Ubiquitous Bishop

Excerpted from issue #22 (June 1996) of the UK magazine "DreamWatch".

Bishop also appeared in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. "I did a tiny part in LOLITA for Stanley Kubrick, one of the first films I'd ever done. When he called me to do 2001 nobody knew what the script was, nobody had ever seen a complete script. It was all in Kubrick's head. I did seven days on the film and I was also working on a play in the West End, so I would go out to the MGM studios for filming. We shot a lot of material and my heart was broken when I went to the premiere... We shot nine hours and cut it down to three!"

Did he find the end result pretty much incomprehensible? "A lot of it didn't work," Bishop agrees. "I saw it recently on TV and it doesn't work on television. Those missing scenes must be somewhere. And as a matter of fact when we were making the film, they were making a film of Kubrick making the film! The actors would be sitting around and you would see a stick mike coming up at the side of your chair! Kubrick had his hands on everything. He knew everything about the props and costumes, it was all in that man's head."

"As there was no script, we would just improvise it. Kubrick would say, 'You guys go away and make up a scene, come back and we'll take a look at it.' It was absolutely incredible. I kind of blew up with Mr. Kubrick, I didn't know what the hell he was talking about! I'm the kind of actor who has to have an open relationship with a director. He would start playing games with you. He'd say one thing one day and completely reverse it the next. By about day six when he said, 'Good morning, Ed,' I didn't know what he meant by that!"