Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999)
was an American
director, writer,
producer, and
photographer of films, who lived in England
during most of the last 40 years of his career. Kubrick was noted
for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow
method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his
technical perfectionism and his reclusiveness about his films and
personal life.
He worked far beyond the confines of the
Hollywood
system, maintaining almost complete artistic
control and making movies according to the whims and time
constraints of no one but himself, but with the rare advantage of
big-studio financial support for all his
endeavors. Nominated several times for Oscars for both
writing and directing, his only personal win was for the special
effects in
2001: A
Space Odyssey, though his films have won many Oscars and
other awards in other departments.
Kubrick is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished,
innovative and influential filmmakers in the
history of cinema. He directed a number of
highly acclaimed and often controversial films that have often been
perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist
nature. His films are characterized by a formal visual style and
meticulous attention to detail – often combining elements of
surrealism and
expressionism with an
ironic pessimism, while also
being among the "most original, provocative, and visionary motion
pictures ever made".
Early life

Stanley Kubrick was a Look magazine
photographer when he caught himself in the mirror of Rosemary
Williams, a showgirl, in 1949.
Kubrick's history in photography would later greatly influence
his film directing.
Stanley
Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 at the Lying-In Hospital in
Manhattan
, the first of two children born to Jacques Leonard
Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Gertrude (née Perveler;
1903–85). His sister, Barbara, was born in 1934. Jacques
Kubrick, whose parents were of
Jewish Austro-Hungarian origin, was a doctor.
At
Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton
Ave. in The
Bronx
.
Kubrick's father taught him
chess at age
twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. He also bought
his son a
Graflex camera when he was
thirteen, triggering a fascination with
still photography. As a teenager, Kubrick
was interested in
jazz, and briefly attempted a
career as a
drummer.
Kubrick attended
William Howard
Taft High School from 1941–45. He was a poor student, with a
meager 67
grade average. He
graduated from high school in 1945, and his poor grades, combined
with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from
the
Second World War, eliminated any
hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke
disdainfully of his education and of education in general,
maintaining that nothing about school interested him. His parents
sent him to live with relatives for a year in Los Angeles in the
hopes that it would help his academic growth.
While still in high school, he was chosen official school
photographer for a year. In 1946,
since he wasn't able to gain admission to
day session classes at colleges, he briefly attended evening
classes at the City College of New York
(CCNY) and then left. Eventually, he sought
jobs as a freelance photographer, and by graduation, he had sold a
photographic series to
Look magazine.
Kubrick supplemented
his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington
Square Park
and various Manhattan
chess clubs. He became an apprentice
photographer for
Look in 1946, and later a full-time staff
photographer. (Many early [1945–50] photographs by Kubrick have
been published in the book
Drama and Shadows [2005,
Phaidon Press] and also appear as a special feature on the 2007
Special Edition DVD of
2001: A Space Odyssey.)
During his
Look magazine years, Kubrick married
Toba Metz (b. 1930) on May 29, 1948.
They lived in Greenwich
Village
, eventually divorcing in 1951. During this time,
Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern
Art
and the cinemas of New York City. He was
particularly inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director
Max Ophüls, whose films influenced
Kubrick's later visual style.
Film career and later life
Early works
In 1951, Kubrick's friend Alex Singer persuaded him to start making
short documentaries for
The March of Time, a provider of
newsreels to movie theatres. Kubrick agreed, and shot the
independently financed
Day of the
Fight in 1951. The film notably employed a reverse
tracking shot, which would become one
of Kubrick's signature camera movements. Although its distributor
went out of business that year, Kubrick sold
Day of the
Fight to
RKO Pictures for a profit
of $100. Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at
Look magazine and began working on his second short
documentary,
Flying Padre
(1951), funded by RKO. A third film,
The Seafarers (1953), Kubrick's first
color film, was a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers'
International Union. These three films constitute Kubrick's only
surviving work in the
documentary
genre. However, it is believed that he was involved in other
shorts, which have been lost—most notably
World Assembly of Youth
(1952). He also served as second unit director on an episode of the
Omnibus television program about the life of
Abraham Lincoln. None of these shorts has
ever been officially released, though they have been widely
bootlegged, and clips are used in the documentary
Stanley
Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. In addition,
Day of the
Fight and
Flying Padre have been shown on
TCM.
1950s: Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, The Killing & Paths
of Glory
Kubrick moved to narrative feature films with
Fear and Desire (1953), the story of a
team of soldiers caught behind enemy lines in a fictional war.
Kubrick and his then-wife, Toba Metz, were the only crew on the
film, which was written by Kubrick's friend
Howard Sackler, who later became a successful
playwright.
Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews
but was a commercial failure. In later life, Kubrick was
embarrassed by the film, which he dismissed as an amateur effort.
He refused to allow
Fear and Desire to be shown at
retrospectives and public screenings and did everything possible to
keep it out of circulation. At least one copy remained in the hands
of a private collector, and the film subsequently surfaced on VHS
and later on DVD.
Kubrick's marriage to Toba Metz ended during the making of
Fear
and Desire. He met his second wife, Austrian-born dancer and
theatrical designer
Ruth Sobotka, in
1952. They lived together in the East Village from 1952 until their
marriage on January 15, 1955. They moved to Hollywood that summer.
Sobotka, who made a cameo appearance in Kubrick's next film,
Killer's Kiss (1954), also
served as art director on
The
Killing (1956). Like
Fear and Desire,
Killer's Kiss is a short feature film, with a running time
of slightly more than an hour. It met with limited commercial and
critical success. The film is about a young heavyweight boxer at
the end of his career who gets involved in a love triangle in which
his rival is involved with organized crime. Both
Fear and
Desire and
Killer's Kiss were privately funded by
Kubrick's family and friends.

Although film noir had peaked in the
1940s, both the plot and cinematography of
The Killing
strongly evoked that genre, and it is now regarded as one of the
best of that kind.
Note the use of shadows and cigarette smoke; note also the
resemblance of the mask to those used in A Clockwork
Orange.
Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a young producer named
James B. Harris, and the two became close friends.
Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, would
finance Kubrick's next three films. The two bought the rights to a
Lionel White novel called
Clean
Break, which Kubrick and coscreenwriter
Jim Thompson turned into a story about
a race track robbery gone wrong. Starring
Sterling Hayden,
The Killing was Kubrick's first full-length
feature film, shot with a professional cast and crew. The resulting
film was unusual in 1950s American cinema in that it had a
nonlinear storyline (in a manner imitated nearly 40 years later by
director
Quentin Tarantino in
Reservoir Dogs) and an
unhappy ending. In many ways, it followed the conventions of
film noir, both in its plotting and
cinematography style. That kind of crime caper film had peaked in
the 1940s; but today, many regard this film as one of the best of
the noir genre.While it was not a financial success, it received
good reviews.
The widespread admiration for
The Killing brought
Harris-Kubrick Productions to the attention of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio offered
them its massive collection of copyrighted stories from which to
choose their next project. During this time, Kubrick also
collaborated with
Calder
Willingham on an adaptation of the Austrian novel
The
Burning Secret. Although Kubrick was enthusiastic about the
project, it was eventually shelved.

Long before it became film fashion
after the Vietnam era, Kubrick portrayed war as brutal, using stark
black-and-white images in
Paths of Glory.
Kubrick's next film
Paths of
Glory was set during
World War
I and based on
Humphrey Cobb's
1935 antiwar novel of the same name. It is about a French army unit
ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of
the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are charged with
cowardice, as an example to the other troops.
Kirk Douglas was cast as Colonel Dax, a
humanitarian officer who tries to prevent the soldiers' execution.
Douglas was instrumental in securing financing for the ambitious
production. The film was not a significant commercial success, but
it was critically acclaimed and widely admired within the industry,
establishing Kubrick as a major up-and-coming young filmmaker.
Critics over the years have praised the film's unsentimental,
spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw black-and-white
cinematography.
Steven Spielberg
has named this one of his favorite Kubrick films.
During the
production of Paths of Glory in Munich
, Kubrick met
and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan (credited by her
stage name, "Susanne Christian"), who
played the only female speaking part in the film. Kubrick
divorced his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, in 1957. Christiane Susanne
Harlan (b. 1932 in Germany) belonged to a theatrical family and had
trained as an actress. She and Kubrick married in 1958 and remained
together until his death in 1999. During her marriage to Kubrick,
Christiane concentrated on a career as a painter. In addition to
raising Christiane's young daughter Katharina (b. 1953) from her
first marriage to the late German actor Werner Bruhns (d. 1977),
the couple had two daughters, Anya (b. 1958) and Vivian (b. 1960).
Christiane's brother
Jan Harlan was
Kubrick's executive producer from 1975 onward.
1960s: Spartacus, Lolita, Dr.
Strangelove & 2001
Upon his return to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months
on the
Marlon Brando vehicle
One-Eyed Jacks (1961). The
two clashed over a number of casting decisions, and Brando
eventually fired him and decided to direct the picture himself.
Kubrick worked on a number of unproduced screenplays until
Kirk Douglas asked him to take over Douglas'
epic production
Spartacus
(1960) from
Anthony Mann, who had been
fired by the studio two weeks into shooting.
Based upon the true story of a doomed uprising of Roman slaves,
Spartacus was a difficult production. Creative differences
arose between Kubrick and Douglas, and the two reportedly had a
stormy working relationship. Frustrated by his lack of creative
control, Kubrick later largely disowned the film, which further
angered Douglas. The friendship the two men had formed on
Paths
of Glory was destroyed by the experience of making the film.
Years later, Douglas referred to Kubrick as "a talented
shit."
Despite the on-set troubles,
Spartacus was a major
critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major
director. However, its embattled production convinced Kubrick to
find ways of working with Hollywood financing while remaining
independent of its production system, which he called "film by
fiat, film by frenzy."
Spartacus is the only Stanley Kubrick film in which
Kubrick had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, no producing
credit, nor any say in the casting. It is largely Kirk Douglas's
project.
Spartacus would go on to win 4 Oscars with one going to
Peter Ustinov, for his turn as slave
dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's
direction.
In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film
Lolita, and he would live there for
the rest of his life. The original motivation was to film
Lolita in a country with laxer censorship laws. However,
Kubrick had to remain in England to film
Doctor
Strangelove since Peter Sellers was not permitted to leave
England at the time as he was involved in divorce proceedings, and
the filming of
2001: A Space Odyssey required the large
capacity of the sound stages of Shepperton studios, which were not
available in America. It was after filming the first two of these
films in England and in the early planning stages of
Odyssey that Kubrick decided to settle in England
permanently.

Lolita was one of most
controversial novels of the century, given its theme.
Here, Lolita kisses her stepfather Humbert goodnight while he
plays chess with her mother (Shelley Winters).
Lolita was Kubrick's first major controversy. The
book, by Russian-American novelist
Vladimir Nabokov, dealt with an affair
between a middle-aged man named Humbert Humbert (
James Mason) and his twelve-year-old
stepdaughter, and was already notorious as an "obscene" novel and a
cause celebre when Kubrick embarked on the project. The
difficult subject matter was mocked in the film's famous
tagline, "How did they ever make a film of
Lolita?" Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his
own novel for the screen. The writer first produced a 400-page
screenplay, which he then reduced to 200. The final screenplay was
written by Kubrick himself, and Nabokov himself estimated that only
20% of his work made it into the film. Nabokov's original draft was
later published under the title
Lolita: A
Screenplay.
Prior to its release, Kubrick realized that to get a
Production Code seal, the screenplay would
have to not be overly provocative, treading lightly with its theme.
Kubrick tried to make some elements more acceptable by omitting all
material referring to Humbert's lifelong infatuation with
"nymphets" and possibly ensuring Lolita looked like a teenager.
Nonetheless, Kubrick had liaised with the censors during production
and it was only "slightly edited", in particular removing the
eroticism between Lolita and Humbert. As a result, the novel's more
perverse aspects were toned down in the final cut, leaving much to
the viewer's imagination. Kubrick would later say that had he known
the severity of the censorship he would face, he probably would not
have made the film.
Lolita was the first of two times Kubrick worked with
British comic actor
Peter Sellers, the
second being
Dr. Strangelove (1964). Sellers' role is that
of
Clare Quilty, a second older man
unknown to Humbert who is involved with Lolita, serving
dramatically as Humbert's darker doppelganger. In the novel, Quilty
is behind the scenes for most of the story, but Kubrick brings him
to the foreground, which resulted in an expansion of his role (even
then running to only about half an hour’s screen time). Kubrick
adds the dramatic device of Quilty's pretending to be multiple
characters, allowing Sellers to employ his gift for mock
accents.
Critical reception of the film was mixed; many praised it for its
daring subject matter, while others were surprised by the lack of
intimacy between Lolita and Humbert. The film received an
Academy Award nomination for
Best Adapted
Screenplay, and
Sue Lyon, who played
the title role, won a
Golden Globe for
Best Newcomer.
Film critic
Gene Youngblood holds
that stylistically
Lolita is a transitional film for
Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema...to
the surrealism of the later films."
Kubrick's next film,
Dr. Strangelove
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1964), became a
cult film and is now
considered a classic.
Roger Ebert has
written that it is the best
satirical
film ever made. The screenplay—based upon the novel
Red Alert, by ex-RAF
flight lieutenant
Peter George (writing
as Peter Bryant)—was cowritten by Kubrick and George, with
contributions by American satirist
Terry
Southern.
Red Alert is a serious, cautionary tale of
accidental atomic war. However, Kubrick found the conditions
leading to nuclear war so absurd that the story became a sinister
macabre comedy. Once so reconceived, Kubrick recruited Terry
Southern to polish the final screenplay.
The story centers on an American nuclear attack on the Soviet
Union, initiated by renegade U.S.A.F. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (
Sterling Hayden; the character's name is a
reference to
Jack the Ripper)
without official authorization. When Ripper gives his orders, the
bombers are all at
fail-safe points,
before which passing they cannot arm their warheads, and past
which, they cannot proceed without direct orders. Once past this
point, the planes will only return with a prearranged recall code.
The film intercuts between three locales: 1) Ripper's air force
base, where RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) tries to
stop the mad Gen. Ripper by obtaining the codes; 2) the Pentagon
War Room, where the
President of the United
States (Sellers) and U.S.A.F. Gen. Buck Turgidson (
George C. Scott) try to develop a strategy with the
Soviets to stop Gen. Ripper's
B-52
bombers from dropping nuclear bombs on Russia; and 3) Major Kong's
(
Slim Pickens) B-52 bomber, where he
and his crew of airmen (never knowing their orders are false)
doggedly try to complete their mission. It soon becomes clear that
the bombers may reach Russia, since only Gen. Ripper knows the
recall codes. At this point, the character of Dr. Strangelove
(Sellers' third role) is introduced. His Nazi-style plans for
ensuring the survival of the fittest of the human race in the
aftermath of a nuclear holocaust are the black-comedy highlight of
the film.
Peter Sellers, who had played a small
but pivotal part in
Lolita, was hired to play four roles
in
Dr. Strangelove. He eventually played three, due to an
injured leg and his difficulty in mastering bomber pilot Major
"King" Kong's Texas accent. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing,"
but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted
beyond two or three takes. To overcome this problem, Kubrick ran
two cameras simultaneously and let Sellers improvise.
Coincidentally, that same year, Columbia Studios released the
dramatic nuclear war thriller
Fail-Safe.
The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments of the later 1960s that
would become explosive only a few years after its release. It was
highly irreverent toward war policies of the U.S., which were
largely considered sacrosanct up to that time. The film earned four
Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best
Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.
Kubrick spent five years developing his next film,
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). The film was conceived as a
Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in
Super Panavision 70. Kubrick cowrote the
screenplay with science fiction writer Sir
Arthur C. Clarke, expanding on Clarke's short story
"
The Sentinel." Kubrick
reportedly told Clarke that his intention was to make "the
proverbial great science fiction film."
2001 begins four million years ago with an encounter
between a group of apes and a mysterious black monolith, which
seems to trigger in them the ability to use a bone as both a tool
and a weapon. Used as the latter allows them to claim a water hole
from another group of apes, who have no
tool-wielding ability. A victorious ape
tosses his bone into the air, at which point the film makes a
celebrated jump cut to an orbiting weapons satellite, circa 2000.
At this time, a group of Americans at their moon base have dug up a
similar monolith. Geological evidence indicates that it was
deliberately buried four million years ago. When the sun rises over
the monolith, it sends a radio signal to Jupiter. Eighteen months
later, the U.S. sends a group of astronauts aboard the spaceship
Discovery on a mission to Jupiter, the purpose of which is to
investigate the monolith's signal, although this is concealed from
the crew. During the flight, the ship's sentient
HAL 9000 computer malfunctions but resists
disconnection, believing its control of the mission to be crucial.
The computer terminates life support for most of the crew before it
is successfully shut down. The surviving astronaut,
David Bowman (Keir
Dullea), in a tiny space pod, encounters another monolith in orbit
around Jupiter, whereupon he is hurled into a portal in space at
high speed, witnessing many astronomical phenomena. His
interstellar journey concludes with his transformation into a
mysterious new being resembling a fetus enclosed in an orb of
light, last seen gazing at Earth from space.
The $10,000,000 (U.S.) film was a massive production for its time.
The groundbreaking visual effects were overseen by Kubrick and were
engineered by a team that included a young
Douglas Trumbull, who would become famous
in his own right for his work on the films
Silent Running and
Blade Runner. Kubrick extensively used
traveling
matte photography to film space
flight, a technique also used nine years later by
George Lucas in making
Star Wars, although
that film also used motion-control effects that were unavailable to
Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of
slit-scan photography to film the
Stargate sequence. The film's striking cinematography was the work
of legendary British director of photography
Geoffrey Unsworth, who would later
photograph classic films such as
Cabaret and
Superman. Manufacturing companies were
consulted as to what the design of both special-purpose and
everyday objects would look like in the future. At the time of the
movie's release, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that a generation of
engineers would design real spacecraft based upon
2001
"…even if it isn't the best way to do it." . The film also is a
rare instance of portraying space travel realistically, with
complete silence in the vacuum of space and a realistic
representation of weightlessness.
The film is famous for using classical music in place of an
original score.
Richard Strauss's
Also
sprach Zarathustra and
Johann
Strauss's The Blue
Danube waltz became for a while indelibly associated with
the film, especially the former, as it was not well-known to the
public prior to the film. Kubrick also used music by contemporary
avant-garde Hungarian composer
György
Ligeti, although some of the pieces were altered without
Ligeti's consent. The appearance of
Atmospheres,
Lux
Aeterna, and
Requiem on the
2001 soundtrack
was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. This use
of "program" music was not originally planned. Kubrick had
commissioned composer
Alex North to write
a full-length score for the film, but Kubrick became so attached to
the temporary soundtrack he had constructed during editing that he
dropped the idea of an original score entirely.
Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not
an immediate hit. Initial critical reaction was extremely hostile,
with critics attacking the film's lack of dialogue, slow pacing,
and seemingly impenetrable storyline. One of the film's few
defenders was
Penelope Gilliatt,
who called it (in
The New
Yorker) "some kind of a great film." Word of mouth among
young audiences—especially the 1960s
counterculture audience, who loved the
movie's "Star Gate" sequence, a seemingly psychedelic journey to
the infinite reaches of the cosmos—made the film a hit. Despite
nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories,
the only
Academy
Award Kubrick ever received was for supervising the special
effects of
2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, however, many
consider it the greatest
sci-fi film
ever made, and it is a staple on Top 10 lists of all-time.
Artistically,
2001 was a radical departure from Kubrick's
previous films. It contains only 45 minutes of spoken dialogue,
over a running time of two hours and twenty minutes. The fairly
mundane dialogue is mostly superfluous to the images and music. The
film's most memorable dialogue belongs to the computer HAL in HAL's
exchanges with Dave Bowman. Some argue that Kubrick is portraying a
future humanity largely dissociated from its environment. The
film's ambiguous, perplexing ending continues to fascinate
contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would
never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative
form, but his subsequent films maintain some level of
ambiguity.
Interpretations of
2001: A Space Odyssey are numerous and
diverse. Despite having been released in 1968, it still prompts
debate today. When critic Joseph Gelmis asked Kubrick about the
meaning of the film, Kubrick replied:
They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because
they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to
viewer.
In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer
sees in it.
If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the
subconscious of the viewer, if it
stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious
yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.
2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps Kubrick's most famous and
influential film.
Steven Spielberg
called it his generation's big bang, focusing attention upon the
space race. It was a precursor to the explosion of the science
fiction film market nine years later, which began with the release
of
Star Wars
Episode IV: A New Hope and
Close Encounters of the Third
Kind.
1970s: A Clockwork Orange & Barry Lyndon

In
A Clockwork Orange,
Kubrick continued his innovative use of classical music begun in
2001: A Space Odyssey.
However, instead of accompanying graceful space flight, the
music accompanied violence and rape.
The slow-motion fight scene about to commence is choreographed
to Rossini's overture to "The Thieving Magpie."
After
2001, Kubrick initially attempted to make a film
about the life of
Napoleon
Bonaparte. When financing fell through, Kubrick went looking
for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He
eventually settled on
A
Clockwork Orange (1971). His adaptation of
Anthony Burgess' novel is a dark, shocking
exploration of violence in human society. The film was initially
released with an X
rating in the United States
and caused considerable controversy. The film's iconic poster
imagery was created by legendary designer
Bill
Gold.
The story takes place in a futuristic version of Great Britain that
is both authoritarian and chaotic. The central character is a
teenage
hooligan named Alex DeLarge
(
Malcolm McDowell), who, along with
his companion "droogs", gleefully torments, beats, robs, tortures,
and rapes without conscience or remorse. His brutal beating and
murder of an older woman finally lands Alex in prison. Alex
undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment that inhibits
his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. At
the public demonstration of the success of the technique, Alex is
treated cruelly but does not fight back; the treatment has made him
less than human. He has been conditioned against classical music,
his love of which was his one human feature, and apparently all of
his sex drive is gone. We further see hints that the promotion of
the treatment is politically motivated. After being freed, he is
found by his former partners in crime who had betrayed him and who
are now policemen, and they beat him mercilessly.
He then comes to the home of a political writer who disdains "the
modern age" and is initially sympathetic to Alex's plight until he
recognizes Alex as the young man who brutally raped his wife and
paralyzed him a few years before. Alex then becomes a pawn in a
political game.
The society was sometimes perceived as Communist (as
Michel Ciment pointed out in an interview with
Kubrick, although he himself didn't feel that way) due to its
slight ties to Russian culture. The teenage slang has a heavily
Russian vocabulary, which can be attributed to Burgess. There is
some evidence to suggest that the society is a socialist one, or at
least a society moving out of a failed, Leftist socialism and into
a Rightist or fascist society. In the novel, streets have paintings
of working men in the style of Russian socialist art, and in the
film, there is a mural of socialist artwork with obscenities drawn
on it. As well, Alex's residence was shot on actual failed Labour
party architecture (as Malcolm McDowell points out on the DVD
commentary), and the name "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North"
alludes to socialist-style housing. Later in the film, when the new
right-wing government takes power, the atmosphere is certainly more
authoritarian than the anarchist air of the beginning. Kubrick's
response to Ciment's question remained ambiguous as to exactly what
kind of society it is. He held that the film held comparisons
between both the left and right end of the political spectrum and
that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated,
"The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the
Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left. ...They
differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly
distinguishable."
Kubrick photographed
A Clockwork Orange quickly and almost
entirely on location in and around London. Despite the low-tech
nature of the film as compared to
2001: A Space Odyssey,
Kubrick showed his talent for innovation; at one point, he threw an
Arriflex camera off a rooftop in order to
achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted
electronic music composer
Wendy
Carlos—at the time, known as Walter Carlos (
Switched-On Bach)—to adapt famous
classical works (such as
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) for the
Moog synthesizer.
The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit
depiction of teenage gang rape and violence. It was released in the
same year as
Sam Peckinpah's
Straw Dogs and
Don Siegel's
Dirty
Harry, and the three films sparked a ferocious debate in
the media about the social effects of cinematic violence. The
controversy was exacerbated when copycat crimes were committed in
England by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in
A Clockwork Orange. British readers of the novel noted
that Kubrick had omitted the final chapter (also omitted from
American editions of the book) in which Alex finds redemption and
sanity.
It is pivotal to the plot that the lead character, Alex, is fond of
classical music, and that the brainwashing Ludovico treatment
accidentally conditions him against classical music. As such, it
was natural for Kubrick to continue the tradition begun in
2001: A Space Odyssey of using a great deal of classical
music in the score. However, in this film, classical music
accompanies scenes of violent mayhem and coercive sexuality rather
than of graceful space flight and mysterious alien presences. Both
Pauline Kael (who generally disliked Kubrick) and Roger Ebert (who
often praises Kubrick) found Kubrick's use of juxtaposing classical
music and violence in this film unpleasant, Ebert calling it a
"cute, cheap, dead-end dimension,"and Kael, "self-important."
However, novelist Anthony Burgess, in his introduction to his own
stage adaptation of the novel, held that ultimately, classical
music is what will finally redeem Alex.
After receiving death threats to himself and his family as a result
of the controversy, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the
film from circulation in Britain. It was unavailable in the United
Kingdom until its re-release in 2000, a year after Kubrick's death,
although it could be seen in continental Europe. The Scala cinema
in London's Kings Cross showed the film in the early 1990s, and at
Kubrick's insistence, the cinema was sued and put out of business,
thus depriving London of one of its very few independent cinemas.
It is now
a
club
.
In the mid-1990s, a documentary entitled
Forbidden Fruit,
about the censorship controversy, was released in Britain. Kubrick
was unable to prevent the documentary makers from including footage
from
A Clockwork Orange in their film.

Special lenses were developed for
Barry Lyndon to allow filming using only natural
light.
Kubrick's next film, released in 1975, was an adaptation of
William Makepeace
Thackeray's
The Luck of
Barry Lyndon, also known as
Barry Lyndon, a
picaresque novel about the
adventures and misadventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and
social climber. After serving in the Prussian army, Lyndon slowly
insinuates himself into English high society, eventually marrying
the Countess of Lyndon. The world of the aristocracy turns out to
be a hollow paradise, dull and decaying. Lyndon is ultimately
unable to maintain his good standing there and falls from grace
after a series of persecutions.
Some critics, especially
Pauline Kael
(one of Kubrick's greatest detractors), found
Barry Lyndon a cold, slow-moving,
and lifeless film. Its measured pace and length—more than three
hours—put off many American critics and audiences, although it
received positive reviews from
Rex Reed and
Richard Schickel.
Time magazine published a cover story
about the film, and Kubrick was nominated for three Academy Awards.
The film was nominated for seven
Academy
Awards and won four, more than any other Kubrick film. Despite
this,
Barry Lyndon was not a box office success in the
U.S., although the film found a great audience in Europe,
particularly in France.
As with most of Kubrick's films,
Barry Lyndon's reputation
has grown through the years, particularly among other filmmakers.
Director
Martin Scorsese has cited
it as his favorite Kubrick film.
Steven
Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique," though, when
younger, he famously described it "like going through the Prado
without
lunch."
As in his other films, Kubrick's cinematography and lighting
techniques were highly innovative.
Most famously, interior scenes were shot
with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for
NASA
. This allowed many scenes to be lit only
with candlelight, creating two-dimensional diffused-light images
reminiscent of 18th-century paintings.
Like its two predecessors, the film does not have an original
score. Irish traditional songs (performed by
The Chieftains) are combined with works such
as
Antonio Vivaldi's Cello Concerto
in B, a
Johann Sebastian Bach
Double Concerto,
George Frideric
Handel's
Sarabande from the
Keyboard Suite in D minor (
HWV 448,
HG II/ii/4), and
Franz Schubert's German Dance No. 1 in
C major,
Piano Trio
No. 2 in E flat, and
Impromptu
No. 1 in C
minor. The music was conducted and adapted by
Leonard Rosenman, for which he won an
Oscar.
In 1976,
production designer Ken Adam, who had
worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, asked
Kubrick to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood
Studios
to provide advice on how to light the enormous
soundstage, which had been built for and was being prepared for the
James Bond movie The Spy
Who Loved Me. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was
promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement.
This was honored until after his death in 1999, when in 2000 the
fact was revealed by Adam in the documentary on the making of
The Spy Who Loved Me on the special edition DVD of the 007
movie.
1980s: The Shining & Full Metal Jacket
The pace of Kubrick's work slowed considerably after
Barry
Lyndon, and he did not make another film for five years.
The Shining, released in
1980, was adapted from the
novel
of the same name by bestselling horror writer
Stephen King. The film starred
Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a failed
writer who takes a job as an off-season caretaker of the
Overlook Hotel, a high-class resort deep in
the Colorado mountains. The job requires spending the winter in the
isolated hotel with his wife, Wendy (played by
Shelley Duvall) and their young son, Danny,
who is gifted with a form of
telepathy—the
"shining" of the film's title.
As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the
demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awake.
The hotel displays increasingly horrible,
phantasmagoric images to Danny. Meanwhile,
Jack is slowly driven mad by the haunted surroundings until he
finally collapses into homicidal
psychosis.
The film was shot entirely on London soundstages, with the
exception of second-unit exterior footage, which was filmed in
Colorado, Montana, and Oregon. In order to convey the
claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made
extensive use of the newly invented
Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which
allowed for smooth camera movement in enclosed spaces.
More than any of his other films,
The Shining gave rise to
the legend of Kubrick as a megalomanic
perfectionist. Reportedly, he demanded
hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet
of film was shot). This process was particularly difficult for
actress
Shelley Duvall, who was used
to the faster, improvisational style of director
Robert Altman.
Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks
too much and feels too little." In 1997, King collaborated with
Mick Garris to create a television
miniseries version of the novel that was more faithful to King's
original.
The film opened to mostly negative reviews, but proved a commercial
success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction
has treated the film more favorably. Among horror movie fans,
The Shining is a cult classic, often appearing at the top
of best horror film lists alongside
Psycho (1960),
The Exorcist and other horror
classics. Some of its images, such as an antique elevator
disgorging a tidal wave of blood, are among the most recognizable
and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film. The
financial success of
The Shining renewed
Warner Brothers' faith in Kubrick's ability
to make artistically satisfying and profitable films after the
commercial failure of
Barry Lyndon in the United
States.

Reviewers noted that unlike most
Vietnam war films set in lush jungle environments, Kubrick made a
mainly urban Vietnam film set around bombed-out buildings, giving
this war film a more distinctively grim and bleak quality.
It was seven years until Kubrick's next film,
Full Metal Jacket (1987), an
adaptation of
Gustav Hasford's
Vietnam War novel
The Short-Timers, starring
Matthew Modine as Joker,
Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother,
R. Lee Ermey as
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and
Vincent D'Onofrio as
Private Leonard "
Gomer
Pyle" Lawrence. Kubrick said to film critic Steven Hall that
his attraction to Gustav Hasford's book was because it was "neither
antiwar or prowar," held "no moral or political position," and was
primarily concerned with "the way things are."
The film
begins at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris
Island
, South
Carolina
, U.S., where
Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman relentlessly
pushes his recruits through basic training in order to transform
them from worthless "maggots" into motivated and disciplined
killing machines. Private Lawrence, an overweight,
slow-witted recruit who Hartman has nicknamed "Gomer Pyle," is
unable to cope with the program and slowly cracks under the strain.
On the eve of graduation, he has a psychotic breakdown and murders
Hartman before killing himself.
In
characteristic Kubrick style, the second half of the film jumps
abruptly to Vietnam
, following Joker, since promoted to
sergeant. As a reporter for the
United States Military's newspaper,
the
Stars and
Stripes, Joker occupies war's middle ground, using wit and
sarcasm to detach himself from the carnage around him. Though a
marine at war, he is also a reporter and is thus compelled to abide
by the ethics of his profession.
The film then follows an infantry
platoon's advance on and through Hue City
, decimated by the Tet
Offensive. The film climaxes in a battle between Joker's
platoon and a sniper hiding in the rubble, who is revealed to be a
young girl. She almost kills Joker until his reporter partner
shoots and severely injures her. Joker then kills her to put her
out of her misery.
Filming a Vietnam War film in England was a considerable challenge
for Kubrick and his production team.
Much of the filming
was done in the Docklands
area of London, with the ruined-city set created by
production designer Anton Furst.
As a result, the film is visually very different from other Vietnam
War films such as
Platoon
and
Hamburger Hill, most of
which were shot in the Far East. Instead of a tropical,
Southeast-Asian jungle, the second half of the story unfolds in a
city, illuminating the urban warfare aspect of a war generally
portrayed (and thus perceived) as jungle warfare, notwithstanding
significant urban skirmishes like the
Tet
offensive. Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed
to the bleakness and seriousness of the film.
Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews on
release but also found a reasonably large audience, despite being
overshadowed by
Oliver Stone's
Platoon and
Clint Eastwood's
Heartbreak Ridge. Like Kubrick's other
films, its critical status has increased immensely since its
initial release.
1990s: Eyes Wide Shut

The casting of real-life celebrity
couple Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as a married couple in a film
rumored (correctly) to have a sexually charged plot fueled wild
speculations about the film's content.
Kubrick's final film was
Eyes Wide
Shut, starring then-married actors
Tom Cruise and
Nicole
Kidman as a wealthy Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey.
The story
of Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Freudian novella
Traumnovelle (Dream
Story in English), although the story has been ported from
Vienna
in the 1920s
to New York City in the 1990s. It follows Dr. William
Harford's journey into the sexual underworld of New York City,
after his wife, Alice, has shattered his faith in her fidelity by
confessing to having fantasized about giving him and their daughter
up for one night with another man. Until then, Harford had presumed
women are more naturally faithful than men. This new revelation
generates doubt and despair, and he begins to roam the streets of
New York, acting blindly on his jealousy.
After trespassing upon the rituals of a sinister, mysterious sexual
cult, Dr. Harford thinks twice before seeking sexual revenge
against his wife. Upon returning home, his wife now gives an
anguished confession she has had a dream about making love to
several men at once. After his own dangerous escapades, Dr. Harford
has no high moral ground over her. The couple begin to patch their
relationship.
The film was in production for more than two years, and two of the
main members of the cast,
Harvey
Keitel and
Jennifer Jason
Leigh, were replaced in the course of the filming. Although it
is set in New York City, the film was mostly shot on London
soundstages, with little location shooting. Shots of Manhattan
itself were pickup shots filmed in New York City by a second-unit
crew. Because of Kubrick's secrecy about the film, mostly
inaccurate rumors abounded about its plot and content. Most
especially, the story's sexual content provoked speculation, some
journalists writing that it would be "the sexiest film ever made."
The casting of then celebrity-actor supercouple Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman as a husband-wife couple in the film increased the
prerelease journalistic hyperbole.
Eyes Wide Shut, like
Lolita and
A Clockwork
Orange before it, faced censorship before release. In the
United States and Canada, digitally manufactured silhouette figures
were strategically placed to mask explicit copulation scenes so as
to secure an R rating from the
MPAA. In Europe, and
the rest of the world, the film has been released uncut, in its
original form. The October 2007 DVD reissue contains the uncut
version, making it available to North American audiences for the
first time.
Death
In 1999—four days after screening a final cut of
Eyes Wide Shut for his family,
Tom Cruise,
Nicole
Kidman, and Warner Brothers executives—70-year-old Kubrick died
of a
heart attack in his
sleep.
He
was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor
, Hertfordshire, England
, U.K.
Projects unrealized or completed by others
The Burning Secret and Natural Child
In 1956, after MGM turned down Harris and Kubrick's request to film
Paths of Glory, they invited him to look through their
other properties. Harris and Kubrick discovered
Stefan Zweig's novel
The Burning
Secret, in which a young baron who tries to seduce a young
Jewish woman by first befriending her twelve-year-old son, who
eventually becomes wise to the situation. Kubrick was very excited
about this novel and hired novelist
Calder Willingham to produce a screenplay,
but
Production Code restrictions
made the project impossible.
Kubrick had earlier been interested in adapting the same Calder
Willingham novel
Natural Child, but quickly realized it
could not be done within the Production Code.
One-Eyed Jacks
The Hollywood
Reporter announced on October 18, 1956 that producer Frank
Rosenberg had bought rights to Charles Neider’s novel
The
Authentic Death of Hendry Jones for $40,000. Two years later,
Pennebaker Inc.,
Marlon Brando’s
independent production company, bought the rights to the novel as
well as
Sam Peckinpah’s first-draft
screenplay adaptation for $150,000. Even at this time, it was
announced that Brando might direct.
Later that year, Kubrick was announced as director of
Gun’s
Up, the working title for the production. Shortly after this
announcement, the name of the film was changed to
One-Eyed
Jacks and
Pina Pellicer was
announced as "the unanimous choice of Brando, Rosenberg, and
Kubrick" to play the female lead.
On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of
One-Eyed
Jacks, stating that he had the utmost respect for Marlon
Brando as one of "the world’s foremost artists" but had recently
acquired the rights to Nabokov’s
Lolita and wanted to
begin production work immediately in light of this wonderful
opportunity. The film was completed with directorial credit given
to Marlon Brando.
Napoleon
After the success of
2001, Kubrick planned a large-scale
biopic of
Napoleon Bonaparte. He did much
research, read books about the French Emperor, and wrote a
preliminary screenplay (which has become available on the
Internet). With assistants, he meticulously created a card
catalogue of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during
its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film
large portions of the story in the same places as in Napoleon's
life. In notes to his financial backers, preserved in The Kubrick
Archives, Kubrick told them he was unsure how his Napoleon film
would turn out, but that he expected to create "the best movie ever
made."
Ultimately, the project was canceled for the prohibitive cost of
location filming, the Western release of
Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of
Leo Tolstoy's novel
War
and Peace (1968), and the commercial failure of
Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film
Waterloo (1970). Much of his historical
research would influence
Barry
Lyndon (1975), which was set in the late eighteenth
century, just before Napoleon's wars.
The film was originally to star
Jack
Nicholson as Napoleon after Kubrick saw him in
Easy Rider (the two would later work
together on
The Shining). After years of preproduction,
the movie was set aside indefinitely in favor of more economically
feasible projects. As late as 1987, Kubrick stated that he had not
given up on the project, mentioning that he had read almost 500
books on the historical figure and that he was convinced that a
film worthy of the subject had not yet appeared.
Aryan Papers
As early as 1976, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film about the
Holocaust, trying to persuade
Isaac Bashevis Singer to contribute an
original screenplay. Kubrick sought a "dramatic structure that
compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an
individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell."
Singer declined, saying, "I don't know the first thing about the
Holocaust."
In the early 1990s, Kubrick almost went into production on a film
of
Louis Begley's
Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his
aunt in hiding during
The Holocaust.
The first-draft screenplay, titled "Aryan Papers," had been penned
by Kubrick himself.
Full Metal Jacket coscreenwriter
Michael Herr reports that Kubrick had considered casting
Julia Roberts and
Uma
Thurman as the aunt.
Eventually, Johanna ter Steege was cast as the aunt
and Joseph Mazzello as the young
boy, with Kubrick even travelling to the Czech city of Brno
as a
possible location for wartime Warsaw
. But
Kubrick chose not to make the film due to the release of
Steven Spielberg's Holocaust-themed
Schindler's List in 1993.
In addition, according to Kubrick's wife, Christiane, the subject
itself had become too depressing and difficult for the director.
Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate film about the
Holocaust was beyond the capacity of cinema and abandoned the
project in 1995 and turned his attention back to
A.I.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Kubrick collaborated with
Brian Aldiss on an expansion of his
short story "
Super-Toys
Last All Summer Long" into a three-act film, along with other
writers such as
Sara Maitland and
Ian Watson) under various names,
including "Pinocchio" and "Artificial Intelligence.". It was a
futuristic fairy-tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a
child, sold as a temporary surrogate to a family whose real son is
in suspended animation with a deadly disease. The story focuses on
the efforts of the robot to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar
to Pinocchio.
Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Steven
Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one
point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's
sensibilities than his. In 2001, following Kubrick's death,
Spielberg took the various drafts and notes left by Kubrick and his
writers and composed a new screenplay and, in association with what
remained of Kubrick's production unit, made the movie
A.I. Artificial Intelligence,
starring
Haley Joel Osment,
Frances O'Connor, and
William Hurt.
The film contains a posthumous producing credit for Stanley Kubrick
at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at
the end. The film contains many recurrent Kubrick motifs, such as
an omniscient narrator, an extreme form of the
three-act structure, the themes of
humanity and inhumanity, and a sardonic view of
Freudian psychology. In addition,
John Williams' score contains
allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.
Lunatic at Large
On November 1, 2006, Philip Hobbs, Kubrick's
son-in-law, announced that he would be
shepherding a film treatment of
Lunatic at Large, which was
commissioned by Kubrick for treatment from noir pulp novelist
Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but
had been lost until Kubrick's death.
Unreleased screenplays
A number of screenplays remain for which Kubrick was either
commissioned or wrote for unsuccessful projects, include
The
German Lieutenant (co-written with Richard Adams), featuring a
group of German soldiers in a mission during the final days of
World War II;
I Stole 16 Million
Dollars, about notorious 1930s bank robber
Willie Sutton (the film was to be made by
Kirk Douglas' Bryna production company,
despite Douglas believing the script was poorly written, and
Cary Grant was approached for the lead);
and a first draft of a script about the Confederate
Mosby Rangers guerilla force in the
Civil War.
Other projects
Kubrick is reported to have been fascinated by the career of Nazi
filmmaker
Veit Harlan, an uncle of his
wife, and to have contemplated a film on the circle around
Joseph Goebbels. Although Kubrick worked on
it for several years, this never got further than a rough story
outline.
Kubrick wanted to make a film based on
Umberto Eco's 1988 novel
Foucault's Pendulum, but he was
refused over Eco's dissatisfaction with the filming of his earlier
novel
The Name of the
Rose and Kubrick's unwillingness to allow him to write the
screenplay himself (after Kubrick died, Eco would admit he
regretted the rebuff).
Before moving onto
2001,
Terry
Southern suggested that Kubrick should make a high-budget
pornographic film called
Blue Movie in an attempt to take
the genre and reinvent it. He decided not to do it, believing that
he did not have the temperament for pornographic cinema and didn't
think he could successfully reinvent the genre enough to truly
elevate it. At this time Southern started work on a novel that
would not be published until 1970, also entitled
Blue Movie, about a highly regarded
art film director named Boris Adrian who attempts just such a film
(the book is dedicated to Kubrick).
When
J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film rights of
The Lord of the Rings to
United Artists in 1969, the
Beatles considered making a film of it, and
approached Kubrick as a possible director, but Kubrick told
John Lennon he thought the novel
unfilmable due to its immensity
Kubrick also toyed with the idea of adapting
Perfume by
Patrick Süskind, a book he greatly
enjoyed, though nothing came of it. It would later be adapted for
the screen by
Tom Tykwer as
Perfume: The Story of a
Murderer.
Frequent collaborators
Unlike directors such as
John Ford,
Martin Scorsese, and
Akira Kurosawa, Kubrick did not generally
reuse actors. However, Kubrick did on several occasions work with
the same actor more than once. In lead roles, there was Sterling
Hayden in both
The Killing and
Dr. Strangelove,
Peter Sellers in
Lolita and
Dr. Strangelove, and
Kirk Douglas in
Paths of Glory and
Spartacus. In
supporting roles,
Joe Turkel appears in
The Killing,
Paths of Glory, and
The
Shining;
Philip Stone appears in
A Clockwork Orange,
Barry Lyndon, and
The
Shining;
Leonard Rossiter is
featured in
2001: A Space Odyssey and
Barry
Lyndon; whilst
Timothy Carey is
in both
The Killing and
Paths of Glory.
A
Clockwork Orange and
Barry Lyndon saw the largest
crossover, with six actors (including
Patrick Magee) having roles of various
lengths in each film.
One of Kubrick's longest collaborations was with
Leon Vitali, who, after playing the older Lord
Bullingdon in
Barry Lyndon, became Kubrick's personal
assistant, working as the casting director on his following films,
and supervising film-to-video transfers for Kubrick. He would also
appear in
Eyes Wide Shut, playing the ominous Red Cloak,
who confronts Tom Cruise during the infamous orgy scene. Since
Kubrick's death, Vitali has overseen the restoration of both
picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick's films. He has also
collaborated frequently with
Eyes Wide Shut costar
Todd Field on his pictures.
Family cameos
Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian has cameos in
2001: A Space
Odyssey (as Heywood Floyd's daughter),
Barry Lyndon
(as a girl at the birthday party for young Bryan Lyndon),
The
Shining (as a party ghost), and
Full Metal Jacket (as
a TV reporter). His stepdaughter Katharina has cameos in
A
Clockwork Orange and
Eyes Wide Shut, and her
character's son in the latter is played by her real son. Kubrick's
wife
Christiane Kubrick appeared
prior to her marriage to Kubrick in
Paths of Glory, billed
as Susanne Christian (her birth name is Christiane Susanne Harlan),
and as a cafe guest in
Eyes Wide Shut.
Style and trademarks

Kubrick's cinematic style frequently
features scenes with long parallel walls.
Stanley Kubrick's films have several trademark characteristics. All
but his first two full-length films and
2001 were adapted
from existing novels (
2001 being based on
The Sentinel as well as
having its own planned novelization), and he occasionally wrote
screenplays in collaboration with writers (usually novelists, but a
journalist in the case of
Full Metal Jacket) who had
limited screenwriting experience. Many of his films had voiceover
narration, sometimes taken verbatim from the novel. With or without
narration, all of his films contain extensive
character's-point-of-view footage. The closing of films with "The
End" went out of style with the advent of long closing credits, but
Kubrick continued to put it at the end of the credits, long after
the rest of the film industry stopped using it. On the other hand,
Kubrick occasionally dispensed with opening credits (in
Space
Odyssey and
Clockwork Orange) long before the
industry started doing so commonly. His credits are always a slide
show. His only rolling credits are the opening credits to
The
Shining.
Kubrick paid close attention to the releases of his films in other
countries. Not only did he have complete control of the dubbing
cast; sometimes alternative material was shot for international
releases: in
The Shining, the text on the typewriter pages
was reshot for the countries the film was released in; in
Eyes
Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were reshot
for different languages. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice
translations are allowed to be produced for any of the films he had
control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only
subtitles are allowed for translation. Kubrick also closely
supervised the actual translation of the script into foreign
languages.
Beginning with
2001: A Space Odyssey, all of his films
except
Full Metal Jacket used mostly prerecorded classical
music, in two cases electronically altered by Wendy Carlos. He also
often used merry-sounding pop music in an ironic way during scenes
depicting devastation and destruction, especially in the closing
credits or end sequences of a film.

Roger Ebert, among others, has noted
the oft-recurring "Kubrick stare."
In his review of
Full Metal Jacket, Roger Ebert noted that
many Kubrick films have a facial closeup of an unraveling character
in which the character's head is tilted down and his eyes are
tilted up. Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots,
character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel
walls.
Many of Kubrick's films have back-references to previous Kubrick
films. The best-known examples of this are the appearance of the
soundtrack album for
2001: A Space Odyssey appearing in
the record store in
A Clockwork Orange and Quilty's joke
about Spartacus in
Lolita. Less obvious is the reference
to a painter named Ludovico in
Barry Lyndon, Ludovico
being the name of the conditioning treatment in
A Clockwork
Orange.
All Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a
bathroom. (Oddly, the most cited example of this in
2001
is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route
to the moon—almost never David Bowman's exploration [still wearing
his spacesuit] of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom
after his journey through the Star Gate.)
Special case of CRM-114
Although
Dr. Strangelove employs a device called
CRM-114, and
A Clockwork
Orange has a sound-alike medicine called
Serum 114,
numerous and oft-repeated claims that the numbers 114 appear in
other Kubrick films are apocryphal. (
CRM-114 is also used
in the source novel
Red Alert, upon which
Dr.
Strangelove is based, which should make anyone suspicious of
claims that the numbers appeared in Kubrick's earlier film
The
Killing.) Nonetheless, in a remarkable case of a director's
influencing popular culture through an exaggerated urban legend,
there is in honor of this Kubrick trademark, an e-mail spam
filtering system, a progressive rock band, a right-wing website, a
sound amplifier in the film
Back
to the Future, a catalog code in the TV series
Heroes, and a weapon in
the TV series
Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine, all named
CRM-114, and a short
film called
Serum 114. The
Star Trek: Deep Space
Nine episode in question had as guest star actor
Steven Berkoff from
A Clockwork
Orange and
Barry Lyndon, and it was directed by
regular cast member
Alexander
Siddig, who is a nephew of Malcolm McDowell, star of
A
Clockwork Orange.
Aspect ratio
There has been a longstanding debate regarding the
DVD releases of Kubrick's films; specifically, the
aspect ratio of many of the
films. The primary point of contention relates to his final five
films:
A Clockwork Orange,
Barry Lyndon,
The
Shining,
Full Metal Jacket, and
Eyes Wide
Shut.
Kubrick's initial involvement with home video mastering of his
films was a result of television screenings of
2001: A Space
Odyssey. Because the film was shot in 65 mm, the
composition of each shot was compromised by the
pan-and-scan method of transferring a
wide-screen image to fit a 1.33:1 television set.
Kubrick's final five films were shot "flat"—the full 1.37:1 area is
exposed in the camera, but with appropriate markings on the
viewfinder, the picture was composed for and cropped to the 1.85:1
aspect ratio in a theater's projector.
The first mastering of these five films was in 2000 as part of the
"Stanley Kubrick Collection", consisting of
Lolita,
Dr. Strangelove (in association with Sony Pictures),
2001: A Space Odyssey,
A Clockwork Orange,
Barry Lyndon,
The Shining,
Full Metal
Jacket, and
Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick oversaw the video
masters in 1989 for
Warner Home
Video, and approved of 1.33:1 transfers for all of the films
except for
2001, which was letterboxed .
Kubrick never approved a 1.85:1 video transfer of any of his films;
when he died in 1999, DVDs and the 16×9 format were only beginning
to become popular in the US, and most people were accustomed to
seeing movies fill their television screen. Warner Home Video chose
to release these films with the transfers that Kubrick had
explicitly approved.
In 2007, Warner Home Video remastered
2001: A Space
Odyssey,
A Clockwork Orange,
The Shining,
Full Metal Jacket, and
Eyes Wide Shut in
High-Definition, releasing the titles on DVD,
HD
DVD, and
Blu-ray Disc. All were
released in 16×9 anamorphic transfers, preserving the theatrical
1.85:1 aspect ratios for all of the flat films except
A
Clockwork Orange, which was transferred at an aspect ratio of
1.66:1.
In regards to the Warner Bros. titles, there is little studio
documentation that is public about them other than instructions
given to projectionists on initial release; however, Kubrick's
storyboards for
The Shining do prove that he composed the
film for wide-screen. In instructions given to photographer
John Alcott in one panel, Kubrick
writes:
- THE FRAME IS EXACTLY 1.85-1. Obviously you compose
for that but protect the full 1.33-1 area.
More confusion results regarding Kubrick's non-Warner distributed
titles. During the days of
laserdisc,
The Criterion Collection
released six Kubrick films.
Spartacus and
2001
were both native 70 mm releases (exhibited in their roadshow
engagements at a ratio of 2.20:1) at the same ratio as their
subsequent DVD releases, and
The Killing and
Paths of
Glory were both transferred at 1.33:1, despite the latter
being
hard matted extensively. Both
pictures were theatrically projected at an aspect ratio of
1.85:1.
Dr. Strangelove and
Lolita were also transferred
at 1.33:1, although
Strangelove exhibits a number of hard
mattes at a ratio of 1.66:1 in second-unit footage. This is
sometimes falsely attributed to the use of stock footage in
Strangelove. Both films were presented theatrically at
ratios of 1.85:1.
The DVD versions of
The Killing and
Paths of
Glory released by
MGM Home
Entertainment retained the same 1.33:1 aspect ratio as the
laserdisc versions. The initial DVD releases of
Strangelove maintained the 1.33:1, Kubrick-approved
transfer, but for the most recent DVD and Blu-ray editions,
Sony Pictures Home
Entertainment replaced it with a new, digitally remastered
anamorphic transfer with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. All DVD
releases of
Lolita to date have been at a uniform 1.66:1
aspect ratio, and the expectation is that future releases will
retain this aspect ratio.
Also of note, laserdisc releases of
2001 were in a
slightly flawed aspect ratio. The film was shot in 65 mm,
which has a ratio of 2.20:1, but many theaters could only show it
in 35 mm reduction prints, which were presented at a ratio of
2.35:1. Thus, the picture was slightly modified for the 35 mm
prints. The laserdisc releases maintained the 2.20:1 ratio, but the
source material was an already cropped 35 mm print; thus, the
edges were slightly cropped and the top and bottom of the image
slightly opened up. This seems to have been corrected with the most
recent DVD release, which was newly remastered from a 70 mm
print.
Personal life
Character
Kubrick infrequently discussed personal matters in interview, and
rarely spoke publicly at all. Over time, the gamut of his public
image in the media ranged from a reclusive genius to a
megalomaniacal lunatic shut off from the world. Since his death,
Kubrick's friends and family have publicly denied both of these
stereotypes. It is clear that the director left behind a strong
family and a circle of close friends, and many of those who worked
for him have spoken in his favor.
's famous reclusive nature is largely a myth, and may have resulted
from his aversion to air travel. Despite once holding a pilot's
license, Kubrick had a
fear of flying
and refused to take airplane trips. As a result, he rarely left
England in the last forty years of his life. In addition, Kubrick
shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine, resulting
in little media coverage of him as a personality.
Upon purchasing the
Childwickbury
Manor in Hertfordshire, England, Kubrick set up his
life so that family and business were one. He purchased
top-of-the-line film editing equipment and owned a number of
cameras, which he sometimes used on his own movies. Children and
animals would frequently come in and out of the room as he worked
on a script or met with an actor. His appearance was not well-known
in his later years, to the extent that a British man named
Alan Conway successfully impersonated Kubrick in
order to meet several well-known actors and get into fancy clubs.
Conway is the subject of the film
Colour Me Kubrick (2005), written by
Kubrick's assistant Anthony Frewin and directed by
Brian Cook, Kubrick's
First Assistant Director for 25
years.
Despite his aversion to international travel, Kubrick was
constantly in contact with family members and business associates,
often by telephone, and contacted his collaborators at all hours of
the day and night for conversations that lasted from under a minute
to several hours. Many of Kubrick's admirers and friends spoke of
these telephone conversations with great affection and nostalgia
after his death, especially
Michael
Herr and
Steven Spielberg. In
his memoir of Kubrick, Herr stated that dozens of people have
claimed to have spoken to Kubrick on the day of his death and
remarked that "I believe all of them." Kubrick also frequently
invited people to his house, ranging from actors to close friends,
admired film directors, writers, and intellectuals.
It was little-known by the public during Kubrick's life that he was
also an animal lover. He owned many dogs and cats, and showed an
extraordinary affection for them. Kubrick's widow, Christiane, in
her book version of
Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures,
wrote that Kubrick brought his cats onto film sets and editing
rooms with him in order to spend more time with them.
Matthew Modine remembers Kubrick's being
deeply upset when a family of rabbits was accidentally killed
during the making of
Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick was so
beside himself that he canceled shooting for the rest of the day.
Philip Kaplan, one of Kubrick's lawyers and friends, told the story
that Stanley once canceled, at the last moment, a meeting with him
and another lawyer who had flown to London from the United States
because he had sat up all night with a dying cat and was in no
shape to participate. Also, according to Kaplan, the huge kitchen
table at Kubrick's home in Harpenden (Hertfordshire, United
Kingdom) was supported by an undulating base with interior spaces,
and housed within each curved space was a dog, most of whom were of
no recognizable breed, and some not notably friendly to
strangers.
Kubrick had a reputation for being tactless and rude to those he
worked with. Some of Kubrick's collaborators complained that his
personality was cold and that he lacked sympathy for the feelings
of other people. Although Kubrick became close friends with
Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell during filming,
Kubrick abruptly terminated the friendship soon after the film was
complete. McDowell was deeply hurt by this, and the schism between
the two men lasted until Kubrick's death. Science fiction writer
Brian Aldiss was fired from Kubrick's never-completed project
A.I. for vacationing with his family in violation of his
contract, even though Kubrick had put the project on hold at the
time.
James Earl Jones, despite his
admiration for Kubrick on an artistic level, spoke negatively of
his experience on
Dr. Strangelove, saying that Kubrick was
disrespectful to actors, using them as instruments in a grand
design rather than allowing them to be creative artists in their
own right. George C. Scott, who admired Kubrick in retrospect for
reportedly being one of the few people who could routinely beat him
at chess, famously resented Kubrick's using Scott's most
over-the-top performances for the final cut of
Dr.
Strangelove after being promised by Kubrick that they were
warmups and would not actually be in the movie. Kubrick's employees
and crew members have stated that he was notorious for not
complimenting anyone, and rarely showed admiration for his
coworkers for fear it would make them complacent. Kubrick
complimented them on their work only after the movie was finished,
unless he felt their work was "genius." The only actors that
Kubrick called "genius" were
Peter
Sellers,
James Mason, and
Malcolm McDowell.
Michael Herr, in his otherwise positive memoir of his friendship
with Kubrick, complained that Kubrick was extremely cheap and very
greedy about money. He stated that Kubrick was a "terrible man to
do business with" and that the director was upset until the day he
died that Jack Nicholson made more money from
The Shining
than he did. Kirk Douglas often commented on Kubrick's
unwillingness to compromise, his out-of-control ego, and his
ruthless determination to make a film his own distinct work of art
instead of a group effort. However, Douglas has acknowledged that a
large part of his dislike for Kubrick was caused by the director's
consistently negative statements about
Spartacus.
Many of those who worked with Kubrick have spoken kindly of him
since his death, including coworkers and friends
Jack Nicholson,
Diane Johnson,
Tom
Cruise,
Joe Turkel,
Con Pederson,
Carl
Solomon,
Ryan O'Neal,
Anthony Frewin,
Ian Watson,
John
Milius,
Jocelyn Pook,
Sydney Pollack,
R. Lee Ermey, and
others.
Michael Herr's memoir of
Kubrick, and Matthew Modine's book
Full Metal Jacket Diary show a
much kinder, saner, and warmer version of Kubrick than the
conventional view of him as cold, demanding, and impersonal. In a
series of interviews found on the DVD of
Eyes Wide Shut, a
teary-eyed
Tom Cruise remembers Kubrick
with great affection;
Nicole Kidman
shares his sentiments.
Shelley
Winters, when asked what she thought of him, answered: "A
gift."
Shelley Duvall, who played
Wendy in
The Shining, had a rocky relationship with
Kubrick, but said in retrospect that it was a great experience that
made her smarter—though she'd never want to do it again. Malcolm
McDowell acknowledged in retrospect that some of his statements
about Kubrick were "unfair" and were a "cry out" to Kubrick to
reconnect with him.
Politics
In his memoir of Kubrick, Michael Herr, his friend and cowriter of
the screenplay for
Full Metal Jacket, wrote:
Stanley had views on everything, but I would not
exactly call them political...
His views on democracy were those of most people I
know, neither left or right, not exactly brimming with belief, a
noble failed experiment along our evolutionary way, brought low by
base instincts, money and self-interest and
stupidity...
He thought the best system might be under a benign
despot, though he had little belief that such a man could be
found.
He wasn't a cynic, but he could have easily passed for
one.
He was certainly a capitalist.
He believed himself to be a realist.
Herr recalls that Kubrick was sometimes akin to a 19th-century
liberal-humanist, that he found Irving Kristol's definition of a
neoconservative as a "liberal mugged by reality" to be hysterically
funny, that he distrusted almost all authority, and that he was a
Social Darwinist.
Herr further wrote that Kubrick owned guns and did not think that
war was an entirely bad thing. In the documentary
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in
Pictures, Herr says "…he also accepted that it was
perfectly okay to acknowledge that, of all the things war is, it's
also very beautiful." The writer said of initial reactions to
Full Metal Jacket that "The political left will call
Kubrick a fascist." In his 1987 interview
with Gene Siskel, called
Candidly Kubrick, Kubrick said,
"
Full Metal Jacket suggests there is more to say about war
than it is just bad." He added that everything serious the drill
instructor says, such as "A rifle is only a tool, it is a hard
heart that kills," is completely true.
Though some have said Kubrick disliked America, Michael Herr says
that America was all he talked about and that he often thought of
moving back. Herr wrote that Kubrick was sent VHS tapes from
American friends of
NFL Football,
Seinfeld,
The Simpsons, and other television shows
that he could not get in the United Kingdom. Kubrick told Siskel
that he was not anti-American and thought that America was a good
country, though he did not think that
Ronald Reagan was a good President. In the
interview, he also predicted an economic meltdown worldwide by
pointing out to Siskel that most of the major banks in the United
States held dubious foreign bonds as collateral and huge third
world loans treated as assets. Kubrick likened this to the
Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale
about the "Emperor's New Clothes", and felt even during the Cold
War, an economic collapse was more worrisome and imminent than
nuclear annihilation was. As far as Kubrick's views on welfarism
and taxation, according to
Ian
Watson, Kubrick said of the pre-1997 socialist Labour Party
that "If the Labourites ever get in, I’ll leave the country."
Watson claims that Kubrick was extremely opposed to taxes on the
rich and to welfare in general.
Kubrick's earlier work is seen by Pauline Kael as more socially
liberal than his later work. The early films embody liberal ideals,
and the satire of government and military in
Dr.
Strangelove seems to point to a liberal political perspective.
However, while Pauline Kael viewed
Dr. Strangelove as a
liberal film, Norman Kagan dissents from this view, holding that
film to be written from the point of view of a detached realist,
lacking the overt liberalism of similar anti-war films of the era
such as
On the Beach or
Fail-Safe.Either way,
Kubrick's more mature works are more pessimistic and suspicious of
the so-called innate goodness of mankind, and are critical of
stances based on that positive assessment. For example, in
A
Clockwork Orange, the police are as violent and vulgar as the
droogs, and Kubrick depicts both the subversive Leftist writer Mr.
Alexander and the authoritarian status quo Minister of the Interior
as manipulative and sinister.Kubrick commented to the
New York Times regarding
A Clockwork
Orange:
Man isn't a noble savage,
he's an ignoble savage.
He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be
objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that
about sums it up.
I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of
him.
And any attempt to create social institutions on a
false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to
failure.
He went on to say:
The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on
a utopian and unrealistic vision of
man.
But in this movie, you have an example of social
institutions gone a bit berserk.
Obviously, social institutions faced with the
law-and-order problem might choose to become grotesquely
oppressive.
The movie poses two extremes: it shows Alex in his
precivilized state, and society committing a worse evil in
attempting to cure him."
When
New York Times writer Fred M. Hechinger wrote a piece
that declared
A Clockwork Orange "
fascist," Kubrick wrote a letter in response:
It is quite true that my film's view of man is less
flattering than the one Rousseau
entertained in a similarly allegorical
narrative—but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man
as a noble savage rather than an ignoble one?
Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one to
be regarded as a tyrant (I
hope)...
The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began
with the opening sentence of Rousseau's Emile: 'Nature made me happy
and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's
fault.'
It is based on two misconceptions: that man in his
natural state was happy and good, and that primal man had no
society...
Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which
corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering
gauze between ourselves and reality.
This view, to use Mr. Hechinger's frame of reference,
is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion
leads to despair.
In his letter, Kubrick quoted extensively from
Robert Ardrey, author of
African Genesis and
The Social
Contract—not to be confused with Rousseau's—and author
Arthur Koestler, who is famous for
writing
The Ghost in the
Machine. Both authors (Koestler through
psychology and Ardrey through
anthropology) searched for the cause of
humanity's capacity for death and destruction, and both, like
Kubrick, were suspicious of the liberal belief in the innate
goodness of mankind. Ardrey and Kubrick both attribute this to
Rousseau, who, in Ardrey's words, "Fathered the romantic fallacy"
and Behaviourism, especially what they consider "radical
Behaviourism," which they blame primarily on
B. F. Skinner. In his interview with
The New
York Times, Kubrick stated that his view of man was closer to
those of Christianity than to humanism or Jewish theology, saying,
"I mean, it's essentially Christian theology anyway, that view of
man."
Kubrick appeared to believe that freedom is still worth pursuing
even if mankind is ultimately ignoble, and that evil on the part of
the individual—however undesirable—is still preferable in contrast
to the evil of a totalitarian society. Kubrick said in an interview
with
Gene Siskel:
To restrain man is not to redeem him...
I think the danger is not that authority will collapse,
but that, finally, in order to preserve itself, it will become very
repressive...
Law and order is not a phony issue, not just an excuse
for the Right to go further right.
Religion
Stanley Kubrick was of
Jewish descent, but
his family did not practice religion at all. Indeed though his
father's real name was Jacob, he went by Jacques or Jack as a move
towards American assimilation. When asked by
Michel Ciment in an interview if he had a
religious upbringing, Kubrick replied: "No, not at all."
Kubrick is often said to have been an
atheist. This may or may not be true. In Kubrick's
interview with Craig McGregor, he said:
2001 would give a little insight into my
metaphysical interests...
I'd be very surprised if the universe wasn't full of an
intelligence of an order that to us would seem
God-like.
I find it very exciting to have a semi-logical belief
that there's a great deal to the universe we don't understand, and
that there is an intelligence of an incredible magnitude outside
the Earth.
It's something I've become more and more interested
in.
I find it a very exciting and satisfying
hope.
When asked by
Eric Nordern in Kubrick's
interview with
Playboy if
2001:
A Space Odyssey was a religious film, Kubrick elaborated:
I will say that the God concept is
at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God.
I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that
one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once
you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars
in our galaxy alone, that each star is a
life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion
galaxies in just the visible universe.
Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not
too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical
reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the
planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or
another will eventually emerge.
It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact,
countless billions of such planets where biological life has
arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing
intelligence are high.
Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its
planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that
there are billions of planets in the universe not only where
intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions
where it is approximately equal and others still where it is
hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of
us.
When you think of the giant technological strides that
man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the
chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary
development that much older life forms have taken?
They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for
the mind at best, into immortal machine
entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from
the chrysalis of matter transformed
into beings of pure energy and spirit.
Their potentialities would be limitless and their
intelligence ungraspable by humans.
In the same interview, he also blames the poor critical reaction to
2001 as follows:
Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen
literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the
grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence
anathema.
In an interview with William Kloman of
The New York Times,
when asked why there is hardly any dialogue in
2001,
Kubrick explained:
I don't have the slightest doubt that to tell a story
like this, you couldn't do it with words.
There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the
film, and 113 of non-dialogue.
There are certain areas of feeling and reality—or
unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it—which
are notably inaccessible to words.
Music can get into these areas.
Painting can get into them.
Non-verbal forms of expression can.
But words are a terrible straitjacket.
It's interesting how many prisoners of that
straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off.
There's a side to the human personality that somehow
senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A,
B, C, D.
It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects
of thought and life and experience.
Man has always responded to it.
Religion, mythology, allegories—it's always been one of the most
responsive chords in man.
With rationalism,
modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some
pretty jarring blows to religion.
In a sense, what's happening now in films and in
popular music is a reaction to the stifling limitations of
rationalism.
One wants to break out of the clearly arguable,
demonstrable things which really are not very meaningful, or very
useful or inspiring, nor does one even sense any enormous truth in
them.
Stephen King recalled Kubrick calling him late at night while he
was filming
The Shining and Kubrick asked him, "Do you
believe in God?" King said that he had answered, "Yes", but has had
three different versions of what happened next. One time, he said
that Kubrick simply hung up on him. On other occasions, he claimed
Kubrick said, "I knew it", and then hung up on him. On yet another
occasion, King claimed that Kubrick said, before hanging up, "No, I
don't think there is a God." In more recent interviews, King has
had yet another version of the "God" story, in which Kubrick calls
King and asks him if he thinks ghost stories are optimistic because
they all suggest there is life after death. King replies, "What
about hell?" There is a pause and Kubrick says, "I do not believe
in hell."
Finally, Katharina Kubrick Hobbs was asked by alt.movies.kubrick if
Stanley Kubrick believed in God. Here is her response:
Hmm, tricky.
I think he believed in something, if you
understand my meaning.
He was a bit of a fatalist actually, but he was also
very superstitious.
Truly a mixture of nature and nurture.
I don't know exactly what he believed, he probably
would have said that no-one can really ever know for sure, and that
it would be rather arrogant to assume that one could
know.
I asked him once after The Shining, if he believed in
ghosts.
He said that it would be nice if there "were" ghosts,
as that would imply that there is something after
death.
In fact, I think he said, "Gee I hope so."...He did not
have a religious funeral service.
He's not buried in consecrated ground.
We always celebrated Christmas
and had huge Christmas trees.
In
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Jack Nicholson
recalls that Kubrick said
The Shining is an overall
optimistic story because "anything that says there's anything after
death is ultimately an optimistic story."
Alternate adaptations
Three of Stanley Kubrick's films have had their source material
readapted in some fashion: Anthony Burgess's subsequent stage
adaptation of
A Clockwork Orange in 1990, which he hoped
would be considered a more definitive adaptation than Kubrick's
film;the Stephen King written and produced
television miniseries of
The
Shining, which he hoped would stand as the authorized
adaptation; and
Adrian Lyne's
adaptation of
Lolita, which had the blessing of
Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri (who echoed his father's moderate
misgivings about Kubrick's version). Both Burgess and King overtly
stated that they were annoyed by Kubrick's denying their lead
characters (Alex DeLarge and Jack Torrance, respectively) a final
redemption that was present in the source material, but absent from
Kubrick's adaptation.
It must be noted that among other Kubrick film adaptations of the
work of living authors, both Arthur C. Clarke and Gustav Hasford
(author of the source novel for
Full Metal Jacket) were
entirely satisfied with how Kubrick adapted their work.
Legacy
Kubrick made only thirteen feature films in his life. His oeuvre
was comparatively low in number, considering the output of his
contemporaries such as
John Ford or
Federico Fellini, due to his
methodical and meticulous dedication to every aspect of film
production. A number of his films are recognized as seminal
classics within their genre.
2001: A Space Odyssey received numerous technical awards,
including a BAFTA award for cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and
an Academy Award for best visual effects, which Kubrick (as
director of special effects on the film) received. Five of his
films were nominated for Academy Awards in various categories,
including Best Picture for
Dr. Strangelove,
A
Clockwork Orange, and
Barry Lyndon, and Best Director
for
2001: A Space Odyssey,
Dr. Strangelove,
A
Clockwork Orange, and
Barry Lyndon.
Most awards for which Kubrick's films were nominated tended to be
in the areas of cinematography, art design, screenwriting, and
music. However, only four of his films were nominated for their
acting performances, notably
Lolita, getting three acting
nominations from the Golden Globes, and Peter Sellers getting
nominated for both an Oscar and a BAFTA for his triple roles in
Doctor Strangelove. Only
Spartacus actually won
an acting award. (See also
Awards,
below.)
For Kubrick, written dialogue is one element to be put in balance
with
mise en scène (set
arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by
Pudovkin's treatise on film acting,
Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing
room and often re-direct a film.
As he explained to a journalist,
Everything else [in film] comes from something else.
Writing, of course, is writing; acting comes from the theatre; and
cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film.
You can see something from different points of view almost
simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent
vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could
be assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as
Spartacus (when he first had an ample budget for film
stock), was endless exploratory reshooting of scenes that was an
exhaustive investigation of all possible variations of a scene.
This enabled him to walk into the editing room with copious
options. John Baxter has written:
Instead of finding the intellectual spine of a film in
the script before starting work, Kubrick felt his way towards the
final version of a film by shooting each scene from many angles and
demanding scores of takes on each line. Then over months... he
arranged and rearranged the tens of thousands of scraps of film to
fit a vision that really only began to emerge during editing.
Such notable contemporary directors as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott have cited Kubrick as a source of
inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. Kubrick's
inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing has often
been repeated by other film directors, for instance Jonathan Glazer, whose film Birth contains many visual references to
Kubrick.
On the other hand others, such as the filmmakers of the remodernist film movement, have been
critical of Kubrick's work, described by Jesse Richards as "boring and dishonest".
"Remodernist Film Manifesto", When The Trees Were
Still Real, August 27, 2008 Retrieved October 7, 2009 Peter
Rinaldi in his essay on the Remodernist Film Manifesto for
Mungbeing, The Shore as Seen from the
Deep Sea, defends the manifesto, writing:
I certainly don't share in my friend's opinion of this
man's work, but I actually think this is a hugely important part of
the manifesto. A lot of us came to be filmmakers because a
particular director's (or a number of directors) work inspired us.
A friend of mine calls these inspirational figures his "Giants,"
which I think is a great word for them because sometimes they are
built up so much in our minds that we don't think we, or our work,
can ever really reach them and theirs. I think, for the most part,
the generation that I grew up in had Kubrick as their Giant. His
work has a mystical "perfectionism" that is awe-inspiring at times.
This perfectionism is anathema to the Remodernist mentality and for
many healthy reasons, this giant (or whatever giant towers over
your work) must fall in our minds. We must become the giant.
Kubrick has been noted both for his social commentary and for his
distinctive visual style.At least two full-length books on Stanley
Kubrick are devoted to frame-by-frame analysis of his visual style:
Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis by Alexander
Walker, andStanley Kubrick: Visual Poet 1928–1999 (Basic
Film) by Paul Duncan. History professor Geoffrey Cocks notes
that Kubrick has what he calls an "open narrative" style that
"requires the audience to derive meaning actively rather than being
passively instructed, entertained, and manipulated." On the other
hand, Cocks believes that Kubrick's preoccupation with sweeping
overarching historical themes causes him to frequently sacrifice
character development. "His films consistently display a basic
taxonomy of violence, systems of control, and inherent human evil.
This idée fixe freezes the people in his films into types rather
than fully developed characters."
Two authors have noticed that the television cartoon The Simpsons abounds with references to
multiple Stanley Kubrick films, particularly 2001 and
A Clockwork Orange, but also Spartacus,
Doctor Strangelove, The Shining, and Full
Metal Jacket. Gary Westfall, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction and Fantasy, writes that while the
references to "fantastic fiction" in The Simpsons are
copious, "there are two masters of the genre whose impact on
The Simpsons supersedes that of all others: Stanley
Kubrick and Edgar Allan Poe." John Alberti, writing in Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the
Possibility of Oppositional Culture, writes of ...the
show's almost obsessive references to the films of Stanley
Kubrick... It was almost as if the show's admittance of these films
into the show's pantheon of intertextual allusions finally marked
their entry into the deepest subconscious level of the global pop
cultural mind.
In 1997, three of Kubrick's films were selected by the American Film Institute for their list of the 100
Greatest Movies in America: 2001: A Space Odyssey at
#22, Dr. Strangelove at #26
and A Clockwork
Orange at #46. In 2007, the AFI updated
their list with 2001 ranked at #15, Dr.
Strangelove ranked at #39 and Clockwork Orange ranked
at #70. In addition, Spartacus was one of the new
selections ranking at #81.
Filmography
- Documentary short films
- Feature films
Year |
Title |
Awards |
1953 |
Fear and Desire |
|
1955 |
Killer's Kiss |
|
1956 |
The Killing |
Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source |
1957 |
Paths of Glory |
Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source |
1960 |
Spartacus |
Nominated for 6 Oscars, Won 4: Best Supporting Actor,
Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume
Design, Best Editing, Best Original Score
Nominated for 6 Golden Globes, Won 1: Best Drama
Picture, Best Drama Actor, Best Director, Best Original
Score, Best Supporting Actor
Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source |
1962 |
Lolita |
Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay
Nominated for 5 Golden Globes, Won 1: Most Promising
Newcomer – Female, Best Drama Actor, Best Drama Actress,
Best Director, Best Supporting Actor
Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Actor |
1964 |
Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb |
Nominated for 4 Oscars:Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture,
Best Adapted Screenplay
Nominated for 6 BAFTA Awards, Won 3: Best British Art
Direction, Best British Film, Best Film from any Source,
Best British Actor, Best British Screenplay, Best Foreign
Actor |
1968 |
2001: A Space
Odyssey |
Nominated for 4 Oscars, Won 1 : Best Special
Effects, Best Director, Best Art Direction, Best Original
Screenplay
Nominated for 4 BAFTA Awards, Won 3: Best Art Direction,
Best Cinematography, Best Sound Track, Best Film |
1971 |
A Clockwork
Orange |
Nominated for 4 Oscars: Best Director, Best Editing, Best
Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay
Nominated for 3 Golden Globes: Best Director, Best Drama Picture,
Best Drama Actor
Nominated for 7 BAFTA Awards: Best Art Direction, Best
Cinematography, Best Direction, Best Film, Best Film Editing, Best
Screenplay, Best Sound Track
Won 2 recognitions by The New York Film Critics: Best Director,
Best Picture |
1975 |
Barry Lyndon |
Nominated for 7 Oscars, Won 4: Best Art Direction, Best
Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Original Song Score
and/or Adaptation, Best Director, Best Picture, Best
Adapted Screenplay
Nominated for 2 Golden Globes: Best Director, Best Drama
Picture
Nominated for 5 BAFTA Awards, Won 2: Best Cinematography,
Best Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design,
Best Film |
1980 |
The Shining |
|
1987 |
Full Metal
Jacket |
Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay
Nominated for Golden Globe: Best Supporting Actor
Nominated for 2 BAFTA Awards: Best Sound, Best Special Effects |
1999 |
Eyes Wide Shut |
Nominated for Golden Globe: Best Original Score |
This chart is limited to the Oscars, Golden Globes, and
BAFTAs.
Kubrick
has also been nominated for and won awards from various societies
of film critics, film festivals, and both the Writers Guild of America and the
Directors
Guild of America
.
In the science fiction world, Kubrick has three times won the
especially coveted Hugo Award, a prized
mainly for print writing and only secondarily for drama production.
He also received four nominations (with one win) of the
sci-fi-film-oriented Saturn awards from the Academy of Science
Fiction for The Shining, an award that did not exist when
Kubrick won his three Hugos.
The least honored of Kubrick's films since 1956's The
Killing is 1980's The Shining, which garnered only
the above-mentioned four nominations (with one win) for Saturn
awards. In addition, The Shining is the only Stanley
Kubrick film ever to be nominated for any of the notorious Razzies
for worst film element. It was nominated for two.
See also
Notes
- "The Kubrick Legacy", by University of the Arts London. Available on
http://www.arts.ac.uk/docs/kubrick-mag-web.pdf
- Kubrick, Stanley (1928-1999), by Sheldon Hall.
At screenonline.org. Visited on 05/16/09.
- Stanley Kubrick (American director). Enciclopaedia
Britannica. Visited on 05/15/09.
- " Biography of Stanley Kubrick", by Jason Ankeny. At
All Movie.
Visited on 05/15/09
- LoBrutto
1999 p. 6
- LoBrutto
1999 p. 524
- LoBrutto
1999 p.33
- Baxter 1999 p.
32
- Stanley Kubrick By Paul Duncan; - Page 25; 46;
62 ISBN 9783822815922
- 100 Famous People at the Turning Point in Their
Lives - Page 84 ISBN 9780740758102
- Students on the Right Way By Holger Thuss - Page
110 ISBN 9783831141296
- Stanley Kubrick: A Biography - Page 56 ISBN
9780786704859
- Stanley Kubrick:Interviews - Page 190
- Major Film Directors of the American and British
Cinema - Page 127 ISBN 9780934223591]
- Baxter 1999 p.
70
- Tarantino has acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence.
See [1]. Many critics have noticed the similarity
in plot structure. See for example [2].
- [3]
- Cinema, A Critical Dictionary, the Major
Film-makers - Page 562 ISBN 9780670222575
- The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives
ISBN 9780684806631
- Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze - Page 260
ISBN 9780253213907
- For a recent example see David Denby in The New
Yorker
- Steven Spielberg Interviews - Page 82 ISBN
9781578061136
- [4]
- LoBrutto
1999 p. 164
- Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in
Hollywood Cinema - Page 170 ISBN 9780415077590
- The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick - Page 170
ISBN 9780813124452
- Now Dig This By Terry Southern - Page 74 ISBN
9780802138941
- Kubrick is not credited for the screenplay for Lolita
but it is well-attested that he heavily rewrote Nabokov's script
and took no credit simply for contractual reasons
- [5]
- See essay by Kubrick's producer in later years Jan Harlan at
[6] and
review in DVD Times [7]
- Also see "The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick by Norman Kagan p. 69
also The Kubrick facade: faces and voices in the films of Stanley
Kubrick by Jason Sperb - P 60 and Stanley Kubrick interviews p.102
edited by Gene D. Phillips
- What They Say About Stanley Kubrick, The New York
Times, July 4, 1999
- Mireia Aragay. page 113. Books in motion: adaptation, intertextuality,
authorship. Rodopi, 2005. ISBN 9789042019577
- James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited
co-screenwriter of "Lolita" has discussed the decision to raise
Lolita's age in interviews. See [8]
- Kagan pp. 82,83 "He
couldn't dramatize Humbert's erotic relationship with the
nymphet"
- LoBrutto 1997 p.
225. "he told Newsweek in 1972 in referring to the
censorship restrictions."
-
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990711/REVIEWS08/907110301/1023
- Macmillan International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
vol. 1, p. 126
- LoBrutto
1997 p. 205
- [9]
- http://www.afi.com/10top10/scifi.html
-
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/critics.html
- See The A List: The National Society Of Film Critics' 100
Essential Films by Jay Carr, National Society of Film Critics p.
1
- Interview with Michael Ciment
- [10]
- http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html
- [11]
- See Steven Spielberg Interviews by Steven Spielberg,
Lester D. Friedman, Brent Notbohm p. 36
- [12]
- [13]
- [14]
- CNN reports that US magazine said this.
See
- Geoffrey Cocks The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick,
History and the Holocaust p. 151
- Cocks p. 149
- LoBrutto
1997 p. 164
- A full article on the production is in Salon.com
at
- The Stanley Kubrick Archives - The Epic That Never Was:
Stanley Kubrick´s "Napoleon" Edited by Alison Castle, © Taschen 2008 GmbH
Hohenzollernring 53, D-50672 Köln.
- See Depth of Field by Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, Glenn
Wesley Perusek p. 196. See also Cock's "The Wolf at the Door:
Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust"
- [15]
- See New York Times biography for Kubrick Nytimes
- See interview with Kubrick visual memory
- Joan Dupont "Kubrick Speaks, Through Family's Documentary",
International Herald Tribune, September 15, 2001.
Retrieved on May 8, 2008.
- See provile of Eco entitled "The Armani of Literature" at
theage
- Baxter 1997 pp.
194-195
- J.R.R. Tokien encyclopedia by Micael D.C. Drout. p. 15. See
also interview in "Show" magazine vol. 1, Number 1 1970
- Baxter 1997 pp.
332,360
- A full discussion of their collaboration is
at
- Terry Southern for Doctor Strangelove, Arthur C.
Clarke for 2001, and Diane Johnson for The
Shining
- A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. CO's
Walter Carlos and Shining's Wendy Carlos are one and the same.
- The closing scenes or credits of Doctor Strangelove,
A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full
Metal Jacket all employ jolly music in an ironic way in their
closing credits or final scenes. However, although the closing
scenes of Jacket have the soldiers singing the Mickey
Mouse song, the closing credits use the Rolling Stones song
Paint it Black
- "Business as Usual"
- Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, p252, "Kubrick had also
been appalled by the excesses of TV presentation, and the
pan-and-scan technique..."
- [16]. In July 2007, less than 10% of US
households had HDTV (16×9 ready) sets.
- Castle p. 452
- May 26, 1956 "Feature Reviews: The Killing". BoxOffice
Magazine, Page 1975.
- November 23, 1957 "Feature Reviews: Paths of Glory." BoxOffice
Magazine, Page 2165.
- June 25, 1962 "Feature Reviews: Lolita." BoxOffice Magazine,
Page 2641.
- February 3, 1964 "Feature Reviews: Dr. Strangelove". BoxOffice
Magazine, Page 2797.
- Kubrick's script collaborator on Eyes Wide Shut portrayed him
as such in an article in The New Yorker. See interview with Tom
Cruise at
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990715/PEOPLE/77010329
- See Stanley Kubrick: Essays on his Films and Legacy by Gary Don
Rhodes p. 17
- See L.A. Noir: Nine Dark Visions of the City of Angels by p.
166
- See Stanley Kubrick Companion p. 16 by James Howard
- See
http://film.guardian.co.uk/Feature_Story/Observer/0,,30123,00.html
- Kubrick by Michael Herr p. 4
- Baxter 1999 p.
31
- McDowell discusses this in the documentary Stanley Kubrick:
A Life in Pictures"
- See article by Jones in Leisure and Arts
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005898
- See Kubrick by Michael Herr p. 60 and Jones article.
- Kubrick by Michael Herr p. 19
- Kerr, p. 11-12
- "Stanley Kubrick: Interviews" by Gene Phillips p. 198
- Herr, p. 46
- Phillips p. 186
- Kagan pp.
65,66,71,134. "a world the liberal Dax will not accept";
Pauline Kael: "Strangelove ... concealed its own liberal
pieties"
- See Kagen pp. 65-67 and 134-135
-
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/film/013072kubrick-profile.html
- [17]
- Phillips p. 156
- Geoffrey Cocks The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick,
History and the Holocaust p. 23
- Cocks ibid p. 23
- Nabokov Won't Be Nailed Down, The New York Times,
April 21, 2001
- See Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers)
by Gene Phillips p. 199
- Baxter 1999 p.
40
- For discussion of Kubrick's method of multiple takes see
Stanley Kubrick: A biography by Vincent LoBrutto 1999 edition p.
398, 423-31, 440-446 "Kubrick continued to work in a directorial
style that included running up a lot of takes on a single setup— a
philosophy that embraced the theory that film stock is the cheapest
part of making a film. p. 398"
- Scorsese and Spielberg are interviewed in the film Stanley
Kubrick a Life in Pictures. Ridley Scott has discussed
Kubrick's influence on him in an interview in Wired
magazine.http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-10/ff_bladerunner?currentPage=all
- "Remodernist Film", MungBeing, October 4, 2009
Retrieved October 7, 2009
- The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the
Holocaust by Geoffrey Cocks p. 6
- Cocks, p. 11
- p. 1232 of book cited
- p. 277 of book cited
References
- (Storyboard for The Shining, Castle,
Alison (editor) and Kubrick, Stanley (photographs))
Further reading
- Andreas Jacke: Stanley Kubrick: Eine Deutung der Konzepte
seiner Filme, Psychosozial-Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-89806-856-7,
ISBN 3-89806-856-0
- Lyons, V and Fitzgerald, M. (2005) ‘’Asperger syndrome : a gift
or a curse?’’ New York : Nova
Science Publishers. ISBN 1-59454-387-9
- Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick ; Kinematograph Nr.
14, Frankfurt/Main, 2004. ISBN 3-88799-069-2 (English edition)
- Documentary
External links