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.
