Kubrick - Softcover

In Kubrick, author and screenwriter Michael Herr gives a personal look at the allegedly reclusive, compulsively brilliant director. He also recounts the evolution of their unique friendship, from their first meeting at a screening for The Shining in 1980, to their collaboration on the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, through years of marathon phone conversations on topics ranging from film and technology to philosophy and literature--the last of which occurred just days before the director's death.

In describing Kubrick, Herr strips away the myths surrounding his friend, revealing a man who was not introverted and misanthropic (as the media and his biographers claimed), but instead warm, gregarious, and endlessly inquisitive. He was also profoundly complicated. Though he loved America-and even embraced such pop culture touchstones as professional football and TV sitcoms--he permanently emigrated to England because of his distrust of Hollywood. Though he disdained elitism, he would only allow the most brilliant and talented inside his inner circle. He had a tremendous love and respect for the actors and screenwriters he worked with, but his style of filmmaking often led to bitter confrontations.

Filled with personal insights and previously untold anecdotes, Michael Herr's Kubrick is a probing view into the director's inner life, capturing the creative passion and powerful intellect of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

"You could always tell it was a Stanley Kubrick movie the moment it started, but he never made the same movie twice. It was often said that the people in Stanley's movies live in separate spaces on the screen, most often alone no matter what the company, but that was something that had been in the air since the early days of the late century, we've all breathed it, artists breathed it more deeply, and exhaled it as work. It was through those spaces, and in the distances between them, and their arrangement on the screen, that you can find the essence of Stanley's sympathy.... In all of the media's mischief and misapprehension, there was a lingering innuendo that he really only made movies to get himself through a bad case of chronic social anxiety disorder, but in fact he had his friends, many of them, who tell another story. An artist's isolation has nothing to do with physical circumstances anyway, with how publicly or privately he seems to be doing his work. It's more about tempo, intuition, experiment, and the kind of silence you don't come by easily these days, and not at all if you're passive. Out of this situation, the only situation he could tolerate, he made films of an incredible purity."--From Kubrick by Michael Herr

Michael Herr is a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. He is the author of Dispatches, his classic account of the war in Vietnam, and the novel Walter Winchell. He is also a coauthor of the screenplays for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.