9/9/99 - APBnews.com - Malcolm McDowell Remembering Stanley Kubrick

McDowell Revisits A Clockwork Orange
Kubrick Classic Holds Bittersweet Memories for Actor
Sept. 9, 1999 By Karen Butler a freelance contributor to APBNews.com

New York - Twenty-eight years after playing the role of the ultra-violent leader of a group of juvenile delinquents in the 1971 cult film A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell describes the part as one he was born to play -- and recalls having a "love/hate&quuot; relationship with the movie's late director, Stanley Kubrick.
    "I loved him, and I was terribly frustrated with him at times," McDowell remembers of the controversial filmmaker, who often stunned audiences with his depictions of sex and violence. "I was young and probably a little hotheaded. And I didn't realize that on a film, when you work with someone for 14 hours a day for 11 months, it didn't necessarily mean you had a relationship with them. ... I found that very, very hard to take."
    The accomplished stage and film actor, whose most recent role was in the delightful coming-of-age tale My Life So Far, went on to say he's amused by how Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman revere Kubrick as "something of a guru." They were the stars of Kubrick's swan song Eyes Wide Shut.
    "Stanley unfortunately died before they got cut off," he says, "so they just got the great side of him."
    But McDowell has some warmer memories of Kubrick, who died in March at the age of 70. "He was wonderful in many ways to me," the 56-year-old Brit concedes. "He was quiet and non-confrontational and extraordinarily bright. He was very interested in chess, computers, filing systems, cameras, all that kind of stuff ... not so much interested in human relationships."
    McDowell says Kubrick did have a warmer side, but that seemed to be reserved for his family and dogs.
    Although he admits he might have been naive to expect that Kubrick would keep in touch after A Clockwork Orange wrapped, McDowell adds that he met many of his longtime friends on movie sets and thought Kubrick's cold shoulder was a bit odd.
    A Clockwork Orange impacted the actor professionally as well as personally. Although it launched his career, McDowell laments that he was typecast for some time as a result.
    "It's a great film, and I think I give as good a performance as you can give in a film, given that part. I kept getting offered these violent things, and I got fed up because I am an actor, not a film star, and I take my profession very seriously," he explains.
    "If you said to me, 'Would you take it back?' and not have it on my resume - certainly not," McDowell continues. "It's a great film, and I think I give as good a performance as you can give in a film, given that part. I was born to play it. You can only say that once or twice in a whole career unless you're Laurence Olivier, and then you've got maybe five.
    Why does the movie remain so effective nearly three decades after it was made?
    "For some reason it touches the pulse," McDowell says. "There are so many levels to it that you think you're watching a social documentary of violence or parent abuse...but it isn't. Then you think you're watching a political film about a government's way of imposing its will of reducing crime in society, and thrown into this mix is this rather futuristic, strange-looking mix of costume bowler hat, weird, out-there sex and stuff like that language on top of it and this incredible music. The very end kicker is that the film isn't about any of these things at all," he adds. "It's a veil on the freedom of man to choose and his right to choose to be a moral man - a good man - or an immoral man - a bad man. If you taake away that basic right then he is not a human being."
    McDowell believes the brilliance of the film - and of the book by Anthony Burgess on which it was based - has to do with its immoral hero.
    "He rapes women and beats people up and yet you still want more of this man," McDowell says. "You're still with him." He compares the allure of the film's immoral characters to that of the Nazis, who he said were, in a way, "very seductive."
    "They were everything you loved to hate. They gave great shows, spectacular. Of course, they were murderous and immoral. Not that I have any liking at all for Nazis. I loathe them and what they did to Europe and the world, but you can see somewhere how they could be attractive."