but I read in a discussion about Clint Eastwood where someone made a point about directors who were strictly “project guys” vs. people who always wanted to be working, and they compared Allen to Eastwood as another director who wanted to work as much as possible, vs. someone like Kubrick who was a “project guy,” who would only make a movie that he saw as a special personal vision that was specifically important to him. Their point wasn’t that Allen and Eastwood didn’t also make those kinds of movies, but that if they didn’t have one at hand, or needed to swap something else for the chance to make it, then they’d do something else just to have work/make money/stay in the studios good graces/ect. If that’s a fair characterization of the difference between Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick, then that’s another reason his envy of Woody Allen is weird.

Both of these examples seem to be Kubrick asking “How can I have all the commercial success I want in exchange for no commercial compromises?”