If you’re anything like us, even vague film ideas that the great Stanley Kubrick scribbled down on toilet paper or even entertained for five minutes are worth discussing and parsing. Obviously, he’s one of the the greatest filmmakers of the last 50 years, and even when Kubrick failed (“Eyes Wide Shut”), he did so with spectacular audacity.
So these new details on Kubrick’s unrealized film project about the Holocaust called, “The Arayan Papers,” that have come to light are rather fascinating. We have the British exhibit, “Unfolding the Aryan Papers” to thank — an installation by Jane & Louise Wilson, at the BFI Southbank Gallery (which runs February 13 to April 19 if you’re in London). Their exhibit includes notes, wardrobe research and period stills all culled from the Kubrick archives.
Ever wondered why Kubrick took 12 years between “Full Metal Jacket” (1987) and “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) ? This is partly why (though Kubrick toyed with other ideas during this time including, “A.I.”).
The meticulous filmmaker was so heart set on the project, he even cast a lead in Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege (The original “The Vanishing” from 1988) in the early 1990s that he thought was the bees knees.
“[Kubrick] was convinced that he had found an actress whose performance would catapult a new star to the forefront of international stardom and give this dark and serious film the needed gloss,” Kubrick’s brother-in-law and producer Jan Harlan has said of ter Steege.
Harlan said the actress was crushed when the project fell apart. “It’s like a young musician getting his first Carnegie Hall [concert] and then being told you can’t do it. It must be terrible, after you’ve prepared yourself for months and months.”
What would the film have been like? Perhaps a risky, arty and gray Holocaust picture? “It is not a drama that is over-the-top and has lots of action. It is a very silent film, a very serious film. The tension is in this horrendous, low valley of humanity that existed because of the Nazis,” he explained.
Remarkably, Kubrick was so committed to the project he was even planning on leaving his hermetic British existence to shoot in Eastern Europe to achieve the perfect locals (While not the shut-in some portrayed him to be, the American born director basically refused to leave his adopted home of England, and famously had palm trees flown in during the making of “Full Metal Jacket” so the U.K. could pass for parts of Vietnam).
So why was the project ultimately abandoned? This film never came to pass is because of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” which beat him to the punch and made the obsessive perfectionist director scrap his plans even after years of work and research (and The Independent notes that he tried to make a Holocaust film for over 20 years and never really found a script that satisfied him until the ’90s)
News had filtered through of Steven Spielberg’s plans for “Schindler’s List.” Kubrick and the top brass at Warner Brothers were worried that “The Aryan Papers” would suffer commercially if it appeared after Spielberg’s movie. It was widely accepted that the box office for his earlier Vietnam war-themed feature “Full Metal Jacket” had been affected by appearing after Oliver Stone’s “Platoon.” Kubrick didn’t want to suffer the same experience twice. The audience, he feared, wouldn’t countenance two Holocaust films at the same time.
Ter Steege was heartbroken, spent two days in bed afterwards and refused to ever talk about the film in the press. Offers from Hollywood poured in and then evaporated once the project crumbled apart. It’s only now on the eve of the exhibit that she has finally relented to discuss the painful, “what if.”
“What can I say?” the actress said. “I don’t regret what happened. I still feel it as a huge compliment. [Meeting Stanley Kubrick and going through test shooting] was a wonderful experience. The ending was very painful. There was a huge future… then it felt like a huge balloon was suddenly burst. Then, that’s it. You have to go on. Not for the first time in my life, I realised that personal happiness has nothing to do with success.”
Harlan says that Warner Bros. still owns the rights to “The Aryan Papers” and its conceivable that someone could one day make it. “It would have to be really a good director. In the wrong hands, this would become a very cheap movie. But if Ang Lee wanted to do it, I would jump to the ceiling!”
Ang? Are you listening?