What It Was Like To Film Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s Final Film [Exclusive Interview]

At this point, Stanley Kubrick has this sort of mythical status surrounding him, but you really worked with him. You worked with him for several years: You were a gaffer on “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining,” and then of course you did “Eyes Wide Shut.” So I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about what it was like really working with this guy who’s become this legend.

Well, of course when I first met him, which as you rightly say, was on “Barry Lyndon,” I didn’t know then — I was quite a young technician, early twenties. I mean, I knew about him, but I didn’t know about him. You know what I mean? Sometimes you know about people, but you don’t really know. You just hear some stuff and the work that he’s done, but you don’t really know too much about him. And that was the case for me. It took a while, because Stanley always spoke to a very few people on the set. The links in the chain were always quite short, because he didn’t want to waste his time going through various people, which was one of the reasons that I didn’t really speak to him that much in the early days of “Barry Lyndon.” We said good morning. But in terms of conversation, there wasn’t much of that between he and I. 

And then at some point during the filming of “Barry Lyndon,” the gaffer, who was a friend of mine, had some problems and he didn’t come into work one particular day or a couple of days, whenever it was. So because it was just [Kubrick] and I literally on the set all of the time and everybody else was kind of outside, apart from actors, I kind of got dragged into it. He had to speak to me and we had to communicate. Then from there on in, of course, we knew each other.

So that was my introduction, working with him. But what I did realize was that even though I didn’t know that much about him, when I first ever set eyes on him, when he first came onto the set as he pulled up in his car and I was looking, doing something near a window, and I saw him get out of the car with his assistant. Even though I couldn’t hear what was being said — I was maybe 50 feet away — you could see the reaction of the people. We were in a big stately home, so it was a lot of crew, and you didn’t need a lot of words there because you could see this respect that people had for him. So I kind of took that on board. And this was, as I say, way before I got to talk to him.

So I knew there was something here. I knew there was this aura around him, that people that knew much more about him than me had. When I got to the stage where I was speaking to him more, [a] few months had gone by, so I’d seen him working the way he worked, which was very, very different to any other film set that I’d been on at that time. The way that he tested everything, he used to use a Polaroid camera in those days where he would do various, or get John Alcott, who [was the Director of Photography on “Barry Lyndon”], to do various exposures on the Polaroid camera in black and white — a professional Polaroid camera, by the way. We’d look at all of those and put them all in a book and then decide what the shooting stop was going to be for this next take. It may change the take after because of the light that was coming through the windows in this big stately home. 

I’d never really seen anything like that before. To be honest, I didn’t really understand it, what it was he was doing, because when I looked at the book, when we had the various exposures in, I could see very little if any change, from my eye at that time. So that was kind of fascinating to me, what he was seeing within this Polaroid still that nobody else probably could see. He would say, “That’s the one, that’s the stop. We’re going to shoot at that.”