Word: kubrick
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Originally Kubrick, who likes to sleep in his own bed and likes even more to save the money it costs to house and feed a crew on location, had hoped to shoot the entire picture within a 90-minute range of home. He dispatched photographers to all the great houses within that circle, hoping to find the look he wanted. Impossible. He then decided to shoot in Ireland, where the early sections of the book are set anyway. After a couple of months there, however, the I.R.A.-or someone using its name-made telephone threats to the production. Kubrick decamped...
Still, things could have been worse. Warner's production chief, John Calley, was always tolerant. "It would make no sense to tell Kubrick, 'O.K., fella, you've got one more week to finish the thing,' " he says. "What you would get then is a mediocre film that cost say, $8 million, instead of a masterpiece that cost $11 million. When somebody is spending a lot of your money, you are wise to give him time to do the job right...
Calley admits he has no idea whether masterpieces are going to sell this season. "The business is, at best, a crap shoot. The fact that Stanley thinks the picture will gross in nine figures is very reassuring. He is never far wrong about anything." If Kubrick is right, he will be rich. By the terms of his deal with Warner, he receives 40% of Barry Lyndon's profits. Only one picture in history-Jaws-has made "nine figures"; it passed the $100 million mark last week...
...Kubrick, he is still working 18 hours a day, overseeing the final fine tuning of the sound track while keeping one compulsively attentive eye on the orchestration of the publicity buildup. It is something he feels he must do, just as he personally checked the first 17 prints of A Clockwork Orange before they went out to the theaters. "There is such a total sense of demoralization if you say you don't care. From start to finish on a film, the only limitations I observe are those imposed on me by the amount of money I have...
Much more often, however, Stanley Kubrick is armored in the serene belief that whatever judgment the public passes on his new movie when it opens next week, he has fulfilled the director's basic ideal, which is to shoot "economically and with as much beauty and gracefulness as possible." Beyond that, he adds, "All you can do is either pose questions or make truthful observations about human behavior. The only morality is not to be dishonest." Barry Lyndon fulfills that ideal as well...