The Rolling Stone Interview: Stanley Kubrick in 1987

Tim Cahill’s 1987 interview with Kubrick, while he was promoting Full Metal Jacket:

If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s vanity, this idea that the work is bigger than one’s capacity to describe it. Some people can do interviews. They’re very slick, and they neatly evade this hateful conceptualizing. Fellini is good; his interviews are very amusing. He just makes jokes and says preposterous things that you know he can’t possibly mean.

I mean, I’m doing interviews to help the film, and I think they do help the film, so I can’t complain. But it isn’t…it’s… it’s difficult.

★ Tuesday, 8 March 2011