By choice, Leon Vitali ‘was just a slave to Stanley.’
If you wanted to work for Stanley Kubrick, you had to absorb a lot of punishment. “You’re not hitting him hard enough” was Kubrick’s note to Ryan O’Neal on the set of 1975’s Barry Lyndon, where O’Neal, as the title character, thrashed Leon Vitali, the actor playing his nemesis, Lord Bullingdon. O’Neal, too modest to note that he was once an amateur boxer, recalls today with a wince that the pummeling had to be repeated in 30 takes before Kubrick was satisfied. “I didn’t want to,” says O’Neal. “But this was Stanley!”
As on film, so it went in life. Vitali would spend decades being Stanley Kubrick’s punching bag, his aide-de-camp, his right arm. Anyone who doubts the destabilizing effects of working for an exacting genius need only consult a notebook composed by Vitali toward the end of the boss’s life: It is filled with hundreds of repetitions of the phrase, “I, Leon Vitali, am healing myself.” Fellow crew members interviewed for a new documentary about Vitali, Filmworker, say he toiled 15, 18, maybe even 24 hours a day on Kubrick’s projects from The Shining to Eyes Wide Shut. To Full Metal Jacket star Matthew Modine, Vitali was “kind of an Igor. You know, ‘Yes, Master!’ He was just a slave to Stanley Kubrick.”
Trained as a Shakespearean, Vitali was a rising actor when he saw A Clockwork Orange at the cinema. When it concluded, he turned to a friend and said, “I want to work for him.” After landing that crucial role in Barry Lyndon, he was transformed. “As opposed to just shooting film, this was filmmaking,” he says in the documentary. Today Barry Lyndon, largely disliked upon its release, is all but universally described as a masterpiece by critics.
Vitali forsook acting to work behind the scenes, doing whatever Kubrick asked him to do, everything from casting to cleaning out rooms. As Kubrick prepared to film The Shining without leaving his longtime home in England (he was a notorious aviophobe), the director sent his factotum to America to gather pictures of grand old hotels and find a kid to play Danny. Vitali discovered Danny Lloyd, just five at the time of shooting.
In Filmworker, directed by Tony Zierra, Lloyd credits Vitali with engineering his performance on the interminable shoot. We get a look at the log, labeled the “book of lies,” in which Vitali carefully notated for any snooping authorities Lloyd’s time on set, which by law was supposed to be limited to 20 minutes per hour but actually carried on as long as Kubrick’s relentless perfectionism required. Filming of the scene in which Danny eats a small dish of ice cream took so many takes that five gallons of ice cream were depleted. We may thank Vitali for one of the movie’s indelible motifs: He came up with the idea of using twins (not called for in the script) to play the murdered girls, and of posing them as in the famous Diane Arbus photograph of creepy duplicate sisters.
Kubrick’s method seemed to wear out even Kubrick. ‘If he bent down to pick something up, I had to bend down and pick Stanley up.’
Vitali, having rounded up actors to play the troops in Full Metal Jacket, was supposed to be shooting warm-up images of the men marching when he instead found his camera increasingly trained in the direction of the film’s technical adviser, a former Marine drill instructor, who was putting them through their paces. R. Lee Ermey tells us, “I wanted to be Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, no doubt about it. I couldn’t imagine anybody could do it any better than I could.” Kubrick told him, “Not a chance.” Then he saw what Vitali had shot. Tim Colceri, the actor originally hired to play Hartman, recalls getting the letter informing him that he was fired, or rather demoted to playing the door gunner in the film. Ermey says he went over and over his dialogue with Vitali, who kept telling him, “Speed it up.” Gratefully, he adds, “I haven’t stopped working since. It’s been a great life.” As for Colceri, he at least got to deliver the immortal lines, “Anyone who runs is a V.C. Anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined V.C.”
On Eyes Wide Shut, Vitali returned to acting, but you never see him: He’s the masked man in the red cloak who demands the password from Tom Cruise. The shoot was typically grueling — “You’re pushed to a point where you’re like, ‘I have no more,’” recalls a crew member — and Kubrick’s method seemed to wear out even Kubrick. “If he bent down to pick something up, I had to bend down and pick Stanley up,” says Vitali. Kubrick died weeks before the film’s release in 1999, leaving it to Vitali to wrap up some loose ends. Nineteen years on, Vitali is 69. He’s still working for the master, lately reviewing prints of Kubrick’s oeuvre to make sure the colors are correct and overseeing a 4K transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Asked if he gets paid for his continuing contributions to Kubrick’s legacy, he replies, “No. So?” Being part of the production of five enduring works of art proved reward enough.