Friday, May 31, 2013

Stanley Kubrick to Anthony Burgess

In 1968, shortly after finishing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick began work on what he would later predict to be "the best movie ever made" — a meticulously researched, large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. A few years later, after adapting Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange for the big screen, Kubrick brought Burgess on-board to write a Beethoven-inspired Napoleon novel on which his epic could be based. In June of 1972, Burgess supplied the filmmaker with the first half of his manuscript; Kubrick rejected it by way of the following letter, thus ending the collaboration. Burgess was undeterred, and Napoleon Symphony was published as a novel in 1974. Kubrick's movie, however, failed to materialise.

15 June, 1972

Dear Anthony,

TI shall start off by saying I don't really know how to write this letter, and that it is a task which is as awful for me to perform for me as it may be for you to read.

You are far too brilliant and successful a writer, and I am far too much of an admirer of yours to patronize you with a listing of what is so obviously excellent about 'Napoleon Symphony'. At the same time, I earnestly hope that our all too brief friendship will survive me telling you that the MS is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon.

Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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