Intervju        TONY ZIERRA

FILMWORKER

Leon Vitali was already an aspiring young actor on stage and television in the UK when he unexpectedly landed the part of the foppish young aristocrat Lord Bullingdon in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel Barry Lyndon (1975). His most famous appearance in the film is the duel scene in which he accidentally triumphs over the movie’s swaggering anti-hero, played by Ryan O’Neal. It was a memorable performance and something of a dream come true for Vitali because he was already a big fan of Kubrick after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) and had then set his heart on working with him.

During Barry Lyndon Vitali had become fascinated by the filmmaking process in all its intricacies and subsequently he successfully applied to be Kubrick’s assistant. For the next 25 years, until Kubrick’s untimely death at the age of 70 in 1999, Vitali worked tirelessly day and night for the most crafted but exhausting of film directors, achieving not only in an unparalleled scholarly knowledge of the Kubrick oeuvre but also of the technicalities of film production in general. However, this came at great spiritual cost, as evident in the gaunt, haunted features of the man we meet in Tony Zierra’s Filmworker (2017) documentary. Now 70-years-old himself, Vitali is still overwhelmingly loyal to the legacy of the legendary director who somewhat ruthlessly burnt him out, leaving relatively little financial reward to his assistant.

Director Tony Zierra has long been fascinated by the potential of storytelling in cinema and has been preoccupied with the flip side of the American Dream since his first acclaimed documentary Carving Out Our Name (2001), which followed four struggling actors in Hollywood, and played Toronto International Film Festival. Zierra went on the road to explore America’s tendency towards violence and retaliation after the September 11th 2001 attacks in USA: The Movie (2005), while his award-winning documentary My Big Break (2009) focused on the darker side of fame and celebrity.

With Filmworker, Zierra delves deep into the Stanley Kubrick and Leon Vitali story with patience and intelligence, and with various witnesses prepared to candidly acknowledge Kubrick’s genius and human failings. Vitali, dressed as an ageing hippy, and retaining a beautifully deep, gravelly, speaking voice, otherwise comes across as a very likeable human being. The series of face-to-face interviews refrain from bitterness or self-pity as he recounts a quarter of a century working with one of history’s greatest film directors.

Interview with Filmworker director Tony Zierra at the 2018 Dokuarts screening in Berlin.

Camera Lucida: In the first place you wanted to make a film about Eyes Wide Shut, how did you decide to do this about Leon Vitali?

Zierra: I met Leon because I was doing a documentary on Stanley Kubrick and his career and also what made him do Eyes Wide Shut (1999), so Leon was on the list of my most important people to find. When I finally found him I was just so struck by that man you saw on the screen, it was such an incredible story, so unique. Then I realized I have got to do a story about this guy, but then taking a project from the one you are already working on is a nightmare. But then I realized I wanted to do it while he was alive so that he would be honored. I decided to put the Kubrick footage aside and do this so that Leon would be here to enjoy it.

Camera Lucida: How much work did you do for the other film?

Zierra: Oh, I shot it completely but then I figured that Kubrick is dead so he can wait and then this film came out when it was released at Cannes (in 2017). It was a bit nerve-wracking because it is an independent film. So I submitted it to Cannes and towards the end of editing I was told by the doctors that Leon had a week to live. So that was a really tough thing, and I submitted and really hoped that it would get in, and it did and so then he showed up and went to Cannes, which was a funny story. Actually, since the movie his health improved, and we went to Cannes and were told we had to wear a tuxedo. I had a t-shirt with holes in it and Leon didn’t have a tux(edo). I said to Leon ‘What are we going to do Leon, we need a tuxedo?’ and he was flying in. He said to me ‘Actually, I have a tuxedo in the closet, its Tom Cruise's from Eyes Wide Shut’. So he put it on and it fit him perfectly. He had a six-minute standing ovation in Cannes. His children were in tears. For the first time they understood what their father was doing and it was very emotional and beautiful. Since then he has been doing much better. Not perfect!

Camera Lucida: What was the reaction of Leon when you came up with the idea of making the film, how did you convince him?

Zierra: It was interesting. At first he didn't want to do it but I said ‘I know you are a silent type but I have this idea’, and he said ‘I am a simple man. You will be disappointed because no one is going to care and want to see it. I don't want you to put all the time and effort into making something that is not going to do well’. I said ‘Well, let me worry about that’ and he said ‘Well, I'll do it for you’ and I said ‘Good, do it for me’, and he did. But, when I showed him the film for the first time he never really told me anything or asked what I was doing and at one point I thought he was crazy because I said ‘If somebody came in to do a movie about me, and I'm not Stanley Kubrick, but don't you want to know what I am doing?’ and he was like ‘No, I really liked you the first time when I met you’. So, he's that kind of person.

Camera Lucida: I also understand that you shared half of what you earned from the film with Leon?

Zierra: Yes! He gets half of what the film makes. We haven't made a lot of money but because of his situation it's good.

Camera Lucida: It showed in thirty cinemas in the US and eight in the UK?

Zierra: Yes, it opened at eight in the UK and in the US it played in thirty screens.

Camera Lucida: And he came to some of those screenings?

Zierra: Yes, it's kind of hard for him to fly because of cost of course but he went to all of the screenings in L.A. (Los Angeles) and it was always a full house. After the screening he was always surrounded by a bunch of people, young and old. It was beautiful.

Camera Lucida: There's always the question of coming up with material. The public footage is quite easy to get hold of but I was wondering how did you manage to get hold of the private footage for use in the film?

Zierra: Actually, some of that stuff was under Leon's bed. In the beginning he didn't even want to do the documentary because he is normally used to talking about Kubrick and he can talk about him forever because he doesn't get tired. When we started filming he didn't even want to talk about himself and he didn't want to engage and I also realized that he couldn't even remember the details. So what happened was, his house is very clean but it is also messy, and it is like an archive in his house. It took a while to figure this out but the deal was: How am I going to get him to respond? I realized that, if I volunteered and organized the entire house, he will remember and he will also get a free cleaning. Everything that you saw in the shed, actually that did exist. There were piles of stuff against the walls everywhere and so I would bring a box for the stuff and suddenly he would remember and then he would start to say ‘Oh my God, I don't believe I did all this’, and it kind-of freed him to talk and so we moved all the stuff from the shed upstairs.