Colour Me Kubrick

John Malkovich rarely disappoints as far as choosing interesting movies to make. He recently finished shooting a film on the painter Gustav Klimt directed by Raoul Ruiz. Another recent Malkovich project that caught my attention is Brian Cook's movie Colour Me Kubrick, about Alan Conway, who successfully impersonated director Stanley Kubrick for several years. Malkovich shared some thoughts about the film with Brigitte Baudin, for an article (Malkovich dans la peau d'un mythomane, January 4) in Le Figaro (my translation):

"The subject fascinated me," explains John Malkovich in his sweet, fluty voice. "It's a true story. I read about the real Alan Conway in an article. What intrigued me was not that he was dishonest but that he didn't really know anything about the work of the person he was impersonating. He had tried to see one of Kubrick's films but couldn't watch the whole thing because he was so bored. His ruse lasted for two to three years, until he was finally exposed. I love his typically British eccentricity, that gutsy imposter thing. The real Alan Conway lived in London in the 1990s. He got the idea to pull this con when Kubrick was shooting Eyes Wide Shut, his last feature film. During that time, I was also shooting a lot in London. So I could very well have met him, which only adds to my amusement!"

The article also explains that Brian Cook was Kubrick's assistant and coproducer for some thirty years, so he brought a lot of personal experience to the story. Kubrick was reportedly both amused and annoyed when he found out about Conway but was unable to do anything about it legally. If this film has been released in the United States, I missed it.