Stanley Kubrick: overwhelmed by his actors

Kubrick [left] was considered one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers, renowned for a legendary perfectionism.

But one of his most intense actors, R. Lee Ermey, the menacing drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket (1987), recently said, “Stanley called me about two weeks before he died [in 1999]. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of s**t and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him – exactly the words he used. He was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn’t real forceful. That’s why he didn’t appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to s**t.” [wikipedia.org and imdb.com 5 Oct 2006]

Nicole Kidman

Being shy is an intriguing revelation about Kubrick, and is an aspect of Nicole Kidman as well, who said in a magazine interview in 2000, “I am very shy – really shy – I even had a stutter as a kid, which I slowly got over, but I still regress into that shyness. So I don’t like walking into a crowded restaurant by myself; I don’t like going to a party by myself.”

Celebrity and narcissism

But maybe at a certain level fame and power can not only overcome shyness, but cause some people [such as Kidman and her then-husband Tom Cruise?] to experience personality distortions such as entitlement that led to the problems Kubrick and the film suffered.

In the article Acquired Situational Narcissism, Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School says celebrities can acquire common symptoms of classical narcissism, a personality disorder whose symptoms include lack of empathy, grandiose fantasies, excessive need for approval, rage, social isolation and depression.

“Celebrities are different,” says Millman. “They’re not normal. And why would they feel normal when every person in the world who deals with them treats them as if they’re not?”

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
introversion / shyness
ego / narcissism
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Stanley Kubrick, dealing with fame, gifted and shy, celebrity and narcissism

He was an unusual sort, obsessive, but gripped by the power and the beauty of sheer computation. I think that was a driving force behind what he did.

Once Newton (1642-1727) was onto something, he was gripped by it and he worked at it and worked at it and worked at it until he could solve it or until he had to give up. In other words, it was the quest to reach a solution, to break the problem, that gripped him. It’s the same kind of thing that motivates scientists today in very much the same way, only he was maybe more extreme and successful than many. ///

Was he a nice guy? No, he probably was not. He led a very self-confined, solitary existence. He didn’t seem to care that much, at least in his youth, about other people. He certainly didn’t, at least until the 1690s, have any significant relationships with anybody else.

Comments by Dr. Jed Buchwald, an historian of physics and professor of history at the California Institute of Technology – from PBS/Nova program Newton’s Dark Secrets

related book: Newton’s Apple: Isaac Newton and the English Scientific Renaissance, by Peter Aughton

related article: In Praise of Positive Obsessions – by Eric Maisel, PhD
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creative obsession, gifted adults characteristics, gifted adult information, exceptional abilities, positive obsessions