Sometimes, you get the choose the image that sticks with you for the day.
And sometimes, it’s the old man in the gang shower at the YMCA, trying to make it look like he was touching his penis by accident.
Nicholson accepted Kubrick’s mandate to discover what could be found in the script by demanding take after take, looking for different ways of doing almost everything required. “Anything you do as many times as a successful actor, you can’t have one set of theories,” Nicholson said to the documentary crew. “You can go for years saying, ‘I’m going to get this thing real, because they really haven’t seen it real.’ They just keep seeing one fashion of unreal after the other that passes as real and you go mad with realism. And then you come up against someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, it’s real, but it’s not interesting.’”
- Stanley Kubrick: A Biography
Real, but not interesting.
Kate Rutter mentioned this to me once, regarding ideas. Theories. Et cetera. She said it terrified her, when first she heard of it.
It terrifies me, too.
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Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.
Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers’ crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds.
Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
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— Henry David Thoreau, Walden