Intervju TONY ZIERRA
Camera Lucida: There were many people in the industry that have worked with Kubrick over the years, like Malcolm McDowell, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. Did you have the time or resources to approach these people and what were their reactions?
Zierra: What I discovered was that, though you saw people in the film like Ryan O'Neal, Matthew Modine (star of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), etc., for an assistant many big actors in the industry don't want to come in and take part, but for Ryan he saw Leon as his co-star because he knew him as an actor and was very generous about it and we filmed at his house, so that was great. With Matthew it was the same thing because he loves Leon. But, yeah, I did approach Jack Nicholson but with his health and memory now he's not...There were a few very big actors who felt they were too big to come in to talk about an assistant and I think that is the point of the film because for some people it is a status thing. Even in the film you saw that he's not invited to LACMA (Los Angeles County Art Museum) for the Kubrick exhibit. It's wasn't anything deliberate against Leon, they invited all these celebrities because they are famous. It was really heartbreaking at times because I went to the exhibit with him and he really did go over forty times. It was crazy to see him stand in a line and pay for his own ticket and to walk around and hear him say 'I worked on that typewriter, I sat on that chair'. It was very intense to see but when he's in that world and when he talks about Kubrick he just lights up. My understanding or what I learned what he and Kubrick had in common was that they were creative junkies. They'll just keep on working and with Kubrick he didn't take care of his own health and that's how he died. It's all about work and I think Leon fell into that, he has the same personality.
Camera Lucida: This film looks like a nightmare for every German or international producer or distributor regarding all the archive material and private stuff, particularly for rights to use as you worked very quickly through all the material, so I wondered what the reactions to this were from the likes of Warner Brothers when this film came out at Cannes.
Zierra: Well, what I did in the beginning was announce that I was going to do a Kubrick documentary and I regretted doing that as I started to get phone calls and they said that I didn't go through them (those representing Kubrick) to do it. I said ‘Yeah but I make documentaries and if I want to make a documentary about George Bush, and I want to say what my views on him are, I have the right to do it’. They replied that Bush is a public figure but Kubrick isn't, and so it is that kind of thing. So, when I started working with Leon, I realized that I was not going to say anything. No one knew until it came out in the press that the movie was going to Cannes. The trick was that they can't stop the press, it is too late. It was everywhere and too late for them to say ‘You can't do it now’.
Camera Lucida: Did you have to cut out something from the film because they came with lawyers of course?
Zierra: There was one scene I had to cut out and that was where you saw Leon in a room where he was watching the cat on the monitor. We had that sketched in with some very simple animation. He was watching the cat dying and he was reading Eyes Wide Shut that night for the first time, Kubrick gave him the book to read. After it, Kubrick was really worried and disturbed about the cat suffering because, as you saw, he is a huge animal lover. So Kubrick had this idea and said to Leon ‘I want you to go and get the shot done for my son-in-law and I want you to put the cat in the bag and I'm going to shoot her so she doesn't suffer anymore’, and Leon didn't like that so I had to cut that out. It was one of those things that did happen and it was kind of beautiful, but of course there are scenes in there in which I was told ‘You can't have this’. You can't really take anybody's footage and be creative with it yourself. For example, with Leon at the end when he has to go to the Hotel and face the head of Warner Brothers and everyone after Stanley died, and he said that he wanted to finish everything the way that Kubrick wanted to, I wanted to use the scene from Barry Lyndon where he has the cane and he walks in and is going in to confront Barry Lyndon, Ryan O'Neal's character. I thought using that scene was perfect for that as he was going in and he was now a grown man and he is going to take on everyone, and they said ‘You can't because that's a creative choice’. But they were otherwise fine so I replaced it with an Eyes Wide Shut scene and I thought that worked perfectly because again it was everyone surrounding Tom Cruise's character and he has to remove his mask. So that kind of thing, you can't be creative with someone else's material, but you can use it. Of course, I didn't know that at first and I had all these ideas because when I sat with Leon in the beginning I said "How were you introduced to Kubrick?" and he said "Well I went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange" and I was like Oh Wow, I'm going to open it with 2001 and A Clockwork Orange and my producer said "Don't even think about it". But I learned that if you explain it to your lawyer, even though he said "Yeah, but he didn't work on 2001," and I said "If it wasn't for 2001 he wouldn't have given up his acting career to go and be Stanley Kubrick's assistant,” it was a big turning point, and so they said "OK!" It's that kind of thing where you have to go back and forth to explain why you have it and a lot of times when I submitted the entire movie you have to log every shot of the entire film and I showed them some 15 pages which is a big log. Everything came back red and red means 'Don't use it! You can't use it'. For instance, if there was a scene and I was using photos, if I was using four or five people, I would use four of five pictures to move around, and they said 'No, you can only use one or two’, that kind of thing. The last thing I removed was a picture I had of Diane Arbus of the twins (that inspired the famous twins in The Shining (1980) and in the film, as you heard Leon say, that when the two twins walked in the room, he right away went ‘Oh, Diane Arbus!’, that famous photo of the twins (Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967), so I showed the twins and actually Kubrick worked with Diane Arbus, so it is actually very respectful to Diane Arbus's picture and it was actually because of her photo that the twins concept came into the picture. Then when the Filmworker movie came out in the theatres, I got a letter from her lawyers saying that I was going to be sued so I pulled it out, I had to cut that.
Camera Lucida: I wanted to ask about his wife or partner, the mother of his children.
Zierra: There were several and he admitted to me that he's not very good when it comes to marriage. Again, you saw like when he slept on the doormat and that's how he was. He couldn't pay attention to anything else, so he was married three times and he had a couple of girlfriends. Some people objected to the fact that I didn't pick up on the kids, that he had a wife and children. He loved them very, very much but the truth is that world, it did exist, but to him it wasn't everything, it was all about the work.
Camera Lucida: What was the reaction of Christiane (Harlan, Kubrick's wife)?
Zierra: Oh I showed the film in the house, Kubrick's estate, and she was surprised actually. She didn't know the level of how much Leon did and because, again, what I learned in the film, and some people asked me, was why I didn't use another assistant. Kubrick has this kind of energy that if he had four assistants, everyone thought they were doing everything because they were so overwhelmed, but he was able to manage everyone, so anybody you talked to, they acted like they were doing everything. So when I showed her the film she actually loved it but she also said, and I found it insightful, that Kubrick and her were really puzzled why Leon did what he did. Kubrick never understood why an actor would give up his career and do all that work including cleaning after the cats. When you are an actor your lifestyle is much more different and probably, but not necessarily, healthier.
Steven YATES
http://doku-arts.com/en/2018/programm
