So I'm always caught in that dichotomy,
is the journey the most thrilling part of it?
Or is it, I say end result. I don't think you ever get to an end result.
You get to a result as close as you can get in the time that you need to get it.
And I think if you have a lot of curiosity,
you-you kind of never feel like you've completed any journey,
because you're always changing trains.
And you're always, without knowing it, on some other destination.
It's a conundrum.
I thought about Leon as a moth that was attracted to the flame
that causes the moth to burn its own wings off.
Stanley Kubrick was an incredibly bright light.
His seductiveness was strong enough for Leon to be burned by Stanley's light.
I'd seen 2001 just after I left drama school.
And I just thought it was the greatest movie I'd ever seen.
Then I went to see to A Clockwork Orange, because it was Stanley Kubrick.
Whoo-hoo!
When I was watching the performances,
like Malcolm McDowell,
it was so big, so bold.
And I thought, this is as close as you get to a theatrical kind of performance on film.
And it makes sense.
And how wonderful for an actor
to be able to come on and give that whole, broad feeling.
-J‘ I'm singin' in the rain I -When the film finished,
I turned to the person I was actually watching it with,
and I said, "I want to work for that man".
That's exactly what I said.
"I want to work for that man".
l was lucky, because I never didn't work.
l was doing theater, television, prestige costume dramas, BBC.
l shocked you, didn't I?
l was doing one-off plays, a couple of movies.
There were cop dramas.
Why should they want to?l live on the outskirts of town, middle of suburbia.
I think I did every single one of them that was being done at the time.
Not gonna bring her back to life again are you, you interfering bastards?
Were you, on the night in question, anywhere near that warehouse?
No, no, no!
l was doing sitcoms.
I was in London when everything was changing.
I felt I could be, and do, and behave the way I wanted to.
It was a huge release for me.
- Thy will be done, on Earth as it is... -Amen
May I come with you?
One of my agents had actually heard that Stanley Kubrick was doing a new production.
And he organized an audition for me,
and it was a film called Barry Lyndon.
So Stanley had the text sent to you.
And on the front of mine, when it came,
it had a little note which had what I later understood to be Stanley's handwriting.
Which was, "Learn these lines".
And when someone like Stanley Kubrick tells you to learn your lines,
you learn your lines.
A phone call came through, and my agent told me,
"You've got the role in Stanley Kubrick's picture".
Well, my head was somewhere out there.
Thanks, oh great ones.
I got a telephone call, who said "You should be at the White Hart Hotel at 6:00,
because Stanley wants to meet you".
And I was standing in that hotel foyer,
and suddenly, there was this little tap on my shoulder.
I turned round, and he said, "Hi, Leon. I'm Stanley".
And we shook hands.
And I have to tell you something.
When you shook hands with Stanley,
it was warm and gentle.
Just, like, a buzz went through you.
0n the first shooting day, l was a little surprised at myself
at how nervous I actually felt about what was going to happen.
He was given a long tube.
And he said, "Put an 18 on".
Now I didn't know what that meant.
But then he put it up to his eye, and said, "Okay, Leon, action.
And do it the way you think you're gonna do it.
I don't want any of this kind of saving it for the take".
And so we kicked off.
He was wandering around. He was looking through this tube.
He was getting up close. He was standing far back,
standing on a stepladder, down on his knee.
And then he'd change lenses and go through the whole process again.
And each time I'd have to start from the beginning
and keep saying it and keep saying it and keep saying it.
And then just about we were going to start shooting it,
he actually said, "Let's do something else".
Completely disorientated me.
I thought, "Oh, my God".
He was going to change the scene he was going to shoot.
When I walk in with Bryan, my little stepbrother,
and he's wearing my shoes, we did it over and over and over again.
And once we'd kind of found the pulse, the emotional beat of the whole thing...
-Madam! -...he just let everything go.
There was never a cut.
l have borne as long as mortal could endure
the ill treatment of the insolent Irish upstart whom you've taken into your bed.
It is not only the lowness of his birth
and the general brutality of his manners which disgusts me.
We just kept doing complete takes with the whole speech.
His brutal and ungentlemanlike behavior,
his open infidelity, his shameless robberies
and swindling of my property and yours.
And as I cannot personally chastise this low-bred ruffian,
and as I cannot bear to witness his treatment of you,
and loathe this horrible society as if it were the plague,
l have decided to leave my home and never return.
And that's really where I got the message.
This is what filmmaking is about.
As opposed to just shooting a film, this was filmmaking.
And I leap up out of my chair,
-and I hit him as hard as I can in the back.
And knock him to the ground, and try to-to throttle him.
And I hit him and...
And Stanley said, "You're not hitting him hard enough".
-I'm looking at Leon, you know
"0h, Leon".
But we did it 30 times.
And—And I know I hurt him. I know I hurt him.
I did n't want to.
But this was Stanley. "Again, again".
We broke for lunch.
He said, "Leon, don't go anywhere. I want to talk to you".
And I thought, "Oh, my God. This is it".
He's gonna say, "You tried hard, but it's not quite what I'm looking for".
Because we had three George the Thirds.
And the first two were kind of fired.
If you didn't know your lines, uh, suddenly you weren't in the picture anymore.
And a new one, actor was brought in.
This happened a couple of times.
You didn't make friends. You didn't know if they were gonna last.
He said, "Leon, let's sit down". We sat down.
And then he said, "I really like what you're doing.
And I like the fact that when we break to set up new lighting,
that you're actually walking around, going through your text.
And sol decided I was going to write a whole bunch of scenes for you
and keep you here till the end of the movie".
I almost passed out.
Can you imagine? Ay, can you imagine?
Although I'd worked on films,
you were always just there as an actor.
So you never really understood anything that was going on into the making of that film.
I started to sort of look around and just see all the resources.
And you see people moving these banks of brutes, like ten yards further in,
ten yards further back.
Angling them differently.
The costumes were being made and hand-sewn
in the way that they would have been made in the 18th century
and people talking about fine details.
And you see Stanley and heard Stanley talking to the art director.
So many people walking around. And everyone had something to do.
And they were doing something to get something on a strip of film
to make that single moment work.
I thought, it's so amazing
that one man's idea should spawn all this.
This goes into making a movie.
And that intrigued me so much.
- The raw egg.
But when you shoot with Stanley, you better have a dozen raw eggs.
But do you know what they gave me for lunch before that?
-No, stop it. -lt was...
-Scrambled. -lt was semi-raw chicken.
-And tomatoes or tomatoes.
And it was all mashed together. I was so vomitous.
But the moment I got on the set,
-and it was like nothing. -Yeah.
And then, Stanley said, "Give him a raw egg". A raw egg. Give him a--
But you know what he saw in you?
He saw a way out of the movie. He saw an ending.
-Yeah, yeah. -Some-Somebody has to get Barry Lyndon.
Somebody has to get him. Who can it be?
It was in July we shot the last scene.
It was sad to know that these were going to be the last couple of days of shooting.
I kind of thought, "Oh, well, this is going to be quite tough, actually".
I said to Stanley that I'm beginning to get quite interested
in your whole sort of technical side of it.
And everything that has to go into the making of the movie.
And I'd be quite interested to work in that area.
And he said to me, "If you really are serious about it, Leon,
do something about it and let me know"
And he gave me a Christmas gift, a beautiful art book.
It says, "Dear Leon, thank you for your great talent, energy and kindness.
Sincerely, Stanley".
It almost brought tears to my eyes.
It was so touching. A Treasury of Master Drawings.
- Barry Lyndon. -And then Barry Lyndon came out.
And I started getting invites to a lot of parties.
And there was somebody who contacted me and wanted to be my press agent.
And the more of these parties I went to,
the more people I met who just thought it was the most fantastic film they'd ever seen.
Wow! A Stanley Kubrick film?
Bloody hell!
This guy is going places, you know I couldn't believe it.
Things were kind of happening in parallel in a positive way.
And I was offered a season at the Royal Shakespeare Company,
which, when I had early thoughts of being an actor, I would have given anything to be a part of.
And I had offers for the National Theatre too.
But what I had understood for myself was the first chance I got,
the next movie that l was going to get to work on,
I would ask if! could work in the cutting room.
I'd make tea, anything. I don't care. I didn't care.
There was a Swedish-lrish coproduction of Frankenstein.
I talked to the director. And he'd seen Barry Lyndon.
He said, "I think you'd work well as Frankenstein".
And sol said, "Great".
I said, "I was wondering if, at the end of it, I could work in the cutting room.
Just get to know that process".And I said, "You don't have to pay me or anything".
And he said, "Sure, if you really want to".
Let me tell you about myself.
I started a whole period
where I worked in the cutting room
till the whole thing was assembled and mixed and released.
And so I did that, and I let Stanley know that's what I'd done.
I kind of started off very slowly.
He sent me a book which was called The Shining.
And there was a little note on the front.
He wrote, "Read this book".
And it was, again, it was like, "Well, if Stanley says I gotta read it, I gotta read it".
The phone rang, I picked it up, and the voice on the other end said, "Did you read it?
What do you think?"
I said it could be a really exciting project.
He said to me, "How would you like to go to America and find a little boy to play Danny?"
Yeah, how would I like to go to America to find a little boy to play Danny.
And I actually just, you know, just said no to every offer of a-a-an acting job, you know
Mission accomplished, is howl saw it.
I think I was rather amazed that he'd stopped acting.
Because I thought he was such a good actor.
And wanted to be an actor, and enjoyed it.
It's a paradox, isn't it?
He was at the height of his career.
And he decides not to carry on acting.
l was dumbfounded.
And he suddenly goes to the other side of the camera,
something I could never see myself doing.
I had been there now 16 months.
So as soon as they said I could go home, I fled,
thinking they'd probably try to call me back, sol fled.
But apparently they had some kind of, um, connection.
Why would someone like Leon Vitali, who was an actor,
he had his life, he had his work,
put all that on hold for another individual?
And I think because you recognize in that individual
something that you don't see in 90 percent of the human race.
He was, um, a master.
You don't meet that many masters in your lifetime.
You're lucky if you meet one.
Leon is one of the only actors who has ever,
you know, surrendered his, uh, career to work closely with a filmmaker.
Let's be honest.
Uh, a filmmaker of Stanley Kubrick's,
not only his stature, but his mystique.
And I look at a box like this,
and I just think, this is years of dealing with all the detritus
of what you have to do inside the film industry to make something work.
All the correspondences, and all the bullshit.
There's a lot of that.
There's footage notes about what's wrong with a print, you know
So you had to look at everything frame by frame and send him notes.
One of Stanley's manias was you had to write everything down.
Write it down. Remember to look at what you've written down.
You could say I spent half my time with Stanley writing down things.
We were always working with all of Stanley's titles all the time.
There wasn't a single one of his movies that somewhere in the world
didn't want to get a print of, and didn't want to screen.
Whether it was a special exhibition print.
I mean Finland, France, Germany, Sweden were doing Paths of Glory and The Killing.
And Denmark. And the thing is,
we were working on something completely different,
i.e. Full Metal Jacket at this time.
Oh, this is Danny Lloyd's. This is his record of times. I call it book of lies.
By law in England, they were very strict about child actors.
You could only film within 20 minutes inside any hour.
Stanley started to get nervous. And Stanley said, "I want you to keep the times".
Well, of course, this is where it becomes a book of lies.
I think, oh, when was his last day of shooting?
March 27, 1979.
- Good evening, Mr. Torrance.
Good evening.
Well, I went to Denver first.
The idea was that I would video every child.
We would ask them an initial set of questions that all of them would get.
There were 4,000 kids.
The biggest number were in Chicago.
The first thing I remember, I'm four years old.
And my parents talking in the kitchen.
Something about sending my picture in.
And now we had to go to Chicago for an audition.
We're underdressed.
And there's so many kids there.
And-And, you know, we don't have a chance.
And I said, "Hi, are you Danny?"
and he wouldn't answer.
For some reason, I got down on my haunches, you know, to get myself on the same level.
And said, "I'm Leon. It's all right.
You know why you've come here?"
He was sitting in the chair like...
that.
And his mum was saying,
"Come on, Danny. We've come all this way," what have you.
And suddenly he said, "Okay".
And so he took my hand, and we walked into this room.
Then we sat on a chair about a foot away from each other,
and just stared at each other like this.
And then he said, "Gee, I really like your suit".
And that was it.
From that moment, we were talking.
Boy, Leon was really so nice.
From then on, you know, we were like best friends.
Hello, Danny.
It wasn't even in the script that they were twins.
l was just looking for someone good.
And the problem with kids who come to these things,
they go to these children's stage schools.
But they were all infected with having an inflection in the way they talk.
Was like, "I don't know why you would--"
And you kind of thought, you know..
But I was getting really, really desperate.
And suddenly, on the very last day,
this woman brought these two girls into the room.
And they were twins.
And the first thing that went through my head was
Diane Arbus' famous photograph of these twins who look a bit weird.
Sol did about ten takes of them doing this.
And I went running onto stage.
"I got it, I got it! It's the Arbus twins!"
He looked at it and said, "Well, there's no question, is there? That's it".
Come play with us, Danny.
When something like that happens...
-Forever. -...it kind of speaks for itself.
-You don't have to say it. -And ever, and ever.
I remember Leon and l...
He would say, "Okay, color. Okay, now stop".
0r. "Okay, give me the scared look".
So I was able to tune into his voice.
He was my acting coach.
Stanley saw that it worked in that way.
If ever we'd, doing a running shot, a traveling shot or something like that,
I'd be the one closest to him behind the camera.
Danny, you gotta listen to Stanley.
Sol could tell him to do things like look around now, or hesitate.
Keep going, come on, scared.
"Look scared". What about the gun, Danny?
"Look back, look back. Left, Danny. Turn right".
Leon and I would be working together and practicing that.
Or maybe we were actually shooting it.
But Leon would play Jack.
Danny!
Yeah, this whole place is such an enormous maze. I feel like...
And then Stanley wanted me to work with Shelley, just run dialogue.
And the same with Scatman.
It's big, but it still ain't nothin' but a kitchen.
Do you remember the repetitive, the many takes?
Uh, kind of. I think the reason I do is because there was a bowl of ice cream.
But it was like a few days later somebody said,
"Oh, we went through five gallons of chocolate ice cream".
The continuity would be if you had to stop and start again,
you got a new bowl of ice cream.
And not being able to eat it all, somethin' to that effect.
You know, a five-year-old's mind was, "Hey, look at all this ice cream".
That is such a-an iconic character.
So many people strive to get to that level.
The most important thing that I would wanna say about that is that
I think that's the tribute to the job Leon did, and the kind of person he is.
Stanley had said from the very beginning,
"Whenever you're not doing anything specific, you know,
just stick by me, and you can come into meetings, and things like that,
and just see how things are done and how they're run and how they're organized".
I worked with John Alcott.
We worked a lot with black-and-white Polaroids to get contrast and density.
This is another thing.
l was allowed to bring my camera.
And then Stanley keyed me into ASA speeds, what you could do with them.
Push them, underexpose, overexpose,
all those things that he learned as a young man, as a photographer.
Also, he'd given me the job of doing all those location stills
in Chicago and Denver, and Kansas City, Missouri.
So we went to every hotel in whatever town we were in
and just photographed every kind of room that there was.
I went back with about a hundred rolls of film.
And he said, "I just want you to know, I think you've done a really great job".
And he just makes you feel so great,
because he's making you feel like you're a part of it.
Get him in. That you're part of his process.
That you've been an important part of his process.
Just get him in! Let him realize we're out of time!
Every day was full of a lot of different jobs.
l was in absolute heaven.
Mr. and Mrs. Kiget, Mr. Kubrick.
-How you doing? - And Mr. Woodland.
- If anybody met Stanley,
maybe talked with him for ten minutes or 20 minutes,
or maybe worked for him for a year, oras long as I did,
they're always going to come away thinking, "I know the real Stanley Kubrick".
He could meet somebody, shake their hands, and be...
"Hello, I'm Stanley".
And remember, he was a chess player.
I always remember the people who met him for the first time would always come out saying,
"Aw, gee, he's nothing like what I've heard about.
He's fantastic. He's so gentle. He's so this, he's so that".
I mean, he was the same with me when I first met him.
It was only when we got into Full Metal Jacket
and the responsibilities were getting heavier and heavier,
another Stanley came in.
Because it was, like, PW!" POW POW-
J‘ Kiss, me good-bye J‘
I And write me while I'm gone I
J‘ Good-bye, my sweetheart Hello, Vietnam J‘
Date, August 19, 1985.
Location, production office.
Stanley invites me to the production office to show me what goes on behind the scenes.
The first thing that strikes me is the lack of people.
This place is almost empty.
There's a guy here named Leon Vitali.
I've met him a few times at Stanley's house.
I think he's Stanley's assistant.
Leon appears to be a jack of all trades.
He makes notes about everything.
Sometimes he writes on his arms. One thing about Leon--"
When I was working on Full Metal Jacket,
I thought of Leon as kind of an Igor character
from, uh, Frankenstein, you know?
"Yes, Master". That he was-- That he was just a slave to Stanley Kubrick.
You kind of had to be everywhere at once.
It was just one of those things where Stanley kind of utilized me
in any way that he thought would be effective and would work.
It was the first time that Stanley had given me responsibility of casting.
There were thousands and thousands and thousands
and thousands of tapes that were sent over.
And it was just so much to do, you know?
I agreed to be Stanley's technical adviser
simply sol could get my foot in the damn door and audition for Stanley.
I wanted to be Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, no question about it.
I couldn't imagine anybody that could do it any better than I could.
He looked me straight in the eyes and said,
"Not a chance. I already have a contracted actor".
Well, it's-- The Marine Corps never did teach me to lose gracefully.
Good afternoon, sir. My name's Tim Colceri. I'm 32 years old--
I get a phone call from Warner Bros.
"Uh, hello, Tim?" "Yes, sir?".
"Come on down and sign your contract".
I think you have the finest role in the film.
And he reached under his desk, and he pulled out the Full Metal Jacket--
He said, "You play the role of the drill instructor".
I was looking for extras for the platoon.
So I went to Army regiments and just said, we're making a film.
We'd like to know if anyone would be interested,
and it occurred to me, Lee Ermey, he used to dress in his drill instructor gear.
I thought, well, why don't we do it sort of the way he used to do it?
Just stand 'em up. You give 'em their induction.
So we did that. And I was videotaping it.
So, and I'm thinking Stanley Kubrick's gotta see this.
And then! had a little talk with these people
and let 'em know that I might say a few unsavory things about their mothers and fathers,
their immediate family.
And that they should not take a shot at me,
because if they hit me, I would for sure not hire them.
Uh, what a dirtbag they looked like.
"What's your name, scumbag?"
I had a couple of 'em suckin' their thumbs.
Then I noticed this, that, uh, Leon was subtly...
He would tape them. Then he would come to me.
Sol says yep, it's workin'.
I ended up having to rehearse all this dialogue with Leon.
And Lee Ermey is out with the troops, marching them around.
And I started doin' that dialogue.
"If you have a mole, a bump, a scar, anything else protruding from your head,
and by protruding, I mean anything else sticking up outta your head,
the minute you sit in that chair, the--"
He goes, "Stop". I go, "What? It's goin' pretty good".
"It's the minute you sit down in that chair".And I went...
I knew that Leon would send the tape to Stanley.
Stanley would see the tape that night, and tomorrow! would have the job.
-PIain and simple. - You knew that?
In my mind, I knew that, yes.
I took the tapes to Stanley. I said, "You gotta see this".
He couldn't help laughing. I mean, he was falling about all over the place.
I pretty much was-was counting on being called to the production office
first thing the next morning, and I was.
The hardest thing I think! actually had to do on that film was go to this guy's house
and give him a letter that Stanley had written saying,
"I'm really sorry to tell you but--"
"After painful deliberation, I've decided to use Lee Ermey to play Sergeant Hartman.
I'd like you to stay on and play the helicopter door gunner,
which is a very powerful role in a very powerful scene.
Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick".
Well, it crushed me. And I didn't want to be around people.
So I could see that they... they were...
Everything became like a blur to me.
The TV was kinda blurry.
And I was angry, because! had that role for eight months,
that he couldn't come to me as a man and talk to me about it.
He sent Leon with a letter.
The caliber of actors who would probably sell their own mothers
just to have the chance at working with Stanley.
And you think you've got it, and then it, suddenly it's gone.
It was not an easy thing to sit through.
My heart bled for him. It really did.
"As Stanley's assistant, Leon is prepared to go for
and answer everything that might come up.
It's a huge undertaking.
Leon's face is a testament to that undertaking, a road map of sleeplessness and concern.
I love Leon, but he makes me sad.
I want to help him, but I don't know how He's chosen his path".
l was suspicious of Leon
when he would come to me and say that he wanted to work on my lines.
Because I knew that he was that guy that was back there in the shadows
who was speaking to Stanley.
And I thought maybe--
I think the other actors working on the film
thought that Leon might have been some kind of spy
that was going to see if somebody was smoking pot or somebody was doing drugs.
And so everybody was kind of a little bit suspicious of Leon.
When, in fact, all Leon wanted to do was make sure that people were truly, deeply prepared.
Everybody was on edge.
I realized was that each day that went past,
I could see and feel Stanley getting more and more sort of tense and nervous.
We had a-an art director who had a-a nervous breakdown,
simply because of the work that had to be done.
I mean, Beckton had to be demolished and then kind of built again.
Stanley assigned Leon to me.
l was Leon's project.
You think you're Mickey Spillane?
That's right. You think you're Mickey Spillane.
There's all the hours and hours and hours of these auditions and these tapes.
We had them transcribed.
And we actually stitched together Lee's role from about 800 pages.
Fucking— That's fucking God awful.
I know how hard he worked with Lee Ermey.
Because Lee's dressing room was next door to my dressing room.
And I—And I heard them playing catch with a ball.
One day, I pissed off Leon.
And there was a bowl of fruit.
He reached over, he picked up an orange, and he threw it at me.
I caught it.
And I threw it back.
And as we were tossing that orange back and forth, I started doing dialogue.
It didn't matter to him how often we went through stuff,
how much we went through stuff.
I'd have him lying on his back on the floor with his eyes closed.
Just say the dialogue.
And then speed it up, and speed it up, and speed it up.
So he was just saying it fast, fast, fast, fast, fast.
Sir, no sir! Are you a peter pumper?
Sir, no, sir!
I'll bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass
and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach around.
Leon Vitali, I--
He would drop me off in the evening, and then he would pick me up in the morning.
When I was there, he was there.
And I spent, anywhere, 14 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week.
It was amazing. He never slept. Stanley drove him.
If it wasn't for Leon Vitali,
I doubt I would have done half the job
that! ended up doing in Full Metal Jacket.
Now, you listen to me, Private Pyle,
and you listen good.
I want that weapon. And I want it now!
You will place that rifle on the deck at your feet...
and step back away from it.
Ahh.
What is your major malfunction, numb nuts?
Didn't Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention?
And that is the one that opened all the doors.
So... I haven't stopped workin' ever since.
It's been a great life.
They're done with the movie.
The movie's finished, shot, done.
And they decide to put the door gunner role back in.
- Action. - Then as we went through it, what you noticed was that,
little by little, he was beginning to find nuances.
- Any women and children? -Sometimes!
It really was a wonderful kind of process
of watching somebody get an understanding about something.
And then we actually went to the place to shoot it, we went up in a helicopter.
And I took a video camera with me.
And we rehearsed it. Because Stanley, of course, he wasn't going to fly.
And then Stanley arrived about noon, and we'd been doing this for about two or three hours.
And then they set up the thing in the outhouse.
And he went, "This angle's still off. Good, Tim".
-Get some! Get some! - "Do it 13 more times just like that".
Get some, get some, come on! Get it, come on!
Get some, get some! Yeah, yeah, yeah!
I got you mother...
And he just became a little bit calmer, but more terrifying for it.
Anyone who runs is a VC.
Anyone who stands still
is a well-disciplined VC.
J‘ Ho Chi Minh Is a son ofa bitch I
Stanley came in to me and he said,
"You gotta do the foots and Foley".
"What do you mean?" He says, "That's where you do all the footsteps,
and you do all the sound effects, and you do all this, and all that".
And I said, "I don't know if! can do that". And he said, "Sure, you can".
And that's how he always started me off on a new task.
If! ever said, "I don't know how to do layouts".
"Sure, you do".
- Okay. 4 am the Foley man.
Eddie Tise, who was our sound recordist, and l,
just the two of us, we did all the footsteps and clothes rustle,
and gear rattle, and everything.
Every bit of sound, including the hooker.
J‘ Somethin' you call love But confess- I
Could you, after Full Metal Jacket, do what Leon did
and actually switch gears, knowing what you know about Stanley?
Um... no.
I think I could not have, uh, after Full Metal Jacket said, "You know what?
I'm gonna go to work for Stanley". I'm too selfish.
What Leon did was a selfless act,
a kind of crucifixion of himself.
I couldn't imagine doing it myself. I guess I'm too selfish.
Leon was compelled to dedicate his entire life, 30 years, he spent with Stanley Kubrick.
Leon did for Stanley
what half a dozen executive producers and associate producers
and production managers and...
and drivers and tailors...
do on other movies for directors.
It was a real roller-coaster ride even through a single day.
And of course, the days were very, very long.
And when you turned in through the gates,
these huge wrought-iron gates which would never close normally.
They wouldn't-- Just never closed.
You'd kind of mentally hear this bang, you know.
They were closing behind you. You hear--I mean, I did. I did.
Fact of the matter was, "This is it".
There will be no "you"
until you start driving out of here at some point.
The phone calls you had to make early in the morning with the laboratory,
or Warner's in London.
'Cause what you know is, you're gonna be chasing for the rest of the day.
The thing was, when I say I worked 14, 15, 16-hour days, that was at the place.
That was at Stanley's place, the place where we worked.
But when I got home, it was all telephone work.
Was there a big staff on the estate?
No, there was me that worked, dealt with all the film, video, TV...
lab work and all that stuff.
You know, to do with his movies.
And then there was Tony Frewin, who looked after the estate,
a go-between writers, between them and Stanley.
And then it was Jan who looked after Stanley's interests
and legal interests, and that was it.
But you handled Stanley creatively?
-No, I never handled Stanley. -Really? Okay.
-Never "handled" Stanley. -WeII, reword it for me.
l handled myself
sol could exist in Stanley's world.
You know, you're there till 3:00 in the morning.
You're just writing these notes.
And that's howl learned so much about color timing.
Because I was with him doing it for all those years.
It was years.
Most of his grading,
he'd-he'd stop and start on-on the Steenbeck.
He'd come in about 11:00.
And Leon would be there.
So it was very much a family thing.
This is, uh, Stanley's notes, the maestro's writing.
All bloody night doing this. "Very unnatural color. Ryan's hair is not orange".
Fifteen pages of this stuff.
I'm sure their hearts sank
when they did come in in the morning and find this waiting for them.
Warner Bros. went through a time where every fax they sent you had that.
You actually started to hate Bugs Bunny.
You really did.
You thought, "Oh, this is another bad news fax coming through".
This was, uh, 2001, the video, VHS, with the notes that I gave them.
They hadn't followed my layout. I mean, not to the millimeter.
Sol had to give them these notes.
I did this one. There it is.
And then you open it up, and then you had a little booklet.
Everything had to be to the millimeter.
We even got Stanley to sign.
l was using a color copier.
Do you know how slow those things were? lt drove you nuts.
lt drove you nuts because Stanley wanted everything now
This was all preproduction on, um, Wartime Lies, a.k.a. Aryan Papers.
Hand weapons list, small arms, artillery.
Inventory.
Do you know, for every one of Stanley's films,
there were, like, 25 protection tracks,
for every single original negative.
There were dozens, and dozens, and dozens, and dozens.
The original negative of Dr. Strangelove disappeared off planet Earth.
-And the only bit of original negative you'll see
is just one little short when Mandrake has discovered a working radio
that tells him that there is not a nuclear alert.
And so for ten years, l was searching for that one.
That's why we kept a track of every reel of all of Stanley's movies.
And if we could grab 'em and store them and archive them ourselves, we did.
That was a full-time job itself?
Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Funnily enough, everything you ever did was a full-time job.
Leon put together, put together quite literally different trailers
for every country in the world.
They were printed here.
Stanley Kubrick...
They were checked by Leon.
-iAv!
And they were then shipped out.
He helped small production houses.
He delivered the ads if we needed.
All the minutiae that drove Leon into, you know, catatonic foam,
foaming at the mouth hysteria
were the things that other people in our company,
and certainly in the other film companies, hadn't thought about.
Didn't think about.
When it came to release the Full Metal Jacket in the UK,
Stanley intuitively
came to distrust the managing director of Warner Home Video in the UK,
going as far as to send people across England,
take photographs of the in-store displays and the store windows.
I went up around all these stores, and I took photographs.
When I told Stanley
"There's not a single bit of advertising in Warner Home Video's own building,"
you know, he just went fucking berserk.
I felt incredibly, um, responsible for this.
Ultimately, we remedied the shortcomings.
His attention to perfection could periodically be maddening.
Well, the reality, these were his works,
and he brought the passion
of an artist who wanted the audience to see the movies
in the highest-quality form
and to have them marketed properly.
What Leon provided was that link
between Stanley and this great behemoth that was Warner Bros.
Huge, huge, powerful corporation,
rather like a dinosaur.
Wonderful mass, power body, and a tiny little brain pan.
And what Stanley was doing, and it went through Leon...
was getting them to change things ever so slightly.
l-l never heard a word said other than, "Leon needs it. Let's get it done".
If anything ever went wrong, he said,
"It is your responsibility to make sure they understand exactly what you want".
And that could take two, three, four, five, six tries to get it right.
If I felt like I wasn't getting any response,
or people were kind of, uh, for want of a better phrase,
dicking me around, you know,
saying they're gonna send something, it never gets sent.
You gotta chase 'em up and chase 'em up.
He'd say, "Okay, Leon, tonight you get on the phone and you say to them,
if they're talking like that to you, they're talking like that to me".
It really felt like there was a kind of a loyalty there.
So sometimes, I'd get into my office
and there'd be a fax on my desk from Stanley
to somebody about some heinous crime that they'd committed.
Except it didn't come from Stanley. He'd typed my name under it.
Where I never knew what it was I was saying to anybody,
because Stanley was saying it forme,
using me as a substitute for him.
I never met, with maybe two exceptions, anybody from the offices here in LA,
even when he came over to England.
Stanley would stick me in a back room.
I think what it was, in a way, this, you know,
Stanley didn't want them to see what I looked like.
Being his, for want of a better word, spokesman, when I would say,
"We need to do this. You gotta do that.
You gotta do this. You gotta do that".
They probably heard my voice on the phone
and thought I wore a three-piece suit, six feet tall
and I had tremendous authority.
The assumption that people think,
"Oh, somebody's an assistant for someone, you're doing layouts".
-Mm-hmm. -"You're, you know, you're working with labs.
-You're working with restoration". -Mm-hmm.
You're, uh, casting people. You're working with the actors.
And sometimes I'm acting.
Was that the title you were happy with?
-Or was that-- You never— -Didn't make any difference.
You know something? When I traveled abroad,
and I used to have to fill in these visas.
They used to say, "Occupation".
And I always used to write "filmworker".
I mean, I'm a filmworker.
I'm a worker. That's what I do.
So assistant, to me, is nothing other than I am assisting somebody
to fulfill what it is they want to get up on a screen.
l was dialogue coaching and casting.
l was also in charge of shipping. Television. Sales.
This was all about licensing. Doing layout.
Video transfers. DVDs. Laser discs. Inventory.
Timing sheets. Checking of all these prints.
The trailer. Translations. All of that work on the timing.
There wasn't a print or a telecine I hadn't sat with Stanley,
made the changes and then talked to the lab about it afterward, for all his movies.
At first, you're like, "Oh!
My God, Stanley Kubrick".
And then you're like, "Fuckin' hell, man".
'Cause you're pushed to a point where you're like,
"l have no more".
You have to understand Stanley Kubrick
before you could even begin to understand...
what Leon V-Vitali did, does, went through,
what's imprinted on his soul and mind.
It's only when you understand that this remarkable man, a genius,
a nightmare, warm, caring, distant, cold,
expansive, funny, hugely intelligent, totally driven man
would do to make his movies.
Stanley's extraordinary attention to the tiniest detail
drove a lot of people away from him.
The production designer on Barry Lyndon
actually got taken off by men in white coats
because he couldn't stand the pressure.
He could be as charming as charming to you.
You know, where you think, "Boy, I'm on top of the world".
He's just patted me on the back and been very pleased about something.
And then the next thing, you can be shit on from a great height.
l was always scared of him, to be honest. I really was, you know
Because it was really cold.
It was like talking to God, pretty much.
But living in that environment, and working in that environment, you know, which was so intense.
And the intensity of Stanley is-is well-documented.
So Leon was as close as anybody was likely to get to that.
lf Leon would do one thing that wasn't correct, or what--
Nobody can do everything correctly. I'm sorry.
Especially when you're working with Stanley,
because there's-- it's so much detail and so much stuff.
It was his nature to always think that you didn't care, or you were gonna mess up,
that people weren't gonna be as invested as he is.
He was always waiting for you to fuck up, in a way.
So it was always like as much as you gave, that it was like "Give more".
And you had to give more, and more, and more, and more.
And that's why Leon got eaten up.
I think we have these ideas about what it would be like to spend all of your time
with one of the world's greatest film directors.
And then when you really stop to think about it, you think,
"God, that would be hell, actually".
Because you would never have your own life anymore, you know
Your entire existence would revolve around this one individual.
I'd say outside of the film industry,
Stanley's equivalent would be Gordon Ramsay on one of his,
you know, reality TV shows
where he's saying, "Oh, fuck me, fuck me.
Yes, fucking stupid. You know what you--"
Fucking look at me! Look at me in the eyes!
You're not as pissed as I am! You fucking ass!
I'm not sending that shit!
This is not personal. This is professional!
I'm sorry, Chef.
That was a piece of shit. Now put it back!
Stanley could be like that.
I mean, if he was mad about something,
you could bet that if there was a fault--
...you were done.
The worst part of any of those jobs,
was actually the time you left the lab
or whatever facility it was with what you thought you'd got.
And you had to have lots of alternatives.
And the whole journey back was, you know, really, uh,
"Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God. He may not like this.
He might not like this".
-I mean-- -Stress?
lt-- Oh, yeah.
They made a 70 mil print of 2001.
And they sent us this copy which was about ten points too green.
I had to go through every single frame.
The smaller frame here is Stanley's 35mm print,
color-timed to his specifications.
But you can see, they're so different.
And when Stanley saw it, he was just... apeshit.
I think that's the word to describe it.
Oh, I saw it, and I just said, "There's no way he's gonna approve this thing".
What a huge difference there is.
And how couldn't someone see that?
That was where! had a lot of em pathy for Stanley.
But then, I also think he kind of pulled that a little bit on himself,
because his temper was so vitriolic and so sarcastic, and so hard.
It took a little bit of courage to actually say the truth about any situation.
lf when we were watching the rushes,
I couldn't not say, "I don't think that looks quite right".
Because if! didn't say it,
he would say afterwards,
"Why didn't you say something?"
J‘ Happy Birthday Dear Jesus I
J‘ Happy Birthday... I
It was Christmas Eve, and suddenly, I was the only person left in the cutting room,
and everyone had pissed off by noon.
And I had to show Stanley these rushes.
And he came down in the foulest fucking temper.
And whenever! said to Stanley,
"There's flare in this shot or that shot," he said, "I like flare".
So I never bothered to mention it.
So we were watching the rushes, and he saw this flare.
And I said, "Well, yeah, but you've always said you like flare".
And he gave me such a bollocking. It was unbelievable.
I mean, he was just screaming at me.
And as soon as he finished, he said, "I guess you wanna go home now
I got some gifts for you. Come".
And so he walked down the hallway.
And outside his office was this box with lots of gifts in them.
He said, uh, "So, take it, and, uh, Happy Christmas".
You kinda think, "I can't believe this.
Well, this will be the end. He'll leave me alone now"
Until 1:00 on Christmas Day.
And that's when I started getting bombarded with phone calls.
Uh, "What's happening with this? What's happening with that? Where are we hour?"
And thought you'd finished the conversation. You put the phone down.
And nine, ten minutes later, you know, it would ring.
"What's happening with that? And what's happening with this?
And have you looked at that? And have you done this?"
It just went on and on.
Oh, what am I doing?
When you work as Stanley Kubrick's assistant,
general factotum, it's not terribly difficult to lose your temper.
lt's-lt's easy.
You have to have patience of a tribe full of Jobs
to listen to that kind of thing every day and take it
and understand from whence it cam e.
I guess he didn't feel he needed anymore
to be kid-glove handling me and my sensitivities.
It became, rig ht, you're here to do this
and you have to get it done.
Any kind of error or mistake could be just jumped on
and absolutely, you could feel crucified at the end of it.
There were times when l was a total dickhead.
And I didn't get it,
or! made a gross error of judgment or something.
As much as Stanley would yell at him
and be like, "Leon, what are you doing?"
"Oh, God, yes, Stanley. Yes, Stanley. Okay, Stanley, but listen".
Always kind of, like, keeping it low tone.
It was-- How many years were they together?
I think that the only reason that that could have continued for so long
was because of a deep loyalty.
That Stanley understood that Leon was somebody who had his back, that would protect him.
The few things that Leon has shared with me that he holds most dear to him,
standing on the porch of his house smoking cigarettes and peeing off the porch.
I don't think Jack Nicholson ever peed off the porch with Stanley Kubrick.
I think they had a unique relationship, uh, rarely found.
And they had this level of trust between each other.
Leon was like a part of Stanley.
There was an understanding between them, an unspoken understanding.
These are depositions I wrote
about aspect ratios that Stanley had wanted his films to be.
And I had them notarized.
Barry Lyndon, that's been a bone of contention all the time.
And I went through a day of hell
where I had all these people saying,
"It never was 1.77. It never was".
I mean, it's really funny, isn't it, that! worked for all those years with Stanley,
working on prints.
We had a special aperture plate that we put in the projector,
and it was 1.77.
You know, I mean, pshh.
Bit like Room 237, you know,
where people had their own ideas of what the film was about and blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, a picture of a downhill skier was not a picture of a downhill skier.
It was a picture of Satan, and you could see his tail behind him.
You know, when I look at the full moon, I don't see a man in the moon.
If you look on one side of it, I can see a French poodle sitting.
I don't think there is a French poodle sitting on the moon.
I'm gonna have to turn to Leon, and I'm gonna have to say,
"Leon, uh, was-was Stanley involved in the Apollo landings?"
No.
Task lists.
"Finish cleaning up projection room". About half a day.
"Go through my filing cabinets and reorganize". About one day.
"Clear up old library.
Finish inventory long garage.
Finish inventory in long stalls". About half a day.
And the stable block was a line of buildings 50 yards long
where everything was shoved into,
and I had to sort it out.
"Dear Stanley, this is now complete regarding stable block".
Was he happy?
He didn't even come and look at it.
"Leon, how could you get the couch so filthy?"
Well, it was the dog hairs of the dogs
who he allowed to lie on the sofa
on the Sunday evening he was watching the movies.
My appreciation for genius would probably end
when the genius told me to clean a room for him.
He would do anything for the guy,
and I would not.
I would, when it got physically difficult,
I'm hereto tell you I would probably say,
"Thank you very much. You're quite a genius. Leave me alone now"
Amongst my other duties is the cat compound.
How we kept the cats safe.
Stanley, oh, my God. He never thought animals had any guile.
And so when one of them was dying, it became a major, major problem.
There was this, oh, lovely cat, you know, 16 years old, named Jessica.
She had a fit, couldn't move.
I set up a whole video system in the house
so that in every room there was a monitor
where you could see Jessica lying there anytime of the day or night.
It just became obsessive. Just didn't wanna let her go.
And in the end, we called the vet.
And they gave her the shot she should have had weeks before.
-Put her to sleep. -Everything was a tragedy for him.
If a dog was dying, there was nothing else except this dying dog.
And I understand it. Nothing got done.
I had to keep with the work so that when he came back to it,
I could say, "This is where we are".
Leon is fascinated, and he's curious, and he's there.
Someone who's a Shakespearean-trained actor.
Someone that you can explain three-point lighting to,
and they get it.
Then you find someone that you can tell them about baths in labs,
and they remember.
And you've struck gold.
And that person is so enamored with you,
and they don't want to leave your existence.
That sort of thing is irreplaceable.
And if Leon had really ever seriously tried to make a break,
you know, for the hills, I think he would have been prevented from doing it.
He came in to my office and he said,
"Leon, I've just had a thought. You're not gonna go and work forWarner Bros., are you?"
l was wearing a Marine jacket.
My hair hadn't looked as if it had been combed in a week.
I just said, "Stanley, do I look corporate?"
He kind of smiled, and then laughed, and then he kind of walked out.
And then there was never any discussion about me leaving or him gettin' rid of me again.
When somebody would say to Stanley, and they would,
"I'd give my right arm to work for you,"
he would kind of smile.
Because I actually think, you know, he thought,
"Well, why are you low-balling me?
What, just a right arm? How about the left one and the legs?
And the body and the heart, and everything?"
If you said to him, "I commit myself,"
you just better make sure you mean it.
Othenwise, why would you bother?
'Cause you'll betray yourself anyway, in the end,
if you're not going to give everything you've got...
to what it is you're doing, because he did.
He gave everything he got to what he was doing.
And that's the most important thing.
And that's what I saw, that's what I understood,
and that's what I reacted to.
Friends, family, et cetera, everybody understood that?
I don't think so.
And why is that?
Because Stanley kind of ate you up.
You're in this strange world.
And-And probably Stanley Kubrick's world was stranger than most.
He was obviously someone who was so steeped
in the day-to-day minutiae of his own films.
He wanted to do everything. And a lot of that work got deferred to Leon.
And Leon really became his arms and legs.
And I think it probably took quite a serious toll.
He would not admit it.
He probably wouldn't say it out loud. M will, though.
Leon surrendered a great deal of his family life to the cause. Did he need the job?
No, he could have worked on, continued working, as I said, as a very good actor.
Stanley said, "You either care or you don't care.
There's no gray area in between".
So caring meant giving as much of your time as you had,
until you quite literally were too tired to go on.
How was Stanley with you guys?
Stanley? Yeah.
Uh, he was...
um, he was lovely.
He was always very sweet to me and Max.
But I always found him really rather charming.
Probably because I didn't work for him.
If they had a good day, then it became a good day for me.
If it was a bad day for Stanley, it became a bad day for Leon,
and that would be a bad day for me.
Very good. Well done.
Of course, I see a person who demanded a lot from Leon
and made life tricky for Leon to maybe balance.
And he'd be working, working, working, working, working.
And constantly working. Not a break.
And that would take all his time.
So me and Vera would do other things.
He would just be on the phone,
or by the copy machine, nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. And smoking.
And a cigarette and a cup of tea and just being totally in the work.
- It was kind of Kafkaesque, I guess.
Always piles of stuff to do that would never go away.
Piles of film reels to check.
All the stands for the video stores, and all the dubbings, translations and subtitles.
Piles of posters to check the color temperature of,
or piles of VHS's to check Hungarian dubbing.
Or whatever. Oof.
I get exhausted just thinking about those things, actually.
In a professional way, Leon never relaxed.
l know there were periods where he would stay dressed and sleep on the doormat
so he could wake up two hours later and go back to work.
Never being comfortable, 'cause then you might oversleep.
When you're working for somebody who's such a perfectionist,
you just keep going and going and going and going,
I think, until you literally fall over.
And I think there's been times when it's got to a point where Leon has literally fallen over.
Because he feels it's bigger than him.
So he'll keep going until he achieves
something close to impossibly beautiful or perfect.
It's something that just keeps driving you on.
That you need to have it again. It's almost like a drug.
Nothing mattered to him as much as the work he's been doing.
Because that overshadowed everything.
It'd be hard to have a single discussion, let's say.
Try to communicate, but someone is still...
somewhere else in his mind.
I remember feeling jealous that he always had the energy for other people.
Being a kid and seeing that I don't-- l-l don't get that.
No one works 24 hours a day,
but if anybody could or would, Leon's job pretty much encompassed that.
And he was certainly on tap seven days a week.
There was one day, I remember,
when Stanley decided we were gonna change the Full Metal Jacket campaign,
and Leon had to go through frame by frame of 35 millimeter film
to pull the right frame that just reflected the nuance that Stanley was looking for.
And on that day, Leon was in absolute pain.
He had an abscess in his tooth.
And he was taking a swig out of a bottle of, uh, whiskey to--
hoping that the whiskey was going to sort of kill the pain.
Leon had a lot of knowledge,
not only about filmmaking, but also about literature and everything.
And at the same time, he was a workhorse.
Uh, he'd do anything.
I mean, he'll carry logs for you.
When you're working with these kind of directors,
it's like you-you're sharing your blood with them,
if you're in the inside.
I think it could be like a drug.
Filmworkers are slightly different than other people.
And that goes for theater workers too.
They're usually there for the love.
They-They work worse hours. They're usually not at home.
And they do all this
with a fantastic capacity of creating a functioning social unit
that is extremely intimate within hours.
I remember coming in at night and meeting the negative developing crew
Precious negative. There's no light in the room.
Everything you do is by feel and by touch.
Once, there was a break on a developer,
and a guy basically wrapped himself in film
so that he could pull it over and quickly get it back into solution to save the film.
I mean, this industry has been built on people like that.
And you're not just doing it at this level. You're doing it at this level.
You're doing— You are at the tip of the spear.
That is an absolutely intoxicating and addictive environment.
I don't have an obsession for creativity.
It just is a necessary requirement.
You either love it so much you can't help it,
or you're a fucking idiot, or you're a mixture of both.
Are you obsessive about creativity also?
I don't know I don't think about it. l-l am creative.
l, uh-- l-l work a lot.
And when I'm not working, I'm cooking.
And when I'm not cooking, I'm fucking. It's all creative work.
I worked as an assistant for a very, very good Swedish director
in the Royal Dramatic Theatre for several years.
I did small roles in his plays.
And I assisted and did-- and did a lot of assistant work. And I loved it.
And after a while, you feel how he feels.
You think how he thinks.
And-And you learn to see what's going on with his eyes.
And that's a fantastic revelation as an assistant.
This was a vicarious experience.
I'm experiencing something through somebody else's genius or whatever it is.
You go with it, and you work with it.
And then you learn from it. And you get the hang of it.
And then Stanley would suddenly say, "Changed my mind. You're starting all over again".
What difference does it make to me?
I'm at the service of him, because he's at the service of his movie.
And the thing was that I wanted--
I wanted to be with Stanley, work with Stanley.
Do all that stuff. I just wanted to.
He was the most brilliant, fantastic filmmaker of the 20th century.
And how honored was I
to be able to work for him, hmm, for all those years?
l have noticed for a very long time, since I was very young,
that how--what kind of impact Stanley had on him.
How important that was, even though I didn't always like it.
But kind of always known that that was his, you know, that's what he needed as well.
My dad, who! loved--
I loved him--
he'd sit down at the piano and he used to sing "La Mer" to me.
It was just wonderful to stand there, and he'd be playing,
and he'd be looking at me while he was singing it.
You felt like, "Oh, this is just for me".
And whether he understood or not,
that song permeated me over many years so deeply
that it really became, and still is,
one of those beautiful songs I can hear over and over and over again.
During the first World War, when my father was a child and living in Belgium,
the Germans had come to his house.
There was just him and his mother there.
And his father was part of the Resistance to the German invasion,
and they'd come looking for him.
And his mother either couldn't or wouldn't say what she knew about where he was.
They took her out into the backyard and they shot her
and made my father watch the incident.
He was a very, very volatile person for the rest of his life.
What was the household like?
It could be explosive at times.
-Fraught, I think is-- -Yes.
-...is howl remember it. -Yes. I'm, uh--
-What, when Father was alive? -Mm.
- Yes. - Oh, yes.
You had to do just the slightest thing
to get him to flip his type.
I think we just tried not to put ourselves into a position which would engender any criticism.
I think that-that's really what we tried to do.
Uh, keep your heads down and keep out of the way?
He died when I was eight.
I remember it was a beautiful summer morning.
And what was funny for me, my mother and my older brother were painting the hallway.
And before I could say anything else, she just hushed me up.
And I looked at her face,
and I'd never seen such a peaceful face in my life.
And she said, "Go into your bedroom and just sit there quietly and think".
Of course I was thinking, "Well, we'll never go to the cinema with him again.
We'll never walk down to the sweet shop on a Sunday morning with him again".
And then you also thought, "Well, I won't ever get slapped by him again.
And I won't have to watch him trying to kill my eldest brother again".
And while I was thinking all these things, all I could hear was these paintbrushes going...
Bit by bit, we kind of rebuilt our lives.
But, of course, we were caretakers of the school,
so it meant that we had a job to do every night.
When it came to Stanley, you see, I kind of got it in a way.
I just understood from my experience of my dad,
you take a step back
so you weren't being abused.
You just stood back, and you didn't confront, you didn't challenge.
You just let them blast their way out of whatever it was
they had a problem with.
I think that's what I bless Stanley for more than anything else
is he kind of helped me to understand who I am.
The thing with Stanley was, you worked for him,
but you also worked with him, and he gave you that latitude.
It's not about what I want to be anymore.
It's about howl am.
You know, the head of Warner Bros. once said to me on a visit to London,
shortly before Stanley died, you know, he said,
"It's remarkable how low his production costs are".
And I said, "Well, it's because, quite frankly, he does everything.
He's Stanley Kubrick, and he—
The only thing he doesn't do is act".
He acted once, actually.
He did do a performance once for Leon.
Good evening. I'm sorry not to be able to be with you tonight
to receive this great honor.
People came, and they set up the cue card. I had the camera.
So, as usual, the guys who set up the cue cards were going to be there operating.
And Stanley said, "Uh, no, no, no. And, um, uh, could you-- could you go?"
So in the end, l was operating the camera
and having to operate the cue card at the same time.
And we did it again, and it would be, "Leon, you're moving it too fast, the cue card".
Or, "Leon, you're moving it too slow"
When he finished, he started walking backwards.
And I said, "Why are you doing that?"
And he said, "Well, you know, kind of finishing it off, you know"
And I said, "I think it would be better, really,
if I just kind of put a big fade on the camera
so that you weren't there anymore.
We just went to black, you know?"
It was quite tortuous for him.
I had a feeling that everything around Leon and Stanley
was a studio for, um, filmmaking.
High and low, small details, big things.
It was like coming to a creative workshop, very creative atmosphere.
- So, Leon, yeah? - Mm-hmm?
Uh, we, have we-- you been recording this?
You've been talking, yeah.
Have you more wigs? Yes.
- Let's try something. - All right, okay.
You look like you've lost weight anyway.
They asked me to come to London.
It was just me and Stanley and Leon in the room.
-A little bit too down maybe. - Look at me.
Ah. Just stand with your legs a bit straighter, yeah.
With, uh--
Any way you want. But not the way you were, no.
Just, uh, moving— Anything.
Whatever you feel comfortable.
Oh, I feel very uncomfortable.
You haven't been a model I see, huh?
-No. No.
Oh, these are from Eyes Wide Shut.
You know, when I was playing Red Cloak for a bit of makeup touch-up.
Although I never understood it, seeing as I was wearing a mask all the time. I never—
What was the feeling when he called you to be MC or--
Oh, well, embarrassed.
Because I was actually doing a screen test for the MC.
And I'd seen about 30, 35 actors.
And I'm auditioning, he was a really well-known actor,
and suddenly this phone call came through, sol picked up the phone.
And he said, "Leon, I just decided. You're gonna play it".
And put the phone down. That was it.
May I have the password, please?
I just felt that I could build on it for every take.
And you weren't afraid of going too far or going over the top.
You could just keep going and keep going,
just like when I was working on Barry Lyndon.
This is what we had to do every day. They were the lighting plans.
So we went around together every night at like 1:00 am.
And we would take the readings from the lights.
And then I had to send a fax to the DOP
with a laid-out plan of every light.
But isn't that what the cinematographer is supposed to do himself?
Yes. But you know, Stanley never trusted anybody.
He just didn't.
It must have been very difficult for people, you know, who are serious professionals
to sort of go through that kind of,
I don't know, examination, for want of a better word.
But he had a specific look that he wanted?
Yeah, he did. And he wanted to keep it once he found it.
On one of the days, Leon pulled me aside and he said,
"You know, Stanley really only saw your tape".
And I was like, "Oh, thanks, Leon. That's really cool".
He said, "No, really, yours is the only tape I put in.
So, you know, Stanley looked at it and went, ‘Great, yeah. Let's-Let's have him.'
So just let you know, you know, you were, uh, great on the day, and that's why! booked you
and really glad that you're part of this".
And I was like, "Oh, Leon, thank you, man. This really--
Wow, that's a lot of, um, high praise coming from you and—"
Leon, he was always working, never sleeping.
I don't know when he slept at all.
In the Masked Ball scene, I'm playing eight different people, including the Red Cloak.
You know, we'd finish a take and Stanley'd say,
"Leon, go down and find the shot that we took, like, two weeks ago".
l was on these six-inch-high platforms in this full-dress costume.
I'd have to run down this corridor,
'cause it had to be "Now, now"
And then I'd have to search through all these slates and put it up on a Steenbeck.
And he'd come down and we'd look at it.
And he'd say, "Great. Now, get back up there".
So I'd be running back up to the set.
And then we were up and running again.
You know, that's what Stanley grew to look like.
And you could see he was kind of tired.
I mean, some people have said, unkindly, that they thought he'd lost it,
but I can tell you, you were there with him every day, that was the last thing.
He and I and Margaret Adams, who was his coordinator,
we were the last people out of the studio.
And it would be 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
But it was a ritual which we always had.
When it was a wrap, and when everyone left the studio,
he would come in to my office and say, "Let's have a talk".
And then we'd talk about everything that had gone well that day.
Who tried hard, who didn't.
We were always looking at material that was shot yesterday
or the day before or what have you.
We were shooting, and at the same time,
the Venice Film Festival had announced
that they were going to celebrate the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
But they needed copies of all his films.
So I was having to crank those out of the lab.
And at the same time--
we were making a new internegative of A Clockwork Orange.
And at the same time, I was dialogue coaching, casting and God knows what.
And I just thought I was going to explode.
He was getting tireder and tireder and tireder.
You know, there were some days when we were driving home from this location in Norfolk.
And when he got out of the car, you kind of thought,
he's not even going to find a way to the front door.
But we're parked right in front of it.
If he bent down on the floor to pick something up,
then! had to bend down and pick Stanley up.
I think that last week was totally exhausting for him.
On a Saturday afternoon, I went down to the supermarket.
My phone rang, and I answered it.
And it was Stanley. And there we--
l was standing, leaning up against my car,
and we were talking for two and a half hours.
It was eerie simply because it was that same kind of gentleness
since the very first day I met him when he said, "Hello, Leon. I'm Stanley".
Everything was rational and measured and gentle.
More relaxed than it had been for a-- for-for quite a while,
because you're in the middle of this mayhem.
Um, but it was. It was.
That was the last contact I had with him.
And then, of course,
early hours of Sunday morning, that's when he died, you know?
l was told that it looked as if he had been
trying to reach for an oxygen bottle...
that he had in his bedroom.
Stanley Kubrick has died at the age of 70,
one of the greatest and most controversial masters of cinema.
The director Stanley Kubrick,
one of film's greatest yet most controversial figures, died today.
Kubrick was revered by his peers for movies like 2001:A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.
He'd just finished what was to be his last film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The studio was-- was in shock for a while.
And because Stanley,
when he was making the film and getting it ready for delivery as a finished piece of work,
as a finished film to the studio,
that part of it was now missing.
So there was Leon Vitali, who was the key factor in all of this.
He'd been through the process of making the film.
Leon Vitali was probably the most important person
from what I call the Kubrick stable.
I have to tell you. It was a very touching scene at the Dorset Hotel.
There was Leon, eyes red-rimmed with tears,
but determined, in the face of chairman of the board of the company,
the head of Warner Bros. technical,
Stanley Kubrick's brother-in-law,
determined that he was going to do whatever he could
to finish Eyes Wide Shut as Stanley would have wanted it.
And that's the greatest compliment I can pay.
Because that speaks not of personal kudos but of a commitment to.
The person that, you know, you had this relationship with for 30 years,
every single day, sacrificed your life.
they're gone, and now you're left to do this last piece of their work.
And then you're having a bunch of other people, like, not respecting you
and treating you like shit about it.
It was bad. It was a bad time.
It was easier to work and live by those standards and that code.
I think it was harder as an assistant to demand the same.
- Was it easy? - No.
While he was alive, we fought the battles.
Of course we did, but he was there.
And everything was about him.
Now it was about what everybody thought...
he was about.
I mean, there were people just crawling out of the woodwork, being as obstructive,
like they all wanted to be the ones
who were gonna now tell us how things were gonna be done.
And so sticking that picture up there in my office, I could just look at that picture.
And I just thought, well, no, this is why you're doing it.
Everything in this picture doesn't really even describe the rest of it.
Because at that time,
l was also checking every single transfer from every country in the world.
One in five prints that were shown in theaters in America
was checked from the first to the last reel.
I think there was something like 2,500 prints came to America.
So how did you collapse?
I'm gonna tell you this.
And it's not to make myself a hero or anything like that.
I did two 36-hour sessions
in a screening room at the lab.
And I had to make a call every now and then to say,
"Could somebody come down here and keep their eye on the print?"
Because I had to run off and throw up, I was so sick.
l was so sick.
Our working days were anything, 15, 18 hours.
Leon was doing 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
I don't think I want to talk about this.
I don't know when he ever slept.
They had released a DVD set,
because they'd done so much heavy advertising timed with the release of Eyes Wide Shut.
It was a bit of a disaster.
There was so much angry reaction to it,
like, how could you just do this to the master's oeuvre?
When you do that, it's not a case of just sticking a piece of film into a machine,
and it comes out in a new format.
You have to do everything again.
And you have to have people like Leon who knew the films backwards.
l authorized incurring the cost
for perfect mastering and digitalization.
Remastered again
and in yet a higher quality format than had been available in VHS.
Without a doubt, there was only one man that could have, uh, headed that restoration effort
and that was Leon.
Someone like Leon, who had that wonderful grasp of the production process
and the distribution process, which is quite a rare animal.
You learn the film by working with it and printing it, you know?
And if you've printed it for 15 years, you know-- You know the negative.
And I didn't.
It was that daunting.
He was trained in the way to know how it was supposed to sound,
know what to do with the tracks,
know how it was supposed to look and know how to handle the negatives.
And he was the only person who knew that.
His final part of his job was basically preserving everything.
Making sure it was in good order, making sure it was all vaulted securely on the shelves.
So he packed up, and he came to the US.
Somebody has to the standard-bearer for that thought process.
And this is where Leon comes in.
Leon was tasked with this kind of Herculean effort to move the ball ahead,
and then take all the flack from the people who thought that this shouldn't be done at all.
And Leon was the person who was left standing there when all the knives came out.
And I know that he took a huge amount of shit
for what Stanley had done to people for many, many years.
Because Stanley wasn't around anymore.
And it was the Kubrick gang, Chris Young and Jan, the Warner Bros. people.
They were known for being tough and not taking any bullshit from anybody
and doing what they wanted to do because they had this guy who had proven it.
He was unique. So Warners wasn't going to say no.
The critics weren't going to say yes.
And Leon was caught in this position in between
of having to be the guy that had to address all parties.
When I'm working on a film,
I need to learn the production history of the film, the archaeology.
And you have to know how it was made.
And when you got it, it's that the film speaks to you.
Just to recreate what Stanley had done originally
took two to three years of research and finding masters
and going and proving that that was exactly what it was.
And then you could start to do your work.
Barry Lyndon, it's a lot of long, long, long shots.
And often it's outside. Often they're landscape exteriors.
Leon always knew how bright it was supposed to be,
how contrasty it was supposed to be, how rich or how dense.
And you realize as you work with him that his skills are enormous.
And then you finish it, and you realize that it's not really finished at all,
because Leon then had the task of moving into Warner Bros.,
where he was the only person who was left,
and fighting for another transfer to be done,
or something to be kept up in a certain way.
All of a sudden, it's Leon against the world.
And they were just grinding him down,
because Warners had exuded goodwill way beyond what anybody would have done
in going through the process.
I got, you know, people calling me saying,
"You know what they're saying about you right now is that you're looking for problems".
No, we're not looking for problems.
We were never looking for problems.
But if there were problems, you have to point them out.
You have to.
You know, I mean, in all honor, you have to say, "This isn't right".
So he started getting thinner and thinner and sicker and sicker.
He looked very gaunt, a bit scared.
I weighed in at one point, 65 pounds.
This is when I wasn't very well, and it was my affirmation.
"I am Leon Vitali. I'm healing myself".
He was always present for the work, a hundred percent, more.
But he's, you know, everybody says, like a cockroach.
Not a great term, but there's nothing that'll stop him. Just keeps going.
Eventually, they gave his office away and they gave him a desk in the hallway at Warner Bros.
And he was sitting there alone,
still going through all the files, making sure all the things were done.
And if somebody wanted to screen 2001, he had to be there for that.
No one else was gonna followthrough with the level of maniacal detail
that only Stanley or only Leon could have done.
And it shows in the work.
It's this body of work that exists today that never would have existed.
Because Leon took the sweat equity of all those years with Stanley.
Leon righted every single wrong that was done.
He basically preserved the process
so that for future generations that will get to see Stanley's work,
they will see it the way the master made them.
That will always be Leon's imprint on Stanley Kubrick's legacy.
Well, right now in Los Angeles, California, there is an exhibit.
Director Stanley Kubrick arguably made--
And then the exhibit comes about.
And there's this big opening and a world tour.
And Leon, kinda not really a part of it.
It felt like Leon was really dismissed.
All these, like, experts on Stanley talking about Stanley and what he was like.
Here is this person still standing in the corner, how he always would be,
who's worked with him from acting, from cinematography, everything.
And meanwhile, it was like Leon didn't exist.
I guess the opening, I guess, or the presentation,
were you part of that?
You mean in a kind of official capacity?
No, not at all. Yeah.
The actual big gala thing-- Gala, mm.
...where people came and spoke about Stanley.
Oh, no, no. Um, no, I didn't goto that.
-You didn't go to that? -No, I didn't go to that.
Now was that, like, choice by you or they just didn't invite you, or...
Um, no, just didn't invite me, so...
Leon had every right to say, "That exhibit stinks,
and I want nothing to do with it".
Just the opposite. He said, "You want to go? I'm gonna take you".
When another friend of mine wanted to go, Leon said, "I'll gladly take you guys again".
to walk through these worlds with a guy who knows them intimately, is just incredible.
And he's so generous about it.
When I asked Leon to take a bunch of high school film and visual arts students,
he said yes like this.
l was shocked. It was so amazing.
lt lifted his spirit to be able to share.
I remember at a recent Academy meeting.
And they were talking about people that they needed to have an oral history with.
I said, "I don't understand why you guys haven't done an oral history on Leon Vitali".
And I said, "You should have done it a long time ago
when you were preparing the Stanley Kubrick exhibit".
I found out that he went 25 or 30 times with people
as favors to people, just to give them that same gift.
There was such a kind of emotional attachment to so much of that material.
I could actually say, "Well, remember when l was doing that, working on that".
There was a story about just about every bit of it.
I spent hours just looking at the lenses.
It felt more like I was saying good-bye to him this time than when he died.
You know, some places are like people.
Some shine and some don't.
Is there something bad here?
And for Leon, not only did he have to face life without his mentor,
he also moved to Los Angeles, initially to work for the estate on the restoration.
Then he made the decision to stay in Los Angeles.
And suddenly found that doors are not easily opened.
- You understand? Stay out.
I had to help him for a while financially.
Um, I guess that's kind of sad,
because he's worked so much.
You would hope that...
that you'd have enough to survive the pretty simple lifestyle he lives, you know
Good. Finally, the last three. We're going good.
I think the last two were better than previous--
Stanley had an amazing vital energy.
I had the license to go into any area on the operations side.
But, of course, you can't do that here because it's quite heavily demarcated.
Are you still working for Stanley?
Of course.
So this is all voluntarily at that point?
This is because I love Stanley.
That's why I do it. Because I love him.
You're not even getting paid?
No. So?
Leon is one person of many that are like him in the business.
I think he's an extraordinary example of it.
And I think he represents the best of that group of people
who are unrecognized for doing what they're doing.
You give your assistant a gift at Christmastime, and that's their recognition.
But that person was crushing it for you for 25 years.
How do you acknowledge them in a way that celebrates what they've done?
Film is just such a fascinating thing.
Requires tireless effort.
It is a moving train of people getting on and off at a process,
but having the train with enough fuel to continue to make it to the destination.
It's a very special world. It's like the circus.
Whatever those worlds are, they have an attraction that goes beyond
how creative your own work is, that you're a part of it.
What skin color you had, what sexual preferences you had,
it has always been a place to go to as long as you function socially.
All right, clear back, boys.
Anybody who's sort of self-obsessed or grumpy
won't survive in the business, unless he's an actor.
And stay there now We're ready-- getting ready to shoot.
-Are you okay?
Leon spent years of his life,
almost drove himself into an early grave
because the prints needed to be as good as they possibly could.
All those other people, if you took out one person,
there'd be something missing in that film.
This is like all a bunch of Leons.
All these people below the line
are the ones that elevate the people above the line.
It was amazing that Leon got to, uh, to stick around
and stay with the--with the-- with the maestro, as we called him.
And they were inseparable for-- for the longest time.
I've been dreaming about him more and more and more.
It's always in a house that! have.
And it's always full of people, most of which I do not know
And we're starting a film production.
And it's like, there's no kind of feeling that we need to communicate at all.
It's just looking at each other and nodding our heads and saying, "That's it".
If you look back on your life when you were a child,
and you had aspirations, and you had ambitions,
but they never really worked out the way you thought they would.
So there's a lot that can make you extremely frustrated and extremely mad.
But at the same time, it's kind of exhilarating.
In many ways, it doesn't really matter
if things work out exactly the way you wanted them to or they didn't.
The most important thing is the journey.
Because the experiences can be so rich and so valuable to you.
Leon was a spirit.
You could see, you know, the doors open before he got to a door.
He has this aura of "Kubrickism" around him.
The apprentice that all of a sudden one day
became the master with all the answers.
You're proud and you're happy of your journey.
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
Of course, I am. It's been amazing so far.
The best way I could think of, you know, leaving this world,
and it would be either, you know, go to sleep and not wake up
or be in the middle of, you know, I don't know
I guess dying on a flatbed Steenbeck, I mean if you could find one nowadays.
I mean, maybe in a telecine suite doing a new transfer.
Like a-- a 4K or an 8K transfer of 2001.
Just as the music plays out, I'd say, "I'm coming".
"I'm with ya, Zarathustra".
You know, maybe something like that, romantic, you know.
It's okay. Mm.
So it's a happy ending?
Sure. Yeah. Of course, it is.