to Richard Brooks of The Sunday Times, in addition to a treatment, Kubrick had also done tests with robots and even shot early footage with a young actor (who many believe was Joseph Mazzello, who was also cast in Kubrick’s aborted “Aryan Papers,” with some reports suggesting Kubrick was doing filming on “A.I.” every few years). There was a “provisional budget” of $100 million while (unlikely) rumors persisted that Aphex Twin was going to score the movie. However, Chris Cunningham — the famed music video helmer, who directed Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” — was tapped by Kubrick to create a robot that would “play” the young boy in the main role.
“I spent the entire year just developing this one robot head,” Cunningham told the The New York Times in 1995. Four years later he would direct the robot-centric “All Is Full Of Love” video for Bjork.
Spielberg’s film would eventually tweak Kubrick’s desired ending further, with David finally getting the love he sought. Kubrick actually first offered the movie to Spielberg feeling he would have a better hand on the material, but Spielberg declined, insisting Kubrick should make it. But after the director passed away, the Kubrick family once again approached Spielberg, and this time he accepted and brought the movie to the multiplex.