It is sort of known and not too surprising (at least to me) that Stanley Kubrick loved Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona.
This is talked about in The Last Days of Disco commentary and Kubrick even asked Stillman to take a meeting with him.
Filmthreat June 8, 1998:
Fans of Whit Stillman’s films should already suspect this: the guy can talk. He speaks in a literate, thoughtful, I’ve-read-way-too-much-English-Lit way. He is more likely to reference a classic text than a classic TV show, and actually finds uses for the word “treacly” in normal coversations. One gets the sense that although he travels in higher social circles nowadays (Stanley Kubrick asked him to take a meeting), it wasn’t always that way.
Thomas Gibson (Dickie Taylor) even got the gig in Eyes Wide Shut without an audition, just because Kubrick had liked him in Barcelona. Nicole Kidman had also told Stillman that Kubrick talked about the film all the time and that he said he liked the technique of dialogue advancing the story.
Hopefully we’ll be seeing a Criterion release of Barcelona soon. Don’t forget to tweet or email Criterion about how you would like to see it released by them.
It is a surprise for me (upsss I didn’t hear the commentaries in Last Days of Disco release).
I’m very happy to know that Criterion will release Barcelona. Muy suggestion will be to edit the dvd and Blr in multizone, if copyright deals permit. I’ve bought a zone-customizable blr MPlayer last year only to see blr editions of Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco ADN Damsels un Distress.