Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited.
Hello cinephiles!
Welcome to Making Film where we take an in-depth look at how cinema’s greatest artists
made their films.
My name is Tyler and today we are looking at the screenwriting of A Clockwork Orange.
Sir.
Shut your filthy hole you scum!
In this video, we’ll take a look at Kubrick’s approach to story.
Kubrick had been given Burgess’ novel by the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove,
Terry Southern
while Kubrick was working on 2001,
but it took him a while to start reading it. Kubrick said,
"Because of the pressures that were on me at the time,
it joined the certain number of books that one has sitting on the shelf
waiting to be read.
One evening I picked it up.
By the end of part one, it seemed obvious that it might make a great film.
By the end of part two, I was very excited about it.
For the next two or three days I did little else but think about it” (Grundy 110).
He also remarked that [quote] "I started to read the book and finished it in one sitting….
As soon as I finished it, I immediately reread it” (New Perspectives 221).
Kubrick had said that it usually takes him about a year to become obsessed with an idea
to the point that he really knows what he wants to do with it,
but here, it was nearly immediate (Interviews 157).
Kubrick knew it would make a good movie before he even finished reading the book saying,
"The story was of a size and density that could be adapted to the screen
without oversimplifying it” (Interviews 157).
The book itself could serve as a blueprint for the film (Interviews 157).
Kubrick had previously collaborated with others on the screenplays for his films—
most recently, writing the screenplay for 2001 alongside Arthur C. Clarke
writing a novelization of the story—
but with A Clockwork Orange, he thought that it could be translated to film without many
changes necessary.
Kubrick decided to write the screenplay himself without working with the book’s author,
Anthony Burgess.
Burgess and Kubrick spoke briefly over the phone while Burgess was in London,
but that was the extent of their interaction during the screenwriting process (Interviews 154).
I’ll speak more on this later.
According to Burgess, the rights to adapt the novel for the screen had been sold [quote]
“for a few hundred dollars to a small production company
headed by a Californian lawyer” (Grundy 110).
In 1962, when the book was published, the production code was still in effect
and audiences weren’t yet interested in such a transgressive narrative, so the project
was shelved (Grundy 110).
The rights were then sold to Warner Brothers for a large amount of money, which Burgess
saw none of (Grundy 110).
Burgess had previously written a screenplay for the film, which Kubrick rejected, and
Terry Southern—
remember: the screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove—
had also taken out an option and wrote a version of the script with Michael Cooper before Kubrick
got involved (Alison Castle).
Southern bought a six-month option on the book for $1000
against a purchase price of $10,000.
He sent sent his script to “several producers, including David Puttnam (LoBrutto).
They sent the script to the British film censor to see if it would be acceptable to make a
movie out of (LoBrutto).
They got the script back unopened with a note saying,
“I know the book, and there’s no point in reading this script because it involves
youthful defiance of authority and we’re not doing that” (LoBrutto).
I'm sorry Alex.
This is for your own good.
You'll have to bear with us for a while.
When Kubrick did get involved, Southern didn’t have the rights anymore
because he was unable to pay the next $1000 fee (LoBrutto).
The option was picked up by Southern’s lawyer Si Litvinoff and a friend named Max Raab (LoBrutto).
Kubrick signed a production deal with Warner Brothers and [quote]
"bought the rights for $200,000 and a 50 percent share in all profits”. (Alison Castle).
Litvinoff and Raab received the $200,000 and five percent of the profits,
which earned them about $1.2 million (LoBrutto).
This was Kubrick’s first time working with Warner Brothers and he would continue with
the studio for the rest of his career (Alison Castle).
Warner Brothers was very “artist-friendly” during this time
and this is why something like A Clockwork Orange was able to be made (Commentary).
When the novel A Clockwork Orange was first published in 1962,
there wasn’t really much controversy surrounding it despite the story containing much brutality
and sexual violence,
which Burgess had some first-hand experience with— his wife had been
"raped by U.S. deserters in London during World War II" (Alison Castle).
She was pregnant at the time and was beaten to the point that they lost the baby (LoBrutto).
She attempted suicide and Burgess became an alcoholic (LoBrutto).
In the book the writer is Burgess himself and he is writing A Clockwork Orange,
which Alex reads excerpts of.
Malcolm McDowell: “He told me… Burgess… He told me that he got the idea for this film
from being in Moscow in the early 60s—
being in a coffee shop in a coffee bar and he said the windows were all steamed up
and he was sitting by the window talking to one of his compatriots or whatever
and these thugs, hooligans, would press their faces up to the window looking in making—
because he was obviously a foreigner.
He was dressed differently and they could tell that a mile away
and they were pressed and it was very threatening he said.”
These hoodlums were also apparently wearing strange
“fetishistic” outfits that Burgess also got inspiration from.
The novel was written pretty quickly during a period in which
Burgess had learned that he had a fatal brain tumor and had less than a year to live (Alison Castle).
It was one of five novels he wrote very quickly, although he went on to live
“another twenty-five years” (Alison Castle).
Burgess was the book reviewer for the Yorkshire Post in England.
He had the other four books come out under pseudonyms,
so that it didn’t look like an author was coming out with
several books in one year (Commentary).
Despite many considering it linked to 2001 as a futuristic film,
Burgess had a different interpretation:
Anthony Burgess: “It is not the future really—
it can be the future, if you will—
it’s just a period of time which is at a slant
to real time (McAndrew).
You could say that this links A Clockwork Orange more with Dr. Strangelove as a satire
of the present day
where the absurdity of our normal world and experience is heightened to an extreme degree.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
In an interview, Kubrick said,
"I always revert back to E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel"
where he tells about the first caveman telling his friends a story as they sit around a fire.
They either fell asleep, threw a rock at him or listened.
The problem obviously is you've got to make people pay attention long enough to get across
what you've got to say.
Most films don't have any purpose other than to
mechanically figure out what people want
and to construct some artificial form of entertainment for them.
Even when this is the sole purpose it rarely succeeds” (Siskel).
We can see this with many large franchise movies whose sole purpose
seems to be to sell products.
The problem is: how do you make something that is both entertaining and has a purpose
beyond ticket sales?
Kubrick addressed this problem in a separate interview. He said,
"Most directors never successfully resolve the dilemma of wanting to be artists
and needing to be popular.
A distressing aspect of intellectual and artistic growth
is that it principally means outgrowing other people:
there are progressively fewer people to share one's ideas,
and who understand, without over-simplification,
what one is trying to communicate" (Interviews106).
The thing that separates Kubrick from other filmmakers for me
is that Kubrick manages to layer meaning underneath simple and accessible stories,
so you can appreciate the story on a superficial level and also appreciate the depth that is
there if you go looking for it.
I think this is why Kubrick’s films seem to change as you get older—
watching this film now in my 30s was much different than how I saw it when I was 16.
I think that you really need ambiguity for this to work.
If the film asks a question that it does not necessarily answer,
then your answer to the question, as a viewer, might change the more you watch it.
Someone said that a director like Ingmar Bergman doesn’t have this accessibility —
you either get it or you don’t.
But with Kubrick, if you don’t get it, you still get an immensely entertaining story.
Kubrick explained how this works in an interview. He said,
“The emotions of people are far more similar than their intellects.
The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction.
Watching a film is like having a daydream. It operates on portions of your mind that
are only reached by dreams or dramas,
and there you can explore things without any responsibility
of conscious ego or conscience" (Interviews 106).
A child can understand that a violent act is being committed on someone who commits
violent acts themselves
and they can have an emotional reaction to this even if
they don’t understand the societal implications.
Satire also seems to be a great way to straddle entertainment
with some kind of intellectual purpose.
You can hold a funhouse mirror up to society
and show how ridiculous some serious things are.
The novel did a great job with this and, if the novel was entertaining,
it shouldn’t be too hard to make the movie entertaining.
Kubrick spoke about this when asked about choosing stories to adapt. He said,
"Should the book finally be what I want, it is very important for me to retain,
during the subsequent phases of making the film, my impressions of the first reading.
After you’ve been working on a film, perhaps for more than a year,
everything about it tends to become so familiar that you are in danger of
not seeing the forest for the trees.
That’s why it’s so important to be able to use this first impression as the criterion
for making decisions about the story much later on.
Whoever the director may be, and however perceptively he has filmed and edited his movie,
he can never have the same experience that the audience has when it sees the film for
the first time.
The director’s first time is the first reading of the story, and the impressions and excitement
of this event have to last through to the final work on the movie.
Fortunately I’ve never chosen a story where the excitement hasn’t gone the distance.
It would be a terrible thing if it didn’t” (Michel Ciment).
It was important for Kubrick to maintain that sense of absurdity while making the movie
so that he could keep it balanced between too realistic and too over-the-top.
Thanks for watching!
Stay tuned because next time we’ll be talking about Kubrick’s process
while writing A Clockwork Orange.
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Until next time, I’m Tyler;
thanks for watching!