Stanley Kubrick
Overview
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades 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, his reluctance to talk about his films, and his reclusiveness. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio
financial support for all his endeavors.
Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail.
Movie studio
A movie studio is a term used to describe a major entertainment company or production company that has its own privately owned studio facility or facilities that are used to film movies...
financial support for all his endeavors.
Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail.
Quotations
You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Newsweek (26 May 1980)
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.
Quoted in Halliwell's Filmgoer's and Video Viewer's Companion (1988), p. 403
One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
Quoted in The Edmonton Journal (8 March 1999), C3
There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.
Quoted in Kubrick : Inside a Film Artist's Maze (2000) by Thomas Allen Nelson, p.10
I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style.
Quoted in Kubrick : Inside a Film Artist's Maze (2000) by Thomas Allen Nelson, p.14
Include utter banalities.
Notebook regarding Full Metal Jacket, quoted in movie Stanley Kubrick's Boxes (2008) by Jon Ronson
Encyclopedia
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades 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, his reluctance to talk about his films, and his reclusiveness. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio
financial support for all his endeavors.
Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail. His later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism and often lack structured linear narrative. His films are frequently described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. He worked in a wide variety of genres: science-fiction, horror, period piece and war film. However, there are recurring themes in all his works, notably man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic
pessimism
, some critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully.
The film that first brought him attention from many critics was Paths of Glory
, the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of Kubrick's movies initially met with lukewarm reception, only to be acclaimed years later as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on later generations of filmmakers. Considered groundbreaking was 2001: A Space Odyssey
, noted for being one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while also maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film A Clockwork Orange
from Great Britain, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. Authors Anthony Burgess (eventually) and Stephen King (immediately) were unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels A Clockwork Orange
and The Shining
respectively; both authors became involved with subsequent stage or TV adaptations. His films were largely successful at the box office, although Barry Lyndon
performed poorly in the United States. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s onward, except The Shining
, were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Even though all his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, frequently disparaged Kubrick's work, Ankeny describes Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."
, New York, the first of two children born to Jewish parents, Jacques (Jacob) Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Sadie Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–85). His sister, Barbara Mary Kubrick, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were Jewish of Austrian, Romania
n and Polish origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx
.
Kubrick biographer Geoffrey Cocks writes that although Kubrick descended from Eastern European Jews, and was raised in a Jewish neighborhood in New York City, his family was not religious, although his parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony. When critic Michel Ciment
asked him in 1980 whether he had a religious upbringing, Kubrick replied "No, not at all." He had no bar mitzvah and apparently did not attend synagogue, although after his death, both his daughter and wife stated that "He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all." His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, to have been called Aryan Papers, and spent years researching the subject. Most of his friends and early photography and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent Jewish immigrants from Europe. British screenwriter Frederic Raphael
, who worked closely with him in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick's films was partly because he "had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars," noting that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality." He points out, nonetheless, that when Kubrick died, "few of the obituaries mentioned that he was a Jew."
A friend of Kubrick's family notes that although his father was a prominent doctor, "Stanley and his mom were such regular people. They had no airs about them. . . . His mother was so down-to-earth, she was lovely." As a boy, he was considered "bookish" and generally uninterested in activities in his Bronx neighborhood. According to a friend, "When we were teenagers hanging around the Bronx, he was just another bright, neurotic, talented guy—just another guy trying to get into a game with my softball club and mess around with girls . . ." Many of his friends from his "close-knit neighborhood" would become involved with his early films, including writing music scores and scripts.
at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. Kubrick later recalled the significance of his chess hobby to his career: "I used to play chess twelve hours a day. You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas." 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. His father was disappointed in his failure to achieve excellence in school, which he felt Stanley was capable of. His father encouraged him to read from his large library at home while at the same time permitting him to take up photography as a serious hobby. These additional interests outside of school may have contributed to his poor performance as a student.
Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School
from 1941 to 45. He was a poor student, with a meager 67 grade average. According to his English teacher, Kubrick was not a great student, and school didn't interest him. However, "the idea of literature and the reading of literature, from a non-academic, from a more human point of view, clearly was what interested him. He was a literary guy even as a young man . . . " Kubrick also had a poor attendance record, and often skipped school to take in double-feature films. He graduated in 1945, but 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 as an official school photographer for a year. In 1946, since he was not 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. January 24, 1930) on May 29, 1948. They lived together in Greenwich Village
. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art
and the cinemas of New York City. He was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director Max Ophüls
, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style, and by director Elia Kazan
, who he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors.
in 1951. The film notably employed a reverse tracking shot
, which would become one of Kubrick's signature camera movements. Kubrick is said to have sold Day of the Fight to RKO Radio Pictures for a profit of $100, although Kubrick himself claimed he lost $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 short film, The Seafarers
(1953) was filmed just after his first feature Fear and Desire to recoup costs. It was a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers' International Union and was Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre, although 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 have been officially released, though they have been widely bootlegged and clips are used in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
.
(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
. Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Later in 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 archives of the film printing company, and the film subsequently surfaced in bootleg copies.
, in 1952. They lived together in New York's 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
(1955), 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. A film noir
about a young heavyweight boxer at the end of his career, it met with limited commercial and critical success.. Both Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss were privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends.
, and the two became close friends. Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, would finance three out of the next four Kubrick pictures. The two bought the rights to the Lionel White
novel Clean Break, which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson
turned into The Killing, which tells the story of a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong. Starring Sterling Hayden
, The Killing was Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. The story is told using a non-linear narrative, an unusual device for 1950s American cinema, and was imitated nearly 40 years later in the film Reservoir Dogs
. Director Quentin Tarantino
acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence, even referring to Reservoir Dogs as "my Killing". The Killing followed many of the conventions of film noir, in both its plotting and cinematography style. The genre peaked in the 1940s, but many critics regard this film as one of its best.
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.
was set during World War I
and based on Humphrey Cobb
's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name. It follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are unduly charged with cowardice and sentenced to death. Kirk Douglas
starred, and was instrumental in securing financing for the 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 have praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. 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, who played a small role in the film. Kubrick divorced Sobotka in 1957, and married Harlan in 1958. They remained together until his death in 1999.
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, including Lunatic at Large, which Kubrick intended to develop into a movie, 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.
for his turn as the slave dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's direction. But the film's 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."
, and would live there for the rest of his life. His original motivation was to film Lolita in a country with laxer censorship laws. Kubrick had to remain in England to film Dr. Strangelove since divorce proceedings prevented Peter Sellers from leaving the country, and the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey required the Shepperton Studios
sound stages for their large capacity, the likes of which was unavailable in America. It was after filming the first two of these films in England and in the early planning stages of 2001 that Kubrick decided to settle there permanently.
Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate major controversy, as it adapted a highly controversial book
, by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov
(already notorious as an "obscene" novel and a cause célèbre
, given its theme) about an affair between a middle-aged professor named Humbert Humbert (James Mason
) and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. The difficult subject matter was referenced in the film's famous tagline
, "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?"
Prior to its release, Kubrick realized that to get a Production Code
seal, the screenplay would have to downplay the book's provocativeness by 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. James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited co-screenwriter of Lolita decided with Kubrick to raise Lolita's age. 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 sensual 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.
Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his own novel for the screen. The writer first produced a screenplay 400 pages long, which he then reduced to 200. Nabokov estimated that only 20% of his work made it into the final screenplay written by Kubrick. One of Kubrick's most notable changes from the book was to expand the character of Clare Quilty, played by Peter Sellers
. Kubrick had the character of Quilty masquerade as various people, enabling Sellers to employ multiple accents, a talent Kubrick would employ again in Dr Strangelove in which Sellers played three separate roles.
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. Andrew Sarris panned it in The Village Voice for being miscast and too restrained; it was also poorly reviewed in London's The Observer and by Eric Rhode on BBC Television News. The film was highly praised by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, though she later became one of Kubrick's harshest critics. Recent reviews of the film in conjunction with its DVD release have been overwhelmingly positive. 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."
, especially famous for its anti-war message, and is now considered a classic. It is a satire on the hawkish American advocates of use of the atomic bomb, as embodied in the character of renegade General Jack D. Ripper, who leads an unauthorized nuclear attack on Russia. The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments which would become explosive only a few years after its release. Roger Ebert
called it 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 co-written 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 conflict so absurd that the story became a sinister, macabre comedy. Once re-conceived, Kubrick recruited Terry Southern to polish the final screenplay.
Peter Sellers
, who had played a pivotal part in Lolita and had appeared in several previous films in multiple roles, 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. Due to Sellers' relative obscurity in the US at the time, most American viewers did not initially realize he was playing three roles, all with very different accents and appearances. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing", but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and allowed Sellers to improvise. Strangelove earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.
(1968). The film was conceived as a Cinerama
spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70
. The $10,000,000 (U.S.) film was a massive production for its time. It is famous for its groundbreaking visual effects, minimal use of dialogue and its use of classical music instead of an original score. It was also noted for its scientific realism in depicting space flight as well as its slightly surreal and enigmatic narrative. The former was achieved through extensive consultation with NASA personnel who also helped design the look and feel of the spacecraft. Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti; it was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. Although not initially a critical and commercial success, the film became quickly popular with the counter-culture youth movement of the 1960s, who were especially enchanted by the "psychedelic" and mysterious nature of the film's closing sequence of astronaut David Bowman's journey through the "Stargate". The film's ambiguous ending continues to fascinate contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form; however, his subsequent films would still maintain some level of ambiguity.
Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke
, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel
". The visual effects were overseen by Kubrick and engineered by a team that included a young Douglas Trumbull
, who would become famous in his own right as an effects technician. 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 unavailable to Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of slit-scan photography
to film the Stargate sequence. The film also featured the most extensive use of front-screen projection
to date in the Dawn of Man sequence, for which Kubrick designed a special high-resolution front-screen projector.
The film opened in widescreen Cinerama
and initially toured as a "roadshow" picture, with program booklets sold in the lobbies of the theatre. Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not an immediate hit. Initial criticism attacked 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". However, word-of-mouth among young audiences (especially the 1960s counterculture
audience) made the film an eventual hit. Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award
Kubrick received was for supervising the film's special effects.
In spite of initial negative critical reaction, many today consider it among the greatest science fiction film
s ever made, as well as one of the most influential. Steven Spielberg called it his generation's "big bang". It is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists.
(1971). His adaptation of Anthony Burgess
' novel of the same name
is an exploration of violence in human society. It takes place in a futuristic Great Britain that is both authoritarian and chaotic, and stars Malcolm McDowell
as Alex De Large, a hooligan who gleefully beats, robs, and rapes without remorse. After landing in prison, Alex undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment, known as the Ludovico technique
, that inhibits his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. The movie hints that the promotion of the treatment is politically motivated, and Alex becomes a pawn in a political game. Kubrick's vision makes comparisons between the left and right ends of the political spectrum, with characters drawn from each extreme, ultimately suggesting that there is little difference between the two. He stated, "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 old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera" off a rooftop in order to achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted electronic music composer Wendy Carlos
to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer
. 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 it. As such, it was natural for Kubrick to continue the tradition begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey of using classical music in the score. In A Clockwork Orange, classical music accompanies scenes of violent mayhem and coercive sexuality. Both Pauline Kael
(who generally disliked Kubrick's work after Lolita) 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."
The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence, and was issued with an X rating in the United States. It was released in the same year as Straw Dogs and Dirty Harry
, and the three films sparked a 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. 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. In early 1973, Kubrick re-released A Clockwork Orange to cinemas in the United States with footage modified so that it could get its rating reduced to an R. This enabled many more newspapers to advertise it, since in 1972 many newspapers had stopped carrying any advertising for X-rated films due to the new association of that rating with pornography. 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.
Kubrick's next film, released in 1975, was Barry Lyndon
, 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. The cinematography and lighting techniques Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon 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 classical works from the period by Bach and others.
Reviewers such as Pauline Kael, who had been critical of Kubrick's previous work, 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 as a whole 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. The French journal of film criticism, Cahiers du cinéma
, included Barry Lyndon at 67 on its top 100 list of all-time films. As with most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndons reputation has grown through the years, particularly among 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."
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 and 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. The agreement was honored until after Kubrick's death in 1999, when in 2000 it was revealed by Adam in a documentary on the making of The Spy Who Loved Me.
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 stars Jack Nicholson
as Jack Torrance, a failed writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel. He lives there with his wife, Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall
) and their young son, Danny (played by Danny Lloyd
), who is gifted with a form of telepathy
. As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awaken, driving Jack into a homicidal psychosis
.
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 hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track was impractical. Although used for some scenes in a few previous motion pictures, Garrett Brown, Steadicam's inventor, was closely involved with this production and regarded it as the first picture to fully employ the new system's potential. More than any of his other films, The Shining gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a perfectionist
. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet of film were shot). This process was particularly difficult for actress Shelley Duvall
, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman
.
The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." 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 Hitchcock
’s Psycho (1960), William Friedkin
’s The Exorcist
(1973), and other horror classics. Much of its imagery, such as the elevator shaft disgorging blood and the ghost girls in the hallway are among the most recognizable and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film, as are the lines "Redrum" and "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" as well as "Here's Johnny!". 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.
(1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford
's Vietnam War
novel The Short-Timers
. 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."
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. As actor Adam Baldwin put it "When you think of Vietnam, it's natural to imagine jungles. But this story is about urban warfare". Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. R. Lee Ermey
served as the film's technical adviser in addition to his acting duties.
Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews upon its release, but nonetheless found a reasonably large audience, despite being overshadowed by Oliver Stone
's Platoon
and Clint Eastwood
's Heartbreak Ridge
. As with Kubrick's other films, its critical status has increased immensely since its initial release.
(1999), starring Tom Cruise
and Nicole Kidman
as a wealthy Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler
's Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story
in English), which Kubrick moved from 1920s Vienna
to New York City in the 1990s. The film's theme has been described by actor Jack Nicholson
as delving into questions on the "dangers of married life," and the "silent desperations of keeping an ongoing relationship alive".
Kubrick's wife noted his long-standing interest in the project, saying "over the years he would see friends getting divorced and remarried, and the topic [of the film] would come up." She knew that this was a subject he wanted to make into a film. Co-star Nicole Kidman
observed that "Stanley's expectations of people were not really high," although she also saw that his wife, to whom he had been married for over 41 years, "was the love of his life. He would talk about her, he adored her, something that people didn't know. His daughters adored them . . . I would see that, and he would talk about them very proudly." Nicholson agrees that "Stanley was very much a family man."
Although Kubrick was almost seventy years of age, he worked relentlessly for 15 months in order to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16, 1999. He worked 18 hours a day, all the while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film. Press releases were sent to the media, stating briefly that "Stanley Kubrick's next film will be Eyes Wide Shut, a story of jealousy and sexual obsession . . . "Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. Kubrick sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release, but his sudden death on March 7, 1999 came a few days after he finished editing, and he never saw the final version when it was released to the public.
Biographer Michel Ciment
believes that "he literally worked himself to death," trying to complete the film to his liking. Ciment explains that Kubrick's desire to keep this, and many of his earlier films, private and unpublicized during its production, was an expression of Kubrick's "will to power," and not a penchant for secrecy: "Kubrick felt, quite rightly, that the public generally knows far too much about a film before it opens and that the surrounding media frenzy made the joy of surprise and pleasure of discovery impossible."
Nicole Kidman
explains that while some critics describe the film's theme as "dark," in essence "it is a very hopeful film." During one interview in the documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
, she states that Kubrick was indirectly stressing the moral values of "commitment and loyalty," adding that "ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut is about that commitment." Sidney Pollack, who acted in the film, adds that "the heart of [the film] was illustrating a truth about relationships and sexuality. But it was not illustrated in a literal way, but in a theatrical way." Michel Ciment agrees with Kidman, and likewise notes the positive meaning underlying the film, pointing out how some of it is voiced through the dialog, and suggests that the words "resonate like an epitaph" to Kubrick:
, Nicole Kidman
, and Warner Bros. executives, Kubrick passed away in his sleep from a heart attack at the age of 70. He was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor
, Hertfordshire
, England, U.K. Following his death, several directors and actors discussed their experiences with Kubrick. Steven Spielberg
said in a 1999 interview that Dr. Strangelove made him forget about being drafted into the Army.
were sold to United Artists, The Beatles
approached Kubrick to direct them in a film based on the books, but Kubrick told John Lennon he felt the story was unfilmable.
. Shortly after this announcement, the name of the film was changed to One-Eyed Jacks
. On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of One-Eyed Jacks so that he could begin production on Lolita. In 1960 he expanded on his reasoning, telling an interviewer: "When I left Brando's picture, it still didn't have a finished script. It had just become obvious to me that Brando wanted to direct the movie. I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando, to see that nobody shot him down." The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando and released in 1961.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss
on an expansion of his short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
" into a three-act film. It was a futuristic fairy-tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a child, and his efforts 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 1999, 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. The film was released in June 2001. It 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 psychiatry. In addition, John Williams
' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.
, was also used effectively in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick described this effect in discussing Ophuls' films le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madam De: "the camera went through every wall and every floor." He once named Ophüls' Le Plaisir his favorite film. However, Ophüls himself derived this technique from his early work as assistant with director Anatole Litvak
in the 1930s, whose own cinematography style is described as "replete with the camera trackings, pans and swoops which later became the trademark of Max Ophuls."
Geoffrey Cocks sees the influence of Ophüls as going beyond this to include a sensibility drawn to stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men. Critic Robert Kolker sees evident influence of Welles
on the same moving camera shots, while biographer Vincent LeBrutto states that Kubrick consciously identified with Welles. LeBrutto sees much influence of Welles' style on Kubrick's The Killing, "the multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus" and on the style of the closing credits of Paths of Glory, and Quentin Curtis in The Daily Telegraph describes Welles as "[Kubrick's] great influence, in composition and camera movement." One particular film of John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle, sufficiently impressed Kubrick as to persuade him he wanted to cast Sterling Hayden in his first major feature The Killing.
Walker states that Kubrick never acknowledged Fritz Lang
as an influence on him, but holds that Lang's interests are analogous to Kubrick's with regard to an interest in myth and "the Teutonic unconscious". Michael Herr's memoir Kubrick states that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst. In particular Pabst had for several decades also considered adapting Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, the basis of Eyes Wide Shut, although Pabst had been unable to come up with a suitable approach.
As a young man, Kubrick also was fascinated by the films of Russian filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Kubrick also as a young man read Pudovkin’s seminal theoretical work, Film Technique which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, which needs to be effectively employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest. Kubrick recommended this work to others for years to come. Thomas Nelson describes this book as "the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick's] private aesthetics".
Russian documentary film maker Pavel Klushantsev
made a groundbreaking film in the 1950s entitled Road to the Stars, which is believed to have significantly influenced Kubrick's technique in 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly with regard to its accurate depiction of weightlessness and rotating space station. Indeed Encyclopedia Astronautica describes some scenes from 2001 as a "shot-for-shot duplication of Road to the Stars". Specific comparisons of shots from the two films have been analyzed by filmmaker Alessandro Cima. A 1994 issue of American Cinematographer states "When Stanley Kubrick made 2001: a Space Odyssey in 1968, he claimed to have been first to fly actor/astronauts on wires with the camera on the ground, shooting vertically while the actor's body covered the wires" but observes that Klushantsev had actually preceded him in this.
Kubrick was also a great admirer of the films of Bergman
, Vittorio De Sica
, Jean Renoir
, and Federico Fellini
, but the degree of their influence on his own style has not been assessed. In an early interview with Horizon magazine in the late 1950s, Kubrick stated, "I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them."
Late in life, Kubrick became enamored with the works of David Lynch
, being particularly fascinated by Lynch's first major film Eraserhead
, which he asked cast members of The Shining to watch to establish the mood he wanted to convey.
(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,
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 re-shooting 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:
1. In Lolita, Kubrick omits all mention of Professor Humbert's previous infatuation with underage girls, makes the character of Lolita much older, and greatly expands the role of Clare Quilty, a much more perverse child molester than Humbert. This has the effect of making Humbert far more sympathetic. As a result of all three of these changes, Greg Jenkins writes "A story originally told from the edge of a moral abyss is fast moving toward safer ground"
2. Kubrick converted Peter George's straight Cold War thriller Red Alert into his macabre black comedy Dr. Strangelove and gave it an entirely different conclusion. He began to see comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction
as he wrote the first draft, saying:
3. In A Clockwork Orange Kubrick made the writer victimized by Alex, F. Alexander, an elderly man speaking standard English, while in the book he is a very young political activist, who speaks the same odd slang as Alex and his droogs. In Burgess' novel, Mr. F. Alexander is a contemporary of Alex, while in Kubrick's film he is a contemporary of the Minister of the Interior whose legislation initiates the use of the brainwashing Ludovico technique
.
4. The most discussed change in The Shining (and certainly the one most objected to by author Stephen King
) is Kubrick's omission of Jack Torrance's return to sanity at the end of the novel, and relatively sympathetic character at the opening of the story. Kubrick also cut all hints that the hotel is itself sentient, while adding the element that the hotel was built on a Native American burial ground. The most famous scenes in the film, such as the revelation of the contents of Jack's book, the apparition of the twins in the hallway, Jack's encounter with the ghost of the dead woman in Room 237, and the chase through the hedge-maze have no counterpart in King's novel. Critic Mark Browning concludes that the King novel is about a haunted house, but Kubrick's film is about a haunted man.
5. In adapting The Short-Timers into Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick expanded the material set in boot camp, which is about 20% of the novel, into fully half of the film. Many viewers find this early material the most memorable in the film. Richard Jenkins believes this is consistent with Kubrick's general desire to explode the standard narrative conventions of film, as this results in the film appearing to be two short stories with the same characters told back-to-back.
6. In adapting Traumnovelle into Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick shifted the story from Vienna in the 1900s to New York City in the 1990s. In the novel, the husband and wife are Jews in a very conservative and anti-Semitic city, while in the film the husband is a fairly conventional WASP upper-middle-class professional in contemporary New York City. In the novel, the secret society upon which the husband stumbles is quite small, whereas in the film it encompasses a large section of the city's social elite. Kubrick has also significantly altered both the events at the mansion party and in the wife's dream as to notably change the tenor and mood of the story. Critic Randy Rasmussen suggests that the character of Bill is fundamentally more naïve, strait-laced, less disclosing and more unconscious of his vindictive motives than his counterpart, Fridolin.
In a book-length study of how Kubrick adapts novels to the screen, writer Greg Jenkins derives the following generalizations about Kubrick's screenplays:
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 voice-over 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 in the wake of the advent of long closing credits in the 1970s. (Disney films, for example, stopped using "The End" in 1984). However, Kubrick continued to put it at the end of the credits in every one of his films, long after the rest of the film industry stopped using it. On the other hand, Kubrick occasionally dispensed with opening credits (in A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange), long before it became commonplace—as had Welles
in Citizen Kane
and Disney
in Fantasia
before him and George Lucas
and Francis Ford Coppola
would later do, most notably in Star Wars
and Apocalypse Now
. Kubrick's 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, but sometimes alternative material was shot for international releases—in The Shining, the text on the typewriter pages was re-shot for the countries in which the film was released; in Eyes Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages. Kubrick always personally supervised the foreign voice-dubbing and the actual script translation into foreign languages for all of his films. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice translations have been produced for any of the films he had control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only subtitles are used for translation.
Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of his films except Full Metal Jacket used mostly pre-recorded 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.
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, although Ebert does not think there is any deep meaning to these shots. Lobrutto's biography of Kubrick notes that his director of photography, Doug Milsome, coined the phrase the "Kubrick crazy stare". The connection of this stare with psychoanalysis is often made through the concept of "The Gaze
" and its implications in visual culture. Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls.
Critic and Kubrick biographer Alexander Walker has noted Kubrick's repeated "corridor" compositions, of which two particularly well-known ones are the StarGate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the extensive use of the hotel corridors in The Shining.
Almost all Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a bathroom. (The more frequently cited example of this in 2001 is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route to the moon, rather than David Bowman's exploration [while still wearing his spacesuit] of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom after his journey through the StarGate.)
Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, often playing on the set of his films. Chess appears as a motif or a plot device in three of his films, The Killing, Lolita, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mario Falsetto believes that the marble floor in the room of the prisoner's trial in Paths of Glory is deliberately chosen to represent a chess board, with prisoners as "pawns in the game".
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.
Kubrick often employed the use of music as a "black joke" to achieve a chilling, ironic effect (one now often employed by Quentin Tarantino) by incongruously combining mismatched moods and styles. Igor Stravinsky
was arguably the innovator of this musical technique during his Neo-Classic period (1920s to the 1950s), but it was Kubrick who extended this idea to the big screen. This gives the intended emotional impact of a scene even more power. Brief examples of this include Vera Lynn
singing We'll Meet Again
in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove (during a nuclear holocaust), using some older classical music for the futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and using Gene Kelly
's Singin’ in the Rain
for the end credits in the dystopian world of A Clockwork Orange, and light pop music in Full Metal Jacket.
The use of long takes, while not an unknown technique before Kubrick, became known in the film community as a "Kubrickian" trademark—for instance the extended tricycle-riding sequence in The Shining or the long pullback from Alex's face at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange.
Newspaper obituaries of Kubrick, the Encyclopædia Britannica and Vincent LoBrutto's biography of the director (which was spoken of approvingly by Kubrick's wife) all characterize Kubrick broadly as pessimistic. Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote: “if Mr. Kubrick's misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity.” So also did Kubrick's most severe critic, Pauline Kael. The charge was repeated in reviews of the multi-film DVD boxed set of his films in 2007, a New Jersey film critic writing “And yet preserved too – like an ugly insect trapped in amber – are some of the artist's most problematic qualities, including a bitter pessimism, a cruel humor and an almost godlike superiority that often viewed other people – and particularly women – as little more than impediments." A pessimistic streak was found in essays collected in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, one of which characterizes Eyes Wide Shut as “a kind of Sartrean pessimism about our inevitable dissatisfaction with romantic love.”
Not all critics agree with this assessment. Other essays in the same anthology find Eyes Wide Shut to be largely optimistic. James Naremore in On Kubrick characterizes Kubrick as a modernist in the tradition of Joyce
and Kafka
with their distrust of mass society. As such, Naremore notes that Kubrick's detachment from his subjects does not make him a dour pessimist, although Kubrick does often dwell on “the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality”. Peter Kramer's study of 2001 argues it is meant to counterweight the pessimism of Kubrick's previous Dr. Strangelove.
Some view Kubrick's pessimism as either at least overstated by others or even more apparent than real, an impression created by Kubrick's refusal of any bland or cheap optimism, refusal to make films that conform to conventional ideas of a spectacle, and a desire to employ films as a wake-up call to humanity to understand its capacity for evil. The editors of The Kubrick Site note that Kubrick avoids cinematically conventional ways of structuring stories. This does indeed create for many viewers a sense of emotionless detachment from the human subjects as noted above. For example, Kubrick often prefers lengthy dialogue scenes shot from one camera angle with no cutting. But the editors of TKS believe this is done in order to establish a life of characters beyond dialogue which "helps to reveal, in the spaces and silences, some of the emotional nature permeating the film's world" as well as a realistic sense of the characters' situatedness in time and society. Kubrick's focus is not just on individual characters but on the larger society around them and how it affects their motivation, often in negative ways. The authors also stress that however bleak Kubrick's outlook (intermittently) is, he is not a misanthrope.
A recent outspoken dissenter from pessimistic readings of Kubrick is author Julian Rice, a scholar of Native American literature. His book Kubrick's Hope argues that although there is a powerful vision of evil in Kubrick, there is vision of redemption and goodness in Kubrick's films stronger than often initially recognized, a vision focused both on family feeling and access to the sublime depths of the subconscious beyond superficial socialization. However, Rice has been alleged to misrepresent the work of prior Kubrick film scholars, particularly with reference to just how pessimistic or misanthropic they actually think Kubrick's films are.
Spielberg
, himself a noted cinematic optimist and close personal friend of Kubrick, expressed a similar view of Kubrick. Going against the grain of the view that Kubrick's films are misanthropic and pessimistic, Spielberg in a tribute to Kubrick at the 71st Academy awards said: "He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we're transported directly to his world, and we're inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy." Kubrick himself denied that he was a pessimist, and summarized his views in a 1968 interview with Playboy
: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
, Martin Scorsese
, or Akira Kurosawa
. However, Kubrick did on several occasions work with the same actor more than once. In lead roles, Sterling Hayden appeared 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, while 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.
Although Kubrick had a reputation as a non-collaborative and controlling director, he atypically allowed actors Peter Sellers (in both Lolita and Dr. Strangelove) and R. Lee Ermey (in Full Metal Jacket) to freely improvise most of their own dialogue.
]
Photographer Dmitri Kasterine, himself regarded as "one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Britain from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s", began a long association with Kubrick in 1964 when he began shooting stills during filming of Dr Strangelove and later for 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kasterine was commissioned to take portraits of Kubrick for publications including the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Harpers & Queen and a variety of his work was published in The Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and The New York Times. Though Kubrick was noted for keeping his production sets extremely private by banning uninvited visitors, Kasterine was allowed onto the sets of numerous Kubrick films to shoot both candid and posed photos. In 2010 and 2011, many of his Kubrick photos were on display for the first time in the United Kingdom at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Four writers who co-authored screenplays with Kubrick subsequently wrote memoirs of their experience working with him. Arthur C. Clarke
's The Lost Worlds of 2001 traces all the intermediate versions of the story from first draft to final project. Diane Johnson
published an essay about her experience collaborating with Kubrick and has discussed it frequently in both lectures and interviews. Michael Herr
, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Full Metal Jacket wrote a book simply titled Kubrick which covers not only his collaboration on the film, but also his friendship with the director over the last 20 years of his life. Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael
, wrote a notoriously unflattering memoir of Kubrick entitled Eyes Wide Open which has been denounced by Kubrick's family, notably on Christianne Kubrick's website. Similarly, Diane Johnson has stated
Two authors of studies of Kubrick's films, Alexander Walker and Michel Ciment, worked closely with Kubrick on their books, with Kubrick personally providing the authors with many production photos and film stills and crucial information about the production of his films. Walker's book Stanley Kubrick, Director saw both a 1972 (entitled Stanley Kubrick Directs) and a 2000 edition, and Michel Ciment's book Stanley Kubrick saw both a 1980 and 2003 edition (the latter called Stanley Kubrick- The Definitive Edition)
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 also appeared 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 co-star Todd Field
on his pictures.
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.
and front-screen projection
. Previously used to create image distortions or blurriness, slit-scan was used by Kubrick to create sophisticated animation for the StarGate sequence. This earned Kubrick his only personal Oscar, awarded for special effects. Although front projection had been used earlier, Space Odyssey was its first use on a large scale, and Kubrick employed a specially built 8x10 projector for the Dawn of Man sequence, as he did not believe that matting or rear-projection would create a sufficiently realistic effect.
Kubrick also made innovative use of Zeiss camera lenses for photographing scenes lit only by actual candlelight in Barry Lyndon. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick relates how he felt that most films containing candle-lit scenes look phony, due to the artificial light flickering off-camera. Kubrick wanted the more authentic look of 19th-century paintings.
Kubrick was also among the first to use the then-revolutionary Steadicam
in The Shining to allow smooth stabilized tracking with the camera in motion, without the use of a dolly limiting the camera's point of view. The inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown
, became heavily involved with the production, as he believed The Shining was the first film to fully realize the Steadicam's full potential, going well beyond "stunt shots and staircases".
After Kubrick, the use of slit-scan to create animation effects was employed in the credits sequence to Doctor Who
. Front-screen projection has been used in James Bond and Superman films, and the Steadicam has been employed in Star Wars films.
, Steven Spielberg
, James Cameron
, Woody Allen
, Terry Gilliam
, the Coen brothers
, Ridley Scott
, and George A. Romero
, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. On the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, Steven Spielberg, in an interview, comments on Kubrick that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history" but the way that Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese notes that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released. Then came a dawning recognition that they were masterful works unlike any other films. Perhaps most notably, Orson Welles
, one of Kubrick’s greatest personal influences and all-time favorite directors, famously said that: “Among those whom I would call “younger generation” Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.”
Many directors have mentioned Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films: Richard Linklater
, Sam Mendes
, Joel Schumacher
, Taylor Hackford
. and Darren Aronofsky
.
Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan
, David Fincher
, Guillermo del Toro
, David Lynch
, Lars Von Trier
, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noé
. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer
's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick. The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent, contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The storytelling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Dr. Strangelove. Director Tim Burton
has included a few visual homages to Kubrick in his work, notably using actual footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, and modeling the look of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in his version of Alice in Wonderland
on the Grady girls in The Shining. Film critic Roger Ebert
also noted that Burton's Mars Attacks!
was partially inspired by Dr. Strangelove. Burton's only music video, that of The Killers' Bones (2006), includes clips from Kubrick's Lolita, as well as other films from the general era.
Paul Thomas Anderson
(who was fond of Kubrick as a teenager) in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, stated "it's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It can all seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with." Reviewer William Arnold described Anderson's There Will Be Blood
as being stylistically an homage to Kubrick "particularly "2001: A Space Odyssey" – opening with a similar prologue that jumps in stages over the years and using a soundtrack throughout that employs anachronistic music."
Although Michael Moore
specializes in documentary filmmaking, at the beginning of shooting his only non-documentary feature film Canadian Bacon
, he sat his cast and crew down to watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. He told them "What this movie was in the '60s, is what we should aspire to with this film." Moore had previously written Kubrick a letter telling him how much Bacon was inspired by Strangelove.
Film director Frank Darabont
has been inspired by Kubrick's use of music. In an interview with The Telegraph, he states that 2001 took "the use of music in film" to absolute perfection, and one shot employing classical music in The Shawshank Redemption follows Kubrick's lead. On the other hand, while Darabont has followed Kubrick in directing two Stephen King adaptations, Darabont shares Stephen King's negative view of Kubrick's adaption of The Shining. In the same interview, Darabont said
Critics occasionally detect a Kubrickian influence when the actual filmmaker acknowledges none. Critics have noticed the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Danish independent director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jim Pappas suggests this comes from his employment of Kubrick's cinematographer for The Shining and Barry Lyndon in his film Fear X, suggesting "it is the Kubrick influence that leaves us asking ourselves what we believe we should know is true". The apparent influence of Kubrick on his film Bronson was noted by the Los Angeles Times and the French publication Evene However, when asked by Twitch about the very frequent comparisons by critics of the film Bronson to A Clockwork Orange, Refn denied the influence. Refn stated
Some filmmakers have been critical of Kubrick's work, such as those of the remodernist film
movement; Jesse Richards
described Kubrick's work as "boring and dishonest". Peter Rinaldi, in his essay on the Remodernist Film Manifesto for Mungbeing, The Shore as Seen from the Deep Sea, defends the manifesto, writing:
Actor Robert Duvall
(who never worked for Kubrick) stated on the fifth in The Hollywood Reporter's roundtable series in 2010 that he thought Kubrick's knack for an unusually high number of takes (often over 50) made him an "actor's enemy". He stated that both A Clockwork Orange and The Shining were "great movies" but contained "the worst performances he had ever seen in movies". On the other hand, Nicole Kidman (who co-starred in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) held that the value of Kubrick's enormous number of takes was that actors stopped consciously thinking about acting technique and went to a deeper place. She stated "He believed that what it does to you, as an actor, was that you would lose control of your sense of self, of the part of you that was internally watching your own performance. Eventually, he felt, you would stop censoring yourself."
, released by Warner Bros. It was produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan
, who had also been executive producer of Kubrick's last four films. The camera and sound for the documentary was managed by his son, Manuel Harlan, who was also the still photographer for Eyes Wide Shut and video operator for Full Metal Jacket.
In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia award the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award. Kubrick is among filmmakers such as Griffith
, Olivier
(whom Kubrick directed in Spartacus), Cecil B. DeMille
, and Irving Thalberg
, all of whom have had annual awards named after them. Kubrick won this award in 1999, one year prior to its being renamed in his honor.
Analysts of the TV series The Simpsons
argue it contains more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound not only to 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining but also to Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket. It has been noted that while 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." Similarly, it has been observed that "...the show's almost obsessive references to the films of Stanley Kubrick...[make it] 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. When the Director's Guild of Great Britain
gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a cut-together sequence of all the homages from the show.
In 2009 there was an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films in Dublin, Ireland, entitled 'Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light'. It was displayed at the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin from October 1 to 31. The same year, online toymaker "quartertofour" released a version of Rubik's Cube
with prints of photos from six of Kubrick's films on the side of the cube. (This is not to be confused with the online game Kubrick with computer images of Rubik's Cube which has no connection with Stanley Kubrick.) In 2010, painter Carlos Ramos held an exhibition entitled "Kubrick" at the Copro gallery in Los Angeles. It featured paintings in a variety of styles based on scenes from Stanley Kubrick films.
The video for pop singer Lady Gaga
's song Bad Romance was found by Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone magazine to be heavily influenced by the filmmaking style of Kubrick. Lady Gaga has also employed a hip-hop remix of the electronic version of Purcell's music that opens the film Clockwork Orange in her concerts and in her mini-movie The Fame. Finally, her song Dance in the Dark has the lines "Find your Jesus, Find your Kubrick".
the television miniseries
of The Shining, written and produced by Stephen King which King 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 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.
in the 2004 film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Sellers appeared in two Kubrick films, but the material with Kubrick in this film is focused on Sellers' appearance in Dr. Strangelove.
frequented the London entertainment scene claiming to be Stanley Kubrick, and temporarily deceived New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich
. Kubrick's personal assistant, Anthony Frewin, helped track Conway down and wrote the screenplay for the film Colour Me Kubrick
based on the Conway affair.
In 2002, with the cooperation of Kubrick's surviving family, the French film maker William Karel
(after initially planning a straight documentary on Stanley Kubrick) directed a hoax mockumentary about Kubrick and the NASA moon landing entitled Dark Side of the Moon. The film purported to demonstrate that the NASA moon landings had been faked and that the moon landing footage had been directed by Stanley Kubrick during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In spite of clues that the film is a news parody, some test audiences believed the film to be sincere, including at least one believer in the moon landing conspiracy.
An earlier 1995 tongue-in-cheek article promoted essentially the same mock hoax about Kubrick, and was also deemed sincere by some readers. Originally posted on the Usenet humor news group 'alt.humor.best-of-usenet', it was later reproduced in venues not devoted to parody.
An entirely sincere documentary film making the same claim as Karel's parodic "mockumentary" was self-released on DVD in 2011 by conspiracy theorist and occultist Jay Weidner entitled Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick; Part One: Kubrick and Apollo. The science magazine Discovery reviewed an earlier article by Weidner on which his film was based as "bunk" but "oddly compelling" and "strangely fascinating".
A second recurring conspiracy theory surrounding Stanley Kubrick is that he was a secret member of a massive Freemason-Illuminati organization and hid clues of its existence in many of his films. Theorists claim Kubrick disclosed too much in Eyes Wide Shut and was subsequently assassinated. Cracked.com listed this as #1 in their list of 5 Absurd (But Mind Blowing) Pop Culture Conspiracy Theories. Although the book The Complete Idiot's Guide to the New World Order claims to be skeptical of the actual conspiracy theories, it takes at face value the claim that Masonic symbolism is woven into Eyes Wide Shut.
Day of the Fight
was part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series. The Flying Padre was an RKO-Pathe Screenliner. The Seafarers and Spartacus were Kubrick's only color films prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
1 Uncredited
Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the underlying concept of Steven Spielberg
's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence which was produced after his death, by his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan
. Kubrick is thanked in the credits, but is not credited as writer. A new screenplay was written by Steven Spielberg based on a 90-page story treatment done in 1990 by Ian Watson which in turn had closely followed Kubrick's stated directives. The film is based on a short story by Brian Aldiss
.
During the laserdisc era, The Criterion Collection released six earlier Kubrick films, but released only Spartacus and 2001 in widescreen, although others had been widescreen in theatres. Earlier DVD releases of The Killing, Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove (whether by Criterion, MGM, or Sony) were standard 4:3 screen, while later releases were widescreen.
Earlier widescreen releases of 2001 were slightly cropped due to being transferred from a 35mm print, but this was corrected in the most recent DVD release.
Personal awards for Kubrick:
Kubrick received two awards from major film festivals: "Best Director" from the Locarno International Film Festival
in 1959 for Killer's Kiss, and "Filmcritica Bastone Bianco Award" at the Venice Film Festival
in 1999 for Eyes Wide Shut. He also was nominated for the "Golden Lion
" of the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for Lolita. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the "Career Golden Lion" in 1997. He received the D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America
, and another life-achievement award from the Director's Guild of Great Britain
, and the Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival. Posthumously, the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" for life achievement in 2008. He also received the coveted Hugo Award
three time for his work in science fiction.
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 No.26 and A Clockwork Orange
at #46. In 2007, the AFI updated their list with 2001 ranked at #15, Dr. Strangelove ranked at No.39 and Clockwork Orange ranked at #70; Spartacus
was one of the new selections, ranking at #81.
Documentary
Movie studio
A movie studio is a term used to describe a major entertainment company or production company that has its own privately owned studio facility or facilities that are used to film movies...
financial support for all his endeavors.
Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail. His later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism and often lack structured linear narrative. His films are frequently described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. He worked in a wide variety of genres: science-fiction, horror, period piece and war film. However, there are recurring themes in all his works, notably man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
pessimism
Pessimism
Pessimism, from the Latin word pessimus , is a state of mind in which one perceives life negatively. Value judgments may vary dramatically between individuals, even when judgments of fact are undisputed. The most common example of this phenomenon is the "Is the glass half empty or half full?"...
, some critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully.
The film that first brought him attention from many critics was Paths of Glory
Paths of Glory
Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Set during World War I, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refused to continue a suicidal attack...
, the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of Kubrick's movies initially met with lukewarm reception, only to be acclaimed years later as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on later generations of filmmakers. Considered groundbreaking was 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
, noted for being one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while also maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange (film)
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
from Great Britain, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. Authors Anthony Burgess (eventually) and Stephen King (immediately) were unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 dystopian novella by Anthony Burgess. The novel contains an experiment in language: the characters often use an argot called "Nadsat", derived from Russian....
and The Shining
The Shining (novel)
The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. The title was inspired by the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!", which contained the line "We all shine on…". It was King's third published novel, and first hardback bestseller, and the success of the book firmly established King...
respectively; both authors became involved with subsequent stage or TV adaptations. His films were largely successful at the box office, although Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon is a 1975 British-American period romantic war film produced, written, and directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray which recounts the exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer...
performed poorly in the United States. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s onward, except The Shining
The Shining (film)
The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. A writer, Jack Torrance, takes a job as an...
, were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Even though all his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, frequently disparaged Kubrick's work, Ankeny describes Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."
Background
Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, at the Lying-In Hospital in ManhattanManhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, New York, the first of two children born to Jewish parents, Jacques (Jacob) Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Sadie Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–85). His sister, Barbara Mary Kubrick, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were Jewish of Austrian, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n and Polish origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx
The Bronx
The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...
.
Kubrick biographer Geoffrey Cocks writes that although Kubrick descended from Eastern European Jews, and was raised in a Jewish neighborhood in New York City, his family was not religious, although his parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony. When critic Michel Ciment
Michel Ciment
Michel Ciment is a French film critic and the editor of the cinema magazine Positif. Ciment is a Chevalier of the Order of Merit, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, and the president of FIPRESCI...
asked him in 1980 whether he had a religious upbringing, Kubrick replied "No, not at all." He had no bar mitzvah and apparently did not attend synagogue, although after his death, both his daughter and wife stated that "He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all." His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, to have been called Aryan Papers, and spent years researching the subject. Most of his friends and early photography and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent Jewish immigrants from Europe. British screenwriter Frederic Raphael
Frederic Raphael
Frederic Michael Raphael is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist.-Life and career:...
, who worked closely with him in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick's films was partly because he "had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars," noting that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality." He points out, nonetheless, that when Kubrick died, "few of the obituaries mentioned that he was a Jew."
A friend of Kubrick's family notes that although his father was a prominent doctor, "Stanley and his mom were such regular people. They had no airs about them. . . . His mother was so down-to-earth, she was lovely." As a boy, he was considered "bookish" and generally uninterested in activities in his Bronx neighborhood. According to a friend, "When we were teenagers hanging around the Bronx, he was just another bright, neurotic, talented guy—just another guy trying to get into a game with my softball club and mess around with girls . . ." Many of his friends from his "close-knit neighborhood" would become involved with his early films, including writing music scores and scripts.
Adolescence
Kubrick's father taught him chessChess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. Kubrick later recalled the significance of his chess hobby to his career: "I used to play chess twelve hours a day. You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas." He also bought his son a Graflex
Graflex
Graflex was a manufacturer, a brand name and several models of cameras. William F. Folmer, an inventor, built the first Graflex camera in 1898, when his company was called The Folmer and Schwing Manufacturing Company, founded originally in New York as a gas lamp company...
camera when he was thirteen, triggering a fascination with still photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
. As a teenager, Kubrick was interested in jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, and briefly attempted a career as a drummer. His father was disappointed in his failure to achieve excellence in school, which he felt Stanley was capable of. His father encouraged him to read from his large library at home while at the same time permitting him to take up photography as a serious hobby. These additional interests outside of school may have contributed to his poor performance as a student.
Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School
William Howard Taft High School (New York City)
William Howard Taft High School was a high school in Southwest section of the Bronx, New York City.The school was operated by the New York City Department of Education....
from 1941 to 45. He was a poor student, with a meager 67 grade average. According to his English teacher, Kubrick was not a great student, and school didn't interest him. However, "the idea of literature and the reading of literature, from a non-academic, from a more human point of view, clearly was what interested him. He was a literary guy even as a young man . . . " Kubrick also had a poor attendance record, and often skipped school to take in double-feature films. He graduated in 1945, but 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.
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
(CCNY) and then left. Eventually, he sought jobs as a freelance photographer, and by graduation, he had sold a photographic series to Look
Look (American magazine)
Look was a bi-weekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles...
magazine. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park
Washington Square Park
Washington Square Park is one of the best-known of New York City's 1,900 public parks. At 9.75 acres , it is a landmark in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village, as well as a meeting place and center for cultural activity...
and various Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
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. January 24, 1930) on May 29, 1948. They lived together in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
and the cinemas of New York City. He was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls
Maximillian Oppenheimer — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , the United States , and France again...
, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style, and by director Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...
, who he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors.
Early work
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 FightDay of the Fight
Day of the Fight is a 1951 American short subject documentary film shot in black-and-white and also the first picture directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick financed the film himself, and it is based on an earlier photo feature he had done as a photographer for Look magazine in 1949...
in 1951. The film notably employed a reverse tracking shot
Tracking shot
In motion picture terminology, a tracking shot is a segment in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly, a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken...
, which would become one of Kubrick's signature camera movements. Kubrick is said to have sold Day of the Fight to RKO Radio Pictures for a profit of $100, although Kubrick himself claimed he lost $100. Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Look magazine and began working on his second short documentary, Flying Padre
Flying Padre
Flying Padre is a 1951 short subject black-and-white documentary film. It is the second picture directed by Stanley Kubrick, after Day of the Fight. The film is nine minutes long.-Story:...
(1951), funded by RKO. A third short film, The Seafarers
The Seafarers
The Seafarers is Stanley Kubrick's third film, a short for the Seafarers International Union, directed in June 1953.There are shots of ships, machinery, a canteen, and a union meeting. The film was shot in color, and was supervised by the staff of The Seafarers Log, the union magazine...
(1953) was filmed just after his first feature Fear and Desire to recoup costs. It was a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers' International Union and was Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre, although it is believed that he was involved in other shorts which have been lost—most notably World Assembly of Youth
World Assembly of Youth (film)
World Assembly of Youth is a documentary film created in 1952 for the US State Department. It is believed to be lost but evidence for it was discovered on an early resume sent by Stanley Kubrick to veteran New York film critic Theodore Huff in February 1953...
(1952). He also served as second unit director on an episode of the Omnibus television program about the life of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
. None of these shorts have been officially released, though they have been widely bootlegged and clips are used in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a 2001 documentary about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, made by his long-time assistant and brother-in-law Jan Harlan...
.
Fear and Desire
Kubrick moved to narrative feature films with Fear and DesireFear and Desire
Fear and Desire is a military action/adventure film by Stanley Kubrick. It is Kubrick’s first feature film and is also one of his least-seen productions...
(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
Howard Sackler
Howard Oliver Sackler , was an American screenwriter and playwright who is best known for writing The Great White Hope . The Great White Hope enjoyed both a successful run on Broadway and, as a film adaptation, in movie theaters...
. Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Later in 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 archives of the film printing company, and the film subsequently surfaced in bootleg copies.
Killer's Kiss
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 SobotkaRuth Sobotka
Ruth A. Sobotka was an Austrian-born dancer, costume designer, art director, painter, and actress.The daughter of prominent Austrian architect and interior designer, Walter Sobotka and Viennese actress, Gisela Schönau, Ruth Sobotka immigrated to the United States from Vienna with her parents in...
, in 1952. They lived together in New York's 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
Killer's Kiss
Killer's Kiss is a 1955 film noir directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Kubrick and Howard Sackler. It is the second feature film directed by Kubrick...
(1955), 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. A film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
about a young heavyweight boxer at the end of his career, it met with limited commercial and critical success.. Both Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss were privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends.
The Killing
Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a young producer named James B. HarrisJames B. Harris
James B. Harris is a film screenwriter, producer and director. He worked with film director Stanley Kubrick as a producer on The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita...
, and the two became close friends. Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, would finance three out of the next four Kubrick pictures. The two bought the rights to the Lionel White
Lionel White
Lionel White was an American crime novelist, several of whose dark, noirish stories were made into films. His books include The Night of the Following Day , The Money Trap , The Big Caper Lionel White (January 1905 – December 1985) was an American crime novelist, several of whose dark,...
novel Clean Break, which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson
Jim Thompson (writer)
James Myers Thompson was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction....
turned into The Killing, which tells the story of a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong. Starring Sterling Hayden
Sterling Hayden
Sterling Hayden was an American actor and author. For most of his career as a leading man, he specialized in westerns and film noir, such as Johnny Guitar, The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing. Later on he became noted as a character actor for such roles as Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Dr...
, The Killing was Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. The story is told using a non-linear narrative, an unusual device for 1950s American cinema, and was imitated nearly 40 years later in the film Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs is an American crime film marking debut of director and writer Quentin Tarantino. It depicts the events before and after a botched diamond heist, but not the heist itself. Reservoir Dogs stars an ensemble cast: Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and...
. Director Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence, even referring to Reservoir Dogs as "my Killing". The Killing followed many of the conventions of film noir, in both its plotting and cinematography style. The genre peaked in the 1940s, but many critics regard this film as one of its best.
While it was not a financial success, it received good reviews.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. 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
Calder Willingham
Calder Baynard Willingham, Jr. was an American novelist and screenwriter. He cowrote several notable screenplays, including Paths of Glory and One-Eyed Jacks ....
on an adaptation of the Austrian novel The Burning Secret. Although Kubrick was enthusiastic about the project, it was eventually shelved.
Paths of Glory
Kubrick's next film Paths of GloryPaths of Glory
Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Set during World War I, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refused to continue a suicidal attack...
was set during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and based on Humphrey Cobb
Humphrey Cobb
Humphrey Cobb was a screenwriter and novelist. He is best known for writing the novel Paths of Glory, which was made into an acclaimed 1957 movie by Stanley Kubrick. Cobb was also the lead screenwriter on the 1937 movie San Quentin, starring Humphrey Bogart.Cobb was born in Siena, Italy...
's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name. It follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are unduly charged with cowardice and sentenced to death. Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past , Champion , Ace in the Hole , The Bad and the Beautiful , Lust for Life , Paths of Glory , Gunfight at the O.K...
starred, and was instrumental in securing financing for the 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 have praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
has named this one of his favorite Kubrick films.
During the production of Paths of Glory in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Kubrick met and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan, who played a small role in the film. Kubrick divorced Sobotka in 1957, and married Harlan in 1958. They remained together until his death in 1999.
1960s
Upon his return to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months on the Marlon BrandoMarlon Brando
Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St...
vehicle One-Eyed Jacks
One-Eyed Jacks
One-Eyed Jacks, a 1961 Western, is the only film directed by actor Marlon Brando, who also played its lead character, Rio.The film was originally to be directed by Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah...
(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, including Lunatic at Large, which Kubrick intended to develop into a movie, until Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past , Champion , Ace in the Hole , The Bad and the Beautiful , Lust for Life , Paths of Glory , Gunfight at the O.K...
asked him to take over Douglas' epic production Spartacus (1960) from Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann was an American actor and film director, most notably of film noirs and Westerns. As a director, he often collaborated with the cinematographer John Alton and with James Stewart in his Westerns.-Biography:...
, who had been fired by the studio two weeks into shooting.
Spartacus
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. Spartacus is the only Kubrick film in which the director had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, no producing credit, or any say in casting. 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 Spartacus. Years later, Douglas referred to Kubrick as "a talented shit." Despite the on-set troubles, Spartacus was a critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major director. It won four Oscars including an award for Peter UstinovPeter Ustinov
Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter...
for his turn as the slave dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's direction. But the film's 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."
Lolita
In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film LolitaLolita (1962 film)
Lolita is a 1962 comedy-drama film by Stanley Kubrick based on the classic novel of the same title by Vladimir Nabokov. The film stars James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Sue Lyon as Dolores Haze and Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze with Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty.Due to the MPAA's restrictions at...
, and would live there for the rest of his life. His original motivation was to film Lolita in a country with laxer censorship laws. Kubrick had to remain in England to film Dr. Strangelove since divorce proceedings prevented Peter Sellers from leaving the country, and the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey required the Shepperton Studios
Shepperton Studios
Shepperton Studios is a film studio in Shepperton, Surrey, England with a history dating back to 1931 since when many notable films have been made there...
sound stages for their large capacity, the likes of which was unavailable in America. It was after filming the first two of these films in England and in the early planning stages of 2001 that Kubrick decided to settle there permanently.
Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate major controversy, as it adapted a highly controversial book
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
, by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
(already notorious as an "obscene" novel and a cause célèbre
Cause célèbre
A is an issue or incident arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning and heated public debate. The term is particularly used in connection with celebrated legal cases. It is a French phrase in common English use...
, given its theme) about an affair between a middle-aged professor named Humbert Humbert (James Mason
James Mason
James Neville Mason was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes .- Early life :Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the...
) and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. The difficult subject matter was referenced in the film's famous tagline
Tagline
A tagline is a variant of a branding slogan typically used in marketing materials and advertising. The idea behind the concept is to create a memorable phrase that will sum up the tone and premise of a brand or product , or to reinforce the audience's memory of a product...
, "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?"
Prior to its release, Kubrick realized that to get a Production Code
Production Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the...
seal, the screenplay would have to downplay the book's provocativeness by 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. James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited co-screenwriter of Lolita decided with Kubrick to raise Lolita's age. 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 sensual 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.
Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his own novel for the screen. The writer first produced a screenplay 400 pages long, which he then reduced to 200. Nabokov estimated that only 20% of his work made it into the final screenplay written by Kubrick. One of Kubrick's most notable changes from the book was to expand the character of Clare Quilty, played by Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE , known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr...
. Kubrick had the character of Quilty masquerade as various people, enabling Sellers to employ multiple accents, a talent Kubrick would employ again in Dr Strangelove in which Sellers played three separate roles.
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. Andrew Sarris panned it in The Village Voice for being miscast and too restrained; it was also poorly reviewed in London's The Observer and by Eric Rhode on BBC Television News. The film was highly praised by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, though she later became one of Kubrick's harshest critics. Recent reviews of the film in conjunction with its DVD release have been overwhelmingly positive. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay
Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay
The Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay is one of the Academy Awards, the most prominent film awards in the United States. It is awarded each year to the writer of a screenplay adapted from another source...
, and Sue Lyon
Sue Lyon
- Lolita :Sue Lyon was 14 years old when she was cast in the role of Dolores "Lolita" Haze, the sexually charged adolescent and the object of an older man's obsessions in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film, Lolita. She was chosen for the role partly because her curvy figure suggested an older adolescent...
, who played the title role, won a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer. Film critic Gene Youngblood
Gene Youngblood
Gene Youngblood is a theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His Expanded Cinema , the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly...
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."
Dr. Strangelove
Kubrick's next project, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), became a cult filmCult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
, especially famous for its anti-war message, and is now considered a classic. It is a satire on the hawkish American advocates of use of the atomic bomb, as embodied in the character of renegade General Jack D. Ripper, who leads an unauthorized nuclear attack on Russia. The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments which would become explosive only a few years after its release. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
called it 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 co-written by Kubrick and George, with contributions by American satirist Terry Southern
Terry Southern
Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...
. Red Alert is a serious, cautionary tale of accidental atomic war. However, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear conflict so absurd that the story became a sinister, macabre comedy. Once re-conceived, Kubrick recruited Terry Southern to polish the final screenplay.
Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE , known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr...
, who had played a pivotal part in Lolita and had appeared in several previous films in multiple roles, 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. Due to Sellers' relative obscurity in the US at the time, most American viewers did not initially realize he was playing three roles, all with very different accents and appearances. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing", but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and allowed Sellers to improvise. Strangelove earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
(1968). The film was conceived as a Cinerama
Cinerama
Cinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. It is also the trademarked name for the corporation which was formed to market it...
spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70
Super Panavision 70
Super Panavision 70 was the marketing brand name used to identify movies photographed with Panavision 70 mm spherical optics between 1959 and 1983.-History:...
. The $10,000,000 (U.S.) film was a massive production for its time. It is famous for its groundbreaking visual effects, minimal use of dialogue and its use of classical music instead of an original score. It was also noted for its scientific realism in depicting space flight as well as its slightly surreal and enigmatic narrative. The former was achieved through extensive consultation with NASA personnel who also helped design the look and feel of the spacecraft. Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti; it was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. Although not initially a critical and commercial success, the film became quickly popular with the counter-culture youth movement of the 1960s, who were especially enchanted by the "psychedelic" and mysterious nature of the film's closing sequence of astronaut David Bowman's journey through the "Stargate". The film's ambiguous ending continues to fascinate contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form; however, his subsequent films would still maintain some level of ambiguity.
Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel
The Sentinel (short story)
"The Sentinel" is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, which was expanded and modified into the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke expressed impatience with the common description of it as "the story on which 2001 is based." He was quoted as saying, it is like comparing "an acorn to...
". The visual effects were overseen by Kubrick and engineered by a team that included a young Douglas Trumbull
Douglas Trumbull
Douglas Huntley Trumbull is an American film director, special effects supervisor, and inventor. He contributed to, or was responsible for, the special photographic effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and The Tree of...
, who would become famous in his own right as an effects technician. Kubrick extensively used traveling matte
Matte (filmmaking)
Mattes are used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. Usually, mattes are used to combine a foreground image with a background image . In this case, the matte is the background painting...
photography to film space flight, a technique also used nine years later by George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
in making Star Wars
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
, although that film also used motion-control effects unavailable to Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of slit-scan photography
Slit-scan photography
The slit-scan photography technique is a photographic and cinematographic process where a moveable slide, into which a slit has been cut, is inserted between the camera and the subject to be photographed.-Use in cinematography:...
to film the Stargate sequence. The film also featured the most extensive use of front-screen projection
Front projection effect
A front projection effect is an in-camera visual effects process in film production for combining foreground performance with pre-filmed background footage...
to date in the Dawn of Man sequence, for which Kubrick designed a special high-resolution front-screen projector.
The film opened in widescreen Cinerama
Cinerama
Cinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. It is also the trademarked name for the corporation which was formed to market it...
and initially toured as a "roadshow" picture, with program booklets sold in the lobbies of the theatre. Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not an immediate hit. Initial criticism attacked the film's lack of dialogue, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. One of the film's few defenders was Penelope Gilliatt
Penelope Gilliatt
Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic....
, who called it (in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
) "some kind of a great film". However, word-of-mouth among young audiences (especially the 1960s counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
audience) made the film an eventual hit. Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award
Academy Award for Visual Effects
The Academy Award for Visual Effects is an Academy Award given for the best achievement in visual effects.-History of the award:The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences first recognized the technical contributions of special effects to movies at its inaugural dinner in 1928, presenting a...
Kubrick received was for supervising the film's special effects.
In spite of initial negative critical reaction, many today consider it among the greatest science fiction film
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...
s ever made, as well as one of the most influential. Steven Spielberg called it his generation's "big bang". It is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists.
A Clockwork Orange
After 2001, Kubrick initially attempted to make a film about the life of Napoleon. When financing fell through, Kubrick searched for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He settled on A Clockwork OrangeA Clockwork Orange (film)
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
(1971). His adaptation of Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
' novel of the same name
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 dystopian novella by Anthony Burgess. The novel contains an experiment in language: the characters often use an argot called "Nadsat", derived from Russian....
is an exploration of violence in human society. It takes place in a futuristic Great Britain that is both authoritarian and chaotic, and stars Malcolm McDowell
Malcolm McDowell
Malcolm McDowell is an English actor with a career spanning over forty years.McDowell is principally known for his roles in the controversial films If...., O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange and Caligula...
as Alex De Large, a hooligan who gleefully beats, robs, and rapes without remorse. After landing in prison, Alex undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment, known as the Ludovico technique
Ludovico technique
The Ludovico technique is a fictional aversion therapy from the novel A Clockwork Orange administered by Dr. Brodsky with the approval of the UK Minister of the Interior. It involved forcing a patient to watch, through the use of specula to hold the eyes open, violent images for long periods of...
, that inhibits his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. The movie hints that the promotion of the treatment is politically motivated, and Alex becomes a pawn in a political game. Kubrick's vision makes comparisons between the left and right ends of the political spectrum, with characters drawn from each extreme, ultimately suggesting that there is little difference between the two. He stated, "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 old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera" off a rooftop in order to achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted electronic music composer Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A...
to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer
Moog synthesizer
Moog synthesizer may refer to any number of analog synthesizers designed by Dr. Robert Moog or manufactured by Moog Music, and is commonly used as a generic term for older-generation analog music synthesizers. The Moog company pioneered the commercial manufacture of modular voltage-controlled...
. 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 it. As such, it was natural for Kubrick to continue the tradition begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey of using classical music in the score. In A Clockwork Orange, classical music accompanies scenes of violent mayhem and coercive sexuality. Both Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
(who generally disliked Kubrick's work after Lolita) 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."
The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence, and was issued with an X rating in the United States. It was released in the same year as Straw Dogs and Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American crime thriller produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first outing as San Francisco Police Department Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan....
, and the three films sparked a 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. 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. In early 1973, Kubrick re-released A Clockwork Orange to cinemas in the United States with footage modified so that it could get its rating reduced to an R. This enabled many more newspapers to advertise it, since in 1972 many newspapers had stopped carrying any advertising for X-rated films due to the new association of that rating with pornography. 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.
Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon is a 1975 British-American period romantic war film produced, written, and directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray which recounts the exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer...
, an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.-Biography:...
's The Luck of Barry Lyndon
The Luck of Barry Lyndon
The Luck of Barry Lyndon is a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in serial form in 1844, about a member of the Irish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy...
(also known as Barry Lyndon), a picaresque novel
Picaresque novel
The picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...
about the adventures and misadventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and social climber. The cinematography and lighting techniques Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon 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
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
. 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
The Chieftains
The Chieftains are a Grammy-winning Irish musical group founded in 1962, best known for being one of the first bands to make Irish traditional music popular around the world.-Name:...
) are combined with classical works from the period by Bach and others.
Reviewers such as Pauline Kael, who had been critical of Kubrick's previous work, 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
Rex Reed
Rex Taylor Reed is an American film critic and former co-host of the syndicated television show At the Movies. He currently writes the column "On the Town with Rex Reed" for The New York Observer.-Life and career:...
and Richard Schickel
Richard Schickel
Richard Warren Schickel is an American author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He is a film critic for Time magazine, having also written for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review....
. TIME magazine published a cover story about the film, and Kubrick was nominated for three Academy Awards. The film as a whole was nominated for seven Academy Awards
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
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. The French journal of film criticism, Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
, included Barry Lyndon at 67 on its top 100 list of all-time films. As with most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndons reputation has grown through the years, particularly among filmmakers. Director Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
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
Museo del Prado
The Museo del Prado is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It features one of the world's finest collections of European art, from the 12th century to the early 19th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection, and unquestionably the best single collection of...
without lunch."
In 1976, production designer Ken Adam
Ken Adam
Sir Kenneth Adam, OBE, born Klaus Hugo Adam , is a motion picture production designer most famous for his set designs for the James Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s.-Childhood in Germany:...
, who had worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, asked Kubrick to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios
Pinewood Studios
Pinewood Studios is a major British film studio situated in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, approximately west of central London. The studios have played host to many productions over the years from huge blockbuster films to television shows to commercials to pop promos.The purchase of Shepperton...
to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built and prepared for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me
The Spy Who Loved Me (film)
The Spy Who Loved Me is a spy film, the tenth film in the James Bond series, and the third to star Roger Moore as the fictional secret agent James Bond. It was directed by Lewis Gilbert and the screenplay was written by Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum...
. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement. The agreement was honored until after Kubrick's death in 1999, when in 2000 it was revealed by Adam in a documentary on the making of The Spy Who Loved Me.
The Shining
The Shining (film)
The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. A writer, Jack Torrance, takes a job as an...
, released in 1980, was adapted from the novel
The Shining (novel)
The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. The title was inspired by the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!", which contained the line "We all shine on…". It was King's third published novel, and first hardback bestseller, and the success of the book firmly established King...
of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
. The film stars Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...
as Jack Torrance, a failed writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel. He lives there with his wife, Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall
Shelley Duvall
Shelley Alexis Duvall is an American film and television actress best known for her roles in The Shining, Popeye, Thieves Like Us and 3 Women....
) and their young son, Danny (played by Danny Lloyd
Danny Lloyd
Danny Lloyd is an American former child actor.Lloyd's first and best-known role is that of Danny Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall....
), who is gifted with a form of telepathy
Telepathy
Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...
. As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awaken, driving Jack into a homicidal psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
.
In order to convey the claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam
Steadicam
A Steadicam is a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera that mechanically isolates it from the operator's movement, allowing a smooth shot even when moving quickly over an uneven surface...
, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track was impractical. Although used for some scenes in a few previous motion pictures, Garrett Brown, Steadicam's inventor, was closely involved with this production and regarded it as the first picture to fully employ the new system's potential. More than any of his other films, The Shining gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a perfectionist
Perfectionism (psychology)
Perfectionism, in psychology, is a belief that a state of completeness and flawlessness can and should be attained. In its pathological form, perfectionism is a belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable...
. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet of film were shot). This process was particularly difficult for actress Shelley Duvall
Shelley Duvall
Shelley Alexis Duvall is an American film and television actress best known for her roles in The Shining, Popeye, Thieves Like Us and 3 Women....
, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
.
The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." 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 Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
’s Psycho (1960), William Friedkin
William Friedkin
William Friedkin is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director...
’s The Exorcist
The Exorcist (film)
The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film directed by William Friedkin, adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty and based on the exorcism case of Robbie Mannheim, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her...
(1973), and other horror classics. Much of its imagery, such as the elevator shaft disgorging blood and the ghost girls in the hallway are among the most recognizable and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film, as are the lines "Redrum" and "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" as well as "Here's Johnny!". 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.
Full Metal Jacket
Seven years later, Kubrick made his next film, Full Metal JacketFull Metal Jacket
Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 war film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is an adaptation of the 1979 novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford and stars Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Arliss Howard and Adam Baldwin. The film follows a platoon of U.S...
(1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford
Gustav Hasford
Gustav Hasford was an American writer. His semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers was the basis of the film Full Metal Jacket.-Biography:...
's Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
novel The Short-Timers
The Short-Timers
The Short-Timers is a 1979 semi-autobiographical novel by American former Marine Gustav Hasford,about his experience in the Vietnam War. It was later adapted into the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket by Hasford, Michael Herr, and Stanley Kubrick....
. 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."
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
Platoon (film)
Platoon is a 1986 American war film written and directed by Oliver Stone and stars Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen. It is the first of Stone's Vietnam War trilogy, followed by 1989's Born on the Fourth of July and 1993's Heaven & Earth....
and Hamburger Hill
Hamburger Hill
Hamburger Hill is a 1987 American war film about the actual assault of the U.S. Army's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, part of the 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division 'Screaming Eagles', on a well-fortified position, including trenchworks and bunkers, of the North Vietnamese Army on Ap Bia...
, 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. As actor Adam Baldwin put it "When you think of Vietnam, it's natural to imagine jungles. But this story is about urban warfare". Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. R. Lee Ermey
R. Lee Ermey
Ronald Lee Ermey is a retired United States Marine Corps drill instructor and actor.Ermey has often played the roles of authority figures, such as his breakout performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, Mayor Tilman in the Alan Parker film Mississippi Burning, Bill Bowerman in...
served as the film's technical adviser in addition to his acting duties.
Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews upon its release, but nonetheless found a reasonably large audience, despite being overshadowed by Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, for which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. His work frequently focuses on...
's Platoon
Platoon (film)
Platoon is a 1986 American war film written and directed by Oliver Stone and stars Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen. It is the first of Stone's Vietnam War trilogy, followed by 1989's Born on the Fourth of July and 1993's Heaven & Earth....
and Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...
's Heartbreak Ridge
Heartbreak Ridge
Heartbreak Ridge is a 1986 American war film, starring Clint Eastwood and Mario Van Peebles, surrounding the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, West Indies. A portion of the movie was filmed on the island itself....
. As with Kubrick's other films, its critical status has increased immensely since its initial release.
Eyes Wide Shut
Kubrick's final film was Eyes Wide ShutEyes Wide Shut
Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle . The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, and was his last film. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually-charged adventures of Dr...
(1999), starring Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV , better known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and he has won three Golden Globe Awards....
and Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Mary Kidman, AC is an American-born Australian actress, singer, film producer, spokesmodel, and humanitarian. After starring in a number of small Australian films and TV shows, Kidman's breakthrough was in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm...
as a wealthy Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler
Arthur Schnitzler
Dr. Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian author and dramatist.- Biography :Arthur Schnitzler, son of a prominent Hungarian-Jewish laryngologist Johann Schnitzler and Luise Markbreiter , was born in Praterstraße 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian...
's Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story
Dream Story
Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, also known as Dream Story, is a 1926 novella by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. It details the thoughts and psychological transformations of Doctor Fridolin over a two-day period. In this short time, he meets many people who give a clue to the world Schnitzler is...
in English), which Kubrick moved from 1920s Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
to New York City in the 1990s. The film's theme has been described by actor Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...
as delving into questions on the "dangers of married life," and the "silent desperations of keeping an ongoing relationship alive".
Kubrick's wife noted his long-standing interest in the project, saying "over the years he would see friends getting divorced and remarried, and the topic [of the film] would come up." She knew that this was a subject he wanted to make into a film. Co-star Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Mary Kidman, AC is an American-born Australian actress, singer, film producer, spokesmodel, and humanitarian. After starring in a number of small Australian films and TV shows, Kidman's breakthrough was in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm...
observed that "Stanley's expectations of people were not really high," although she also saw that his wife, to whom he had been married for over 41 years, "was the love of his life. He would talk about her, he adored her, something that people didn't know. His daughters adored them . . . I would see that, and he would talk about them very proudly." Nicholson agrees that "Stanley was very much a family man."
Although Kubrick was almost seventy years of age, he worked relentlessly for 15 months in order to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16, 1999. He worked 18 hours a day, all the while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film. Press releases were sent to the media, stating briefly that "Stanley Kubrick's next film will be Eyes Wide Shut, a story of jealousy and sexual obsession . . . "Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. Kubrick sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release, but his sudden death on March 7, 1999 came a few days after he finished editing, and he never saw the final version when it was released to the public.
Biographer Michel Ciment
Michel Ciment
Michel Ciment is a French film critic and the editor of the cinema magazine Positif. Ciment is a Chevalier of the Order of Merit, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, and the president of FIPRESCI...
believes that "he literally worked himself to death," trying to complete the film to his liking. Ciment explains that Kubrick's desire to keep this, and many of his earlier films, private and unpublicized during its production, was an expression of Kubrick's "will to power," and not a penchant for secrecy: "Kubrick felt, quite rightly, that the public generally knows far too much about a film before it opens and that the surrounding media frenzy made the joy of surprise and pleasure of discovery impossible."
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Mary Kidman, AC is an American-born Australian actress, singer, film producer, spokesmodel, and humanitarian. After starring in a number of small Australian films and TV shows, Kidman's breakthrough was in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm...
explains that while some critics describe the film's theme as "dark," in essence "it is a very hopeful film." During one interview in the documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a 2001 documentary about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, made by his long-time assistant and brother-in-law Jan Harlan...
, she states that Kubrick was indirectly stressing the moral values of "commitment and loyalty," adding that "ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut is about that commitment." Sidney Pollack, who acted in the film, adds that "the heart of [the film] was illustrating a truth about relationships and sexuality. But it was not illustrated in a literal way, but in a theatrical way." Michel Ciment agrees with Kidman, and likewise notes the positive meaning underlying the film, pointing out how some of it is voiced through the dialog, and suggests that the words "resonate like an epitaph" to Kubrick:
Death
On March 7, 1999—four days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family, Tom CruiseTom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV , better known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and he has won three Golden Globe Awards....
, Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Mary Kidman, AC is an American-born Australian actress, singer, film producer, spokesmodel, and humanitarian. After starring in a number of small Australian films and TV shows, Kidman's breakthrough was in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm...
, and Warner Bros. executives, Kubrick passed away in his sleep from a heart attack at the age of 70. He was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor
Childwickbury Manor
Childwick Bury Manor is a manor in Hertfordshire, England, between St Albans and Harpenden. Previous owners were the Lomax family who bought the house in 1666 and who lived there until 1854 when Joshua Lomax sold it to Henry Hayman Toulmin, a wealthy ship owner and High Sheriff of Hertfordshire and...
, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...
, England, U.K. Following his death, several directors and actors discussed their experiences with Kubrick. Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
said in a 1999 interview that Dr. Strangelove made him forget about being drafted into the Army.
Unrealized projects
Kubrick both developed and was offered several film ideas which never saw completion. The most notable of these were an epic biopic of Napoleon and a Holocaust-themed film entitled Aryan Papers. When the film rights to Tolkien's The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
were sold to United Artists, The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
approached Kubrick to direct them in a film based on the books, but Kubrick told John Lennon he felt the story was unfilmable.
Projects completed by others
In 1956, Kubrick was announced as director of Gun's Up, the working title for the production of Charles Neider's novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones to be produced by Marlon BrandoMarlon Brando
Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St...
. Shortly after this announcement, the name of the film was changed to One-Eyed Jacks
One-Eyed Jacks
One-Eyed Jacks, a 1961 Western, is the only film directed by actor Marlon Brando, who also played its lead character, Rio.The film was originally to be directed by Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah...
. On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of One-Eyed Jacks so that he could begin production on Lolita. In 1960 he expanded on his reasoning, telling an interviewer: "When I left Brando's picture, it still didn't have a finished script. It had just become obvious to me that Brando wanted to direct the movie. I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando, to see that nobody shot him down." The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando and released in 1961.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE is an English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society...
on an expansion of his short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
"Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" is a short story by British science fiction author Brian Aldiss, first published in 1969. The story deals with humanity in an age of intelligent machines, and of the aching loneliness endemic in an overpopulated future where child creation is controlled.- Plot :The...
" into a three-act film. It was a futuristic fairy-tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a child, and his efforts to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar to Pinocchio. Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his. In 1999, 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. The film was released in June 2001. It 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 psychiatry. In addition, John Williams
John Williams
John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T...
' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.
Influences
Alexander Walker, in his book Stanley Kubrick Directs, notes that Kubrick often mentioned Max Ophüls as an influence on his moving camera, especially the tracking shots in Paths of Glory. His "fascination with the fluid camera" of Ophuls, writes critic Gene D. PhillipsGene D. Phillips
Gene D. Phillips is an American author, educator, and Catholic priest. Phillips has been a prolific author of biographical books on filmmakers, and has published extended interviews with many filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, and Joseph Losey.Phillips was raised...
, was also used effectively in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick described this effect in discussing Ophuls' films le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madam De: "the camera went through every wall and every floor." He once named Ophüls' Le Plaisir his favorite film. However, Ophüls himself derived this technique from his early work as assistant with director Anatole Litvak
Anatole Litvak
Anatole Litvak was a Ukrainian-born filmmaker who wrote, directed, and produced films in a various countries and languages...
in the 1930s, whose own cinematography style is described as "replete with the camera trackings, pans and swoops which later became the trademark of Max Ophuls."
Geoffrey Cocks sees the influence of Ophüls as going beyond this to include a sensibility drawn to stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men. Critic Robert Kolker sees evident influence of Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
on the same moving camera shots, while biographer Vincent LeBrutto states that Kubrick consciously identified with Welles. LeBrutto sees much influence of Welles' style on Kubrick's The Killing, "the multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus" and on the style of the closing credits of Paths of Glory, and Quentin Curtis in The Daily Telegraph describes Welles as "[Kubrick's] great influence, in composition and camera movement." One particular film of John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle, sufficiently impressed Kubrick as to persuade him he wanted to cast Sterling Hayden in his first major feature The Killing.
Walker states that Kubrick never acknowledged Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
as an influence on him, but holds that Lang's interests are analogous to Kubrick's with regard to an interest in myth and "the Teutonic unconscious". Michael Herr's memoir Kubrick states that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst. In particular Pabst had for several decades also considered adapting Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, the basis of Eyes Wide Shut, although Pabst had been unable to come up with a suitable approach.
As a young man, Kubrick also was fascinated by the films of Russian filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Kubrick also as a young man read Pudovkin’s seminal theoretical work, Film Technique which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, which needs to be effectively employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest. Kubrick recommended this work to others for years to come. Thomas Nelson describes this book as "the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick's] private aesthetics".
Russian documentary film maker Pavel Klushantsev
Pavel Klushantsev
Pavel Vladimirovich Klushantsev was a Russian film director, producer, screenwriter and author who worked during the Soviet Era. A self-taught special effects engineer, far ahead of his time, Klushantsev devised many effects and techniques used by major motion pictures for decades to...
made a groundbreaking film in the 1950s entitled Road to the Stars, which is believed to have significantly influenced Kubrick's technique in 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly with regard to its accurate depiction of weightlessness and rotating space station. Indeed Encyclopedia Astronautica describes some scenes from 2001 as a "shot-for-shot duplication of Road to the Stars". Specific comparisons of shots from the two films have been analyzed by filmmaker Alessandro Cima. A 1994 issue of American Cinematographer states "When Stanley Kubrick made 2001: a Space Odyssey in 1968, he claimed to have been first to fly actor/astronauts on wires with the camera on the ground, shooting vertically while the actor's body covered the wires" but observes that Klushantsev had actually preceded him in this.
Kubrick was also a great admirer of the films of Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and...
, Vittorio De Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
, Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
, and Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
, but the degree of their influence on his own style has not been assessed. In an early interview with Horizon magazine in the late 1950s, Kubrick stated, "I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them."
Late in life, Kubrick became enamored with the works of David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
, being particularly fascinated by Lynch's first major film Eraserhead
Eraserhead
Eraserhead is a 1977 American surrealist film and the first feature film of David Lynch, who wrote, produced and directed. Lynch began working on the film at the AFI Conservatory, which gave him a $10,000 grant to make the film after he had begun working there following his 1971 move to Los Angeles...
, which he asked cast members of The Shining to watch to establish the mood he wanted to convey.
Technique
For Kubrick, written dialogue was one element to be put in balance with mise en scèneMise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
(set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin
Vsevolod Pudovkin
Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin was a Russian and Soviet film director, screenwriter and actor who developed influential theories of montage...
'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 re-shooting 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.
Writing style
Kubrick wrote or co-authored the screenplays to all of his films except for Fear and Desire (his first film) and Spartacus, but always adapted his screenplays from previously existing novels (except for Killer's Kiss). However, Kubrick was noted for often making moderate changes in characterization or plot structure which greatly altered the tone of the story. Notable changes from the source material in Kubrick's films include:1. In Lolita, Kubrick omits all mention of Professor Humbert's previous infatuation with underage girls, makes the character of Lolita much older, and greatly expands the role of Clare Quilty, a much more perverse child molester than Humbert. This has the effect of making Humbert far more sympathetic. As a result of all three of these changes, Greg Jenkins writes "A story originally told from the edge of a moral abyss is fast moving toward safer ground"
2. Kubrick converted Peter George's straight Cold War thriller Red Alert into his macabre black comedy Dr. Strangelove and gave it an entirely different conclusion. He began to see comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction
Mutual assured destruction
Mutual Assured Destruction, or mutually assured destruction , is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two opposing sides would effectively result in the complete, utter and irrevocable annihilation of...
as he wrote the first draft, saying:
3. In A Clockwork Orange Kubrick made the writer victimized by Alex, F. Alexander, an elderly man speaking standard English, while in the book he is a very young political activist, who speaks the same odd slang as Alex and his droogs. In Burgess' novel, Mr. F. Alexander is a contemporary of Alex, while in Kubrick's film he is a contemporary of the Minister of the Interior whose legislation initiates the use of the brainwashing Ludovico technique
Ludovico technique
The Ludovico technique is a fictional aversion therapy from the novel A Clockwork Orange administered by Dr. Brodsky with the approval of the UK Minister of the Interior. It involved forcing a patient to watch, through the use of specula to hold the eyes open, violent images for long periods of...
.
4. The most discussed change in The Shining (and certainly the one most objected to by author Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
) is Kubrick's omission of Jack Torrance's return to sanity at the end of the novel, and relatively sympathetic character at the opening of the story. Kubrick also cut all hints that the hotel is itself sentient, while adding the element that the hotel was built on a Native American burial ground. The most famous scenes in the film, such as the revelation of the contents of Jack's book, the apparition of the twins in the hallway, Jack's encounter with the ghost of the dead woman in Room 237, and the chase through the hedge-maze have no counterpart in King's novel. Critic Mark Browning concludes that the King novel is about a haunted house, but Kubrick's film is about a haunted man.
5. In adapting The Short-Timers into Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick expanded the material set in boot camp, which is about 20% of the novel, into fully half of the film. Many viewers find this early material the most memorable in the film. Richard Jenkins believes this is consistent with Kubrick's general desire to explode the standard narrative conventions of film, as this results in the film appearing to be two short stories with the same characters told back-to-back.
6. In adapting Traumnovelle into Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick shifted the story from Vienna in the 1900s to New York City in the 1990s. In the novel, the husband and wife are Jews in a very conservative and anti-Semitic city, while in the film the husband is a fairly conventional WASP upper-middle-class professional in contemporary New York City. In the novel, the secret society upon which the husband stumbles is quite small, whereas in the film it encompasses a large section of the city's social elite. Kubrick has also significantly altered both the events at the mansion party and in the wife's dream as to notably change the tenor and mood of the story. Critic Randy Rasmussen suggests that the character of Bill is fundamentally more naïve, strait-laced, less disclosing and more unconscious of his vindictive motives than his counterpart, Fridolin.
In a book-length study of how Kubrick adapts novels to the screen, writer Greg Jenkins derives the following generalizations about Kubrick's screenplays:
1. Regardless of how a novel may begin, Kubrick launches his adaptation of it with a heavily visual sequence that immediately and purposefully seizes our attention.
2. Where it suits his purpose, Kubrick expunges parts of the original, including some characters, episodes, and swatches of dialogue.
3. Addressing himself to the portion of the narrative that remains, Kubrick distorts, reorders, and conflates many of its components.
4. Although skilled with words, Kubrick is equally skilled with and devoted to images, and he tells his stories as visually as possible.
5. In general, Kubrick lowers the amount and intensity of violence found in the original.
6. As Kubrick remakes the original narrative, he tends, with some exceptions, to simplify it.
7. Kubrick makes his heroes more virtuous than the novels' and his villains more wicked.
8. Predominately, Kubrick imbues his films with a morality that is more conventional than the novels'.
9. Kubrick's films are more obviously laced with moments of moderate-to-high drama than are the source materials.
10. From time to time, though it countervails his mainly reductive thrust, Kubrick expands one or more aspects of the original narrative.
11. Now and then, Kubrick invents his own material outright, and imposes it on the new narrative.
Trademark characteristics
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 SentinelThe Sentinel (short story)
"The Sentinel" is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, which was expanded and modified into the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke expressed impatience with the common description of it as "the story on which 2001 is based." He was quoted as saying, it is like comparing "an acorn to...
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 voice-over 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 in the wake of the advent of long closing credits in the 1970s. (Disney films, for example, stopped using "The End" in 1984). However, Kubrick continued to put it at the end of the credits in every one of his films, long after the rest of the film industry stopped using it. On the other hand, Kubrick occasionally dispensed with opening credits (in A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange), long before it became commonplace—as had Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
in Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...
and Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
in Fantasia
Fantasia (film)
Fantasia is a 1940 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and released by Walt Disney Productions. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are...
before him and George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
and Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
would later do, most notably in Star Wars
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
and Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
. Kubrick's 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, but sometimes alternative material was shot for international releases—in The Shining, the text on the typewriter pages was re-shot for the countries in which the film was released; in Eyes Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages. Kubrick always personally supervised the foreign voice-dubbing and the actual script translation into foreign languages for all of his films. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice translations have been produced for any of the films he had control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only subtitles are used for translation.
Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of his films except Full Metal Jacket used mostly pre-recorded classical music, in two cases electronically altered by Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A...
. 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.
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, although Ebert does not think there is any deep meaning to these shots. Lobrutto's biography of Kubrick notes that his director of photography, Doug Milsome, coined the phrase the "Kubrick crazy stare". The connection of this stare with psychoanalysis is often made through the concept of "The Gaze
Gaze
Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...
" and its implications in visual culture. Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls.
Critic and Kubrick biographer Alexander Walker has noted Kubrick's repeated "corridor" compositions, of which two particularly well-known ones are the StarGate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the extensive use of the hotel corridors in The Shining.
Almost all Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a bathroom. (The more frequently cited example of this in 2001 is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route to the moon, rather than David Bowman's exploration [while still wearing his spacesuit] of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom after his journey through the StarGate.)
Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, often playing on the set of his films. Chess appears as a motif or a plot device in three of his films, The Killing, Lolita, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mario Falsetto believes that the marble floor in the room of the prisoner's trial in Paths of Glory is deliberately chosen to represent a chess board, with prisoners as "pawns in the game".
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.
Kubrick often employed the use of music as a "black joke" to achieve a chilling, ironic effect (one now often employed by Quentin Tarantino) by incongruously combining mismatched moods and styles. Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
was arguably the innovator of this musical technique during his Neo-Classic period (1920s to the 1950s), but it was Kubrick who extended this idea to the big screen. This gives the intended emotional impact of a scene even more power. Brief examples of this include Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Dame Vera Lynn, DBE is an English singer-songwriter and actress whose musical recordings and performances were enormously popular during World War II. During the war she toured Egypt, India and Burma, giving outdoor concerts for the troops...
singing We'll Meet Again
We'll Meet Again
"We'll Meet Again" is a 1939 song made famous by British singer Vera Lynn, and it also may refer to:* We'll Meet Again , a musical starring Lynn that includes the song...
in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove (during a nuclear holocaust), using some older classical music for the futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and using Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly
Eugene Curran "Gene" Kelly was an American dancer, actor, singer, film director and producer, and choreographer...
's Singin’ in the Rain
Singin' in the Rain (song)
"Singin' In the Rain" is a song with lyrics by Arthur Freed and music by Nacio Herb Brown, published in 1929. However, it is unclear exactly when the song was written with some claiming that the song was written and performed as early as 1927. The song was listed as Number 3 on AFI's 100 Years.....
for the end credits in the dystopian world of A Clockwork Orange, and light pop music in Full Metal Jacket.
The use of long takes, while not an unknown technique before Kubrick, became known in the film community as a "Kubrickian" trademark—for instance the extended tricycle-riding sequence in The Shining or the long pullback from Alex's face at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange.
Themes
Through his films, Kubrick often addressed concern with the over-mechanization of society which, in its attempt to create a safe environment, creates an artificial sterility that breeds the very evils it tries to exclude. Multiple critics have noted that Kubrick's earlier films have more straightforward linear narrative while the later films are moderately and subtly surreal reflecting a sense of social dislocation and confusion. The emotional distance Kubrick maintains from many of his characters have caused critics to see Kubrick as a cold and detached rationalist, while the recurrence of strongly psychopathic characters from Alex DeLarge to Jack Torrance in his films have caused many to view Kubrick's outlook as deeply pessimistic. In his book Nihilism in Film and Television, Kevin L. Stoehr writes "If there is one film director whose movies express consistently, in terms of both form and content, the pervasive dangers and creative opportunities of nihilism in contemporary culture, that filmmaker is the late Stanley Kubrick". A frequently recurring observation on the Kubrick film that Spielberg completed A.I is that it uneasily meshes Spielberg's rosy optimistic outlook with Kubrick's pessimistic one, although one reviewer wrote “[Spielberg] has done a remarkable job in balancing Kubrick's pessimism with his optimism without having one overcrowd the other”.Newspaper obituaries of Kubrick, the Encyclopædia Britannica and Vincent LoBrutto's biography of the director (which was spoken of approvingly by Kubrick's wife) all characterize Kubrick broadly as pessimistic. Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote: “if Mr. Kubrick's misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity.” So also did Kubrick's most severe critic, Pauline Kael. The charge was repeated in reviews of the multi-film DVD boxed set of his films in 2007, a New Jersey film critic writing “And yet preserved too – like an ugly insect trapped in amber – are some of the artist's most problematic qualities, including a bitter pessimism, a cruel humor and an almost godlike superiority that often viewed other people – and particularly women – as little more than impediments." A pessimistic streak was found in essays collected in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, one of which characterizes Eyes Wide Shut as “a kind of Sartrean pessimism about our inevitable dissatisfaction with romantic love.”
Not all critics agree with this assessment. Other essays in the same anthology find Eyes Wide Shut to be largely optimistic. James Naremore in On Kubrick characterizes Kubrick as a modernist in the tradition of Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
and Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
with their distrust of mass society. As such, Naremore notes that Kubrick's detachment from his subjects does not make him a dour pessimist, although Kubrick does often dwell on “the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality”. Peter Kramer's study of 2001 argues it is meant to counterweight the pessimism of Kubrick's previous Dr. Strangelove.
Some view Kubrick's pessimism as either at least overstated by others or even more apparent than real, an impression created by Kubrick's refusal of any bland or cheap optimism, refusal to make films that conform to conventional ideas of a spectacle, and a desire to employ films as a wake-up call to humanity to understand its capacity for evil. The editors of The Kubrick Site note that Kubrick avoids cinematically conventional ways of structuring stories. This does indeed create for many viewers a sense of emotionless detachment from the human subjects as noted above. For example, Kubrick often prefers lengthy dialogue scenes shot from one camera angle with no cutting. But the editors of TKS believe this is done in order to establish a life of characters beyond dialogue which "helps to reveal, in the spaces and silences, some of the emotional nature permeating the film's world" as well as a realistic sense of the characters' situatedness in time and society. Kubrick's focus is not just on individual characters but on the larger society around them and how it affects their motivation, often in negative ways. The authors also stress that however bleak Kubrick's outlook (intermittently) is, he is not a misanthrope.
A recent outspoken dissenter from pessimistic readings of Kubrick is author Julian Rice, a scholar of Native American literature. His book Kubrick's Hope argues that although there is a powerful vision of evil in Kubrick, there is vision of redemption and goodness in Kubrick's films stronger than often initially recognized, a vision focused both on family feeling and access to the sublime depths of the subconscious beyond superficial socialization. However, Rice has been alleged to misrepresent the work of prior Kubrick film scholars, particularly with reference to just how pessimistic or misanthropic they actually think Kubrick's films are.
Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
, himself a noted cinematic optimist and close personal friend of Kubrick, expressed a similar view of Kubrick. Going against the grain of the view that Kubrick's films are misanthropic and pessimistic, Spielberg in a tribute to Kubrick at the 71st Academy awards said: "He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we're transported directly to his world, and we're inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy." Kubrick himself denied that he was a pessimist, and summarized his views in a 1968 interview with Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
Frequent and memorable collaborators
Kubrick did not generally reuse actors on film after film in the manner of John FordJohn Ford
John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...
, Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
, or Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
. However, Kubrick did on several occasions work with the same actor more than once. In lead roles, Sterling Hayden appeared 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
Joe Turkel
Joe Turkel is an American character actor. He is credited in several films as Joseph Turkel.-Background:Turkel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and served in the U.S. Military during World War II. He currently lives in southern California, and has been involved in writing screenplays.-Career:His...
appears in The Killing, Paths of Glory, and The Shining, Philip Stone
Philip Stone
Philip Stone was an English actor.He was born Philip Stones in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Stone appeared in three successive Stanley Kubrick films: playing the central character's "Dad" in A Clockwork Orange , "Graham" in Barry Lyndon and as "Delbert Grady," the original caretaker in The Shining...
appears in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, Leonard Rossiter
Leonard Rossiter
Leonard Rossiter was an English actor known for his roles as Rupert Rigsby, in the British comedy television series Rising Damp , and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin...
is featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon, while Timothy Carey
Timothy Carey
Timothy Agoglia Carey was an American film and television actor....
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
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
) having roles of various lengths in each film.
Although Kubrick had a reputation as a non-collaborative and controlling director, he atypically allowed actors Peter Sellers (in both Lolita and Dr. Strangelove) and R. Lee Ermey (in Full Metal Jacket) to freely improvise most of their own dialogue.
]
Photographer Dmitri Kasterine, himself regarded as "one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Britain from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s", began a long association with Kubrick in 1964 when he began shooting stills during filming of Dr Strangelove and later for 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kasterine was commissioned to take portraits of Kubrick for publications including the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Harpers & Queen and a variety of his work was published in The Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and The New York Times. Though Kubrick was noted for keeping his production sets extremely private by banning uninvited visitors, Kasterine was allowed onto the sets of numerous Kubrick films to shoot both candid and posed photos. In 2010 and 2011, many of his Kubrick photos were on display for the first time in the United Kingdom at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Four writers who co-authored screenplays with Kubrick subsequently wrote memoirs of their experience working with him. Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
's The Lost Worlds of 2001 traces all the intermediate versions of the story from first draft to final project. Diane Johnson
Diane Johnson
Diane Johnson is an American-born novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living abroad in contemporary France....
published an essay about her experience collaborating with Kubrick and has discussed it frequently in both lectures and interviews. Michael Herr
Michael Herr
Michael Herr is a writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches , a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine during the Vietnam War...
, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Full Metal Jacket wrote a book simply titled Kubrick which covers not only his collaboration on the film, but also his friendship with the director over the last 20 years of his life. Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael
Frederic Raphael
Frederic Michael Raphael is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist.-Life and career:...
, wrote a notoriously unflattering memoir of Kubrick entitled Eyes Wide Open which has been denounced by Kubrick's family, notably on Christianne Kubrick's website. Similarly, Diane Johnson has stated
Two authors of studies of Kubrick's films, Alexander Walker and Michel Ciment, worked closely with Kubrick on their books, with Kubrick personally providing the authors with many production photos and film stills and crucial information about the production of his films. Walker's book Stanley Kubrick, Director saw both a 1972 (entitled Stanley Kubrick Directs) and a 2000 edition, and Michel Ciment's book Stanley Kubrick saw both a 1980 and 2003 edition (the latter called Stanley Kubrick- The Definitive Edition)
One of Kubrick's longest collaborations was with Leon Vitali
Leon Vitali
Leon Vitali is an English actor, best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, most notably as Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon.- Biography :...
, 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 also appeared 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 co-star Todd Field
Todd Field
William Todd Field, known professionally as Todd Field is an American actor and writer/director. He has received three Academy Award nominations.-Background and personal life:...
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 KubrickChristiane Kubrick
Christiane Kubrick is a German actress, dancer, painter and singer. She was born into a theatrical family, and was the wife of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick from 1958 until his death in 1999.-Biography:...
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.
Legacy
Kubrick made only thirteen feature films in his life, comparatively low in number compared to contemporaries, due to his meticulous dedication to every aspect of film production. A number of his films are recognized as seminal classics within their genre.Cinematography techniques
Among Kubrick's notable innovations in filmmaking technique are his use of special effects in cinematography. For 2001: A Space Odyssey, he made innovative uses of both slit-scan photographySlit-scan photography
The slit-scan photography technique is a photographic and cinematographic process where a moveable slide, into which a slit has been cut, is inserted between the camera and the subject to be photographed.-Use in cinematography:...
and front-screen projection
Front projection effect
A front projection effect is an in-camera visual effects process in film production for combining foreground performance with pre-filmed background footage...
. Previously used to create image distortions or blurriness, slit-scan was used by Kubrick to create sophisticated animation for the StarGate sequence. This earned Kubrick his only personal Oscar, awarded for special effects. Although front projection had been used earlier, Space Odyssey was its first use on a large scale, and Kubrick employed a specially built 8x10 projector for the Dawn of Man sequence, as he did not believe that matting or rear-projection would create a sufficiently realistic effect.
Kubrick also made innovative use of Zeiss camera lenses for photographing scenes lit only by actual candlelight in Barry Lyndon. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick relates how he felt that most films containing candle-lit scenes look phony, due to the artificial light flickering off-camera. Kubrick wanted the more authentic look of 19th-century paintings.
Kubrick was also among the first to use the then-revolutionary Steadicam
Steadicam
A Steadicam is a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera that mechanically isolates it from the operator's movement, allowing a smooth shot even when moving quickly over an uneven surface...
in The Shining to allow smooth stabilized tracking with the camera in motion, without the use of a dolly limiting the camera's point of view. The inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown
Garrett Brown
Garrett Brown is an American cinematographer, best known as the inventor of the Steadicam. Brown's invention allows cameramen to film while walking without the normal shaking and jostles of a handheld camera...
, became heavily involved with the production, as he believed The Shining was the first film to fully realize the Steadicam's full potential, going well beyond "stunt shots and staircases".
After Kubrick, the use of slit-scan to create animation effects was employed in the credits sequence to Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
. Front-screen projection has been used in James Bond and Superman films, and the Steadicam has been employed in Star Wars films.
Industry response
Leading directors, including Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
, Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
, James Cameron
James Cameron
James Francis Cameron is a Canadian-American film director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, environmentalist and inventor...
, Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
, Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil , The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , The Fisher King , and 12 Monkeys...
, the Coen brothers
Coen Brothers
Joel David Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers...
, Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
, and George A. Romero
George A. Romero
George Andrew Romero is a Canadian-American film director, screenwriter and editor, best known for his gruesome and satirical horror films about a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. He is nicknamed "Godfather of all Zombies." -Life and career:...
, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. On the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, Steven Spielberg, in an interview, comments on Kubrick that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history" but the way that Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese notes that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released. Then came a dawning recognition that they were masterful works unlike any other films. Perhaps most notably, Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
, one of Kubrick’s greatest personal influences and all-time favorite directors, famously said that: “Among those whom I would call “younger generation” Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.”
Many directors have mentioned Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films: Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater
-Early life:Linklater was born in Houston, Texas. He studied at Sam Houston State University and left midway through his stint in college to work on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. While working on the rig he read a lot of literature, but on land he developed a love of film through...
, Sam Mendes
Sam Mendes
Samuel Alexander "Sam" Mendes, CBE is an English stage and film director. He is best known for his Academy Award-winning work on his debut film American Beauty and his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret , Oliver! , Company and Gypsy . He's currently working on the 23rd James Bond...
, Joel Schumacher
Joel Schumacher
Joel T. Schumacher is an American film director, screenwriter and producer.-Early life:Schumacher was born in New York City, the son of Marian and Francis Schumacher. His mother was a Swedish Jew, and his father was a Baptist from Knoxville, Tennessee, who died when Joel was four years old...
, Taylor Hackford
Taylor Hackford
Taylor Edwin Hackford is an American film director, and the current president of the Directors Guild of America.-Early life:Hackford was born in Santa Barbara, California, the son of Mary , a waitress, and Joseph Hackford...
. and Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky is an American film director, screenwriter and film producer. He attended Harvard University to study film theory and the American Film Institute to study both live-action and animation filmmaking...
.
Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan
Christopher Jonathan James Nolan is a British-American film director, screenwriter and producer.He received serious notice after his second feature Memento , which he wrote and directed based on a story idea by his brother, Jonathan Nolan. Jonathan went to co-write later scripts with him,...
, David Fincher
David Fincher
David Andrew Leo Fincher is an American film and music video director. Known for his dark and stylish thrillers, such as Seven , The Game , Fight Club , Panic Room , and Zodiac , Fincher received Academy Award nominations for Best Director for his 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and...
, Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is mostly known for his acclaimed films, Blade II, Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise. He is a frequent collaborator with Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi and Doug Jones...
, David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
, Lars Von Trier
Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches, and have frequently received strongly divided critical opinion....
, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noé
Gaspar Noé
Gaspar Noé is an Argentine filmmaker and the son of Argentine painter and intellectual Luis Felipe Noé. He graduated from Louis Lumière College and is the visiting professor of film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland...
. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer
Jonathan Glazer
Jonathan Glazer is an English director of films, commercials and music videos.-Biography:After studying theatre design at Nottingham Trent University, Glazer started out directing theatre and making film and television trailers, including award-winning work for the BBC...
's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick. The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent, contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The storytelling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Dr. Strangelove. Director Tim Burton
Tim Burton
Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
has included a few visual homages to Kubrick in his work, notably using actual footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (film)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 2005 film adaptation of the 1964 book of the same name by Roald Dahl. The film was directed by Tim Burton. The film stars Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket and Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka...
, and modeling the look of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in his version of Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland (2010 film)
Alice in Wonderland is a 2010 American computer-animated/live action fantasy adventure film directed by Tim Burton, written by Linda Woolverton, and released by Walt Disney Pictures...
on the Grady girls in The Shining. Film critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
also noted that Burton's Mars Attacks!
Mars Attacks!
Mars Attacks! is a 1996 American science fiction film directed by Tim Burton and based on the cult trading card series of the same name. The film uses elements of black comedy, surreal humour, and political satire, and claims to be also a parody of multiple science fiction B movies...
was partially inspired by Dr. Strangelove. Burton's only music video, that of The Killers' Bones (2006), includes clips from Kubrick's Lolita, as well as other films from the general era.
Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has written and directed five feature films: Hard Eight , Boogie Nights , Magnolia , Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood...
(who was fond of Kubrick as a teenager) in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, stated "it's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It can all seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with." Reviewer William Arnold described Anderson's There Will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood is a 2007 drama film written, co-produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!. It tells the story of a silver miner-turned-oilman on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and...
as being stylistically an homage to Kubrick "particularly "2001: A Space Odyssey" – opening with a similar prologue that jumps in stages over the years and using a soundtrack throughout that employs anachronistic music."
Although Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Francis Moore is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time. His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries...
specializes in documentary filmmaking, at the beginning of shooting his only non-documentary feature film Canadian Bacon
Canadian bacon
Canadian bacon can mean:* Canadian bacon, a US name for two different pork products - back bacon and a smoked ham* Canadian Bacon, a 1995 comedy film* Canadian Bacon , a peak in the US state of Washington...
, he sat his cast and crew down to watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. He told them "What this movie was in the '60s, is what we should aspire to with this film." Moore had previously written Kubrick a letter telling him how much Bacon was inspired by Strangelove.
Film director Frank Darabont
Frank Darabont
Frank Darabont is a Hungarian-American film director, screenwriter and producer who has been nominated for three Academy Awards and a Golden Globe. He has directed the films The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist, all based on stories by Stephen King...
has been inspired by Kubrick's use of music. In an interview with The Telegraph, he states that 2001 took "the use of music in film" to absolute perfection, and one shot employing classical music in The Shawshank Redemption follows Kubrick's lead. On the other hand, while Darabont has followed Kubrick in directing two Stephen King adaptations, Darabont shares Stephen King's negative view of Kubrick's adaption of The Shining. In the same interview, Darabont said
Critics occasionally detect a Kubrickian influence when the actual filmmaker acknowledges none. Critics have noticed the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Danish independent director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jim Pappas suggests this comes from his employment of Kubrick's cinematographer for The Shining and Barry Lyndon in his film Fear X, suggesting "it is the Kubrick influence that leaves us asking ourselves what we believe we should know is true". The apparent influence of Kubrick on his film Bronson was noted by the Los Angeles Times and the French publication Evene However, when asked by Twitch about the very frequent comparisons by critics of the film Bronson to A Clockwork Orange, Refn denied the influence. Refn stated
Some filmmakers have been critical of Kubrick's work, such as those of the remodernist film
Remodernist Film
Remodernist film developed in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 21st century with ideas related to those of the international art movement Stuckism and its manifesto, Remodernism...
movement; Jesse Richards
Jesse Richards
Jesse Richards is a painter, filmmaker and photographer from New Haven, Connecticut and was affiliated with the international movement Stuckism.-Early life:...
described Kubrick's work as "boring and dishonest". 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.
Actor Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall
Robert Selden Duvall is an American actor and director. He has won an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and a BAFTA over the course of his career....
(who never worked for Kubrick) stated on the fifth in The Hollywood Reporter's roundtable series in 2010 that he thought Kubrick's knack for an unusually high number of takes (often over 50) made him an "actor's enemy". He stated that both A Clockwork Orange and The Shining were "great movies" but contained "the worst performances he had ever seen in movies". On the other hand, Nicole Kidman (who co-starred in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) held that the value of Kubrick's enormous number of takes was that actors stopped consciously thinking about acting technique and went to a deeper place. She stated "He believed that what it does to you, as an actor, was that you would lose control of your sense of self, of the part of you that was internally watching your own performance. Eventually, he felt, you would stop censoring yourself."
Homages
In 2001, a number of persons who worked with Kubrick on his films created the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in PicturesStanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a 2001 documentary about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, made by his long-time assistant and brother-in-law Jan Harlan...
, released by Warner Bros. It was produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan
Jan Harlan
Jan Harlan is a film producer and the brother of Christiane Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's widow. He was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on May 5, 1937....
, who had also been executive producer of Kubrick's last four films. The camera and sound for the documentary was managed by his son, Manuel Harlan, who was also the still photographer for Eyes Wide Shut and video operator for Full Metal Jacket.
In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia award the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award. Kubrick is among filmmakers such as Griffith
D. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
, Olivier
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
(whom Kubrick directed in Spartacus), Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies...
, and Irving Thalberg
Irving Thalberg
Irving Grant Thalberg was an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures. He was called "The Boy Wonder" for his youth and his extraordinary ability to select the right scripts, choose the right actors, gather the best production staff and make very profitable films.-Life and...
, all of whom have had annual awards named after them. Kubrick won this award in 1999, one year prior to its being renamed in his honor.
Analysts of the TV series The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
argue it contains more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound not only to 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining but also to Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket. It has been noted that while 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." Similarly, it has been observed that "...the show's almost obsessive references to the films of Stanley Kubrick...[make it] 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. When the Director's Guild of Great Britain
Director's Guild of Great Britain
The Directors Guild of Great Britain is a professional organization which represents directors across all media, including film, television, theatre, radio, opera, commercials, music videos, corporate film/video and training, documentaries, multimedia and "new technology"...
gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a cut-together sequence of all the homages from the show.
In 2009 there was an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films in Dublin, Ireland, entitled 'Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light'. It was displayed at the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin from October 1 to 31. The same year, online toymaker "quartertofour" released a version of Rubik's Cube
Rubik's Cube
Rubik's Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik.Originally called the "Magic Cube", the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that...
with prints of photos from six of Kubrick's films on the side of the cube. (This is not to be confused with the online game Kubrick with computer images of Rubik's Cube which has no connection with Stanley Kubrick.) In 2010, painter Carlos Ramos held an exhibition entitled "Kubrick" at the Copro gallery in Los Angeles. It featured paintings in a variety of styles based on scenes from Stanley Kubrick films.
The video for pop singer Lady Gaga
Lady GaGa
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta , better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to...
's song Bad Romance was found by Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone magazine to be heavily influenced by the filmmaking style of Kubrick. Lady Gaga has also employed a hip-hop remix of the electronic version of Purcell's music that opens the film Clockwork Orange in her concerts and in her mini-movie The Fame. Finally, her song Dance in the Dark has the lines "Find your Jesus, Find your Kubrick".
Studies of Kubrick
At least two full-length books on Stanley Kubrick are devoted to frame-by-frame analyses of his visual style: Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis by Alexander Walker, and Stanley 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."Alternative adaptations
Three of Stanley Kubrick's films have had their source material re-adapted in some fashion: Anthony Burgess's stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in 1990, which he hoped would be considered a more definitive adaptation than Kubrick's film;the television miniseries
The Shining (TV miniseries)
The Shining is a three-part television miniseries based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. Directed by Mick Garris from King's teleplay, the series was first aired in 1997.-Plot:...
of The Shining, written and produced by Stephen King which King hoped would stand as the authorized adaptation; and Adrian Lyne's adaptation
Lolita (1997 film)
Lolita is a 1997 French-American drama film directed by Adrian Lyne. It is the second screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name and stars Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores "Lolita" Haze, with supporting roles by Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze,...
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 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.
Portrayal in film
Kubrick was portrayed by Stanley TucciStanley Tucci
Stanley Tucci is an American actor, writer, film producer and film director. He has been nominated for several notable film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his performance in The Lovely Bones...
in the 2004 film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Sellers appeared in two Kubrick films, but the material with Kubrick in this film is focused on Sellers' appearance in Dr. Strangelove.
Hoaxes, parodies and conspiracy theories involving Kubrick
In the early 1990s, a con artist named Alan ConwayAlan Conway
Alan Conway became known for impersonating the film director Stanley Kubrick. Conway and his wife were travel agents with offices in Harrow, Muswell Hill and London.-Early years:...
frequented the London entertainment scene claiming to be Stanley Kubrick, and temporarily deceived New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich
Frank Rich
Frank Rich is an American essayist and op-ed columnist who wrote for The New York Times from 1980, when he was appointed its chief theatre critic, until 2011...
. Kubrick's personal assistant, Anthony Frewin, helped track Conway down and wrote the screenplay for the film Colour Me Kubrick
Colour Me Kubrick
Colour Me Kubrick: A True...ish Story is a French/British Dramedy film directed by Brian W. Cook, released in 2006 . The film stars John Malkovich as Alan Conway, a man who had been impersonating director Stanley Kubrick since the early 1990s...
based on the Conway affair.
In 2002, with the cooperation of Kubrick's surviving family, the French film maker William Karel
William Karel
William Karel is a French film director and author. He is known for his historical and political documentaries.- Biography :After studying in Paris, Karel emigrated to Israel where he lived for about 10 years in a kibbutz...
(after initially planning a straight documentary on Stanley Kubrick) directed a hoax mockumentary about Kubrick and the NASA moon landing entitled Dark Side of the Moon. The film purported to demonstrate that the NASA moon landings had been faked and that the moon landing footage had been directed by Stanley Kubrick during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In spite of clues that the film is a news parody, some test audiences believed the film to be sincere, including at least one believer in the moon landing conspiracy.
An earlier 1995 tongue-in-cheek article promoted essentially the same mock hoax about Kubrick, and was also deemed sincere by some readers. Originally posted on the Usenet humor news group 'alt.humor.best-of-usenet', it was later reproduced in venues not devoted to parody.
An entirely sincere documentary film making the same claim as Karel's parodic "mockumentary" was self-released on DVD in 2011 by conspiracy theorist and occultist Jay Weidner entitled Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick; Part One: Kubrick and Apollo. The science magazine Discovery reviewed an earlier article by Weidner on which his film was based as "bunk" but "oddly compelling" and "strangely fascinating".
A second recurring conspiracy theory surrounding Stanley Kubrick is that he was a secret member of a massive Freemason-Illuminati organization and hid clues of its existence in many of his films. Theorists claim Kubrick disclosed too much in Eyes Wide Shut and was subsequently assassinated. Cracked.com listed this as #1 in their list of 5 Absurd (But Mind Blowing) Pop Culture Conspiracy Theories. Although the book The Complete Idiot's Guide to the New World Order claims to be skeptical of the actual conspiracy theories, it takes at face value the claim that Masonic symbolism is woven into Eyes Wide Shut.
Documentary short films
As director, writer, cinematographer, and sound- Day of the FightDay of the FightDay of the Fight is a 1951 American short subject documentary film shot in black-and-white and also the first picture directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick financed the film himself, and it is based on an earlier photo feature he had done as a photographer for Look magazine in 1949...
(1951, RKO Radio Pictures)
(also producer and uncredited editor) - Flying PadreFlying PadreFlying Padre is a 1951 short subject black-and-white documentary film. It is the second picture directed by Stanley Kubrick, after Day of the Fight. The film is nine minutes long.-Story:...
(1951, RKO Radio Pictures)
(also writer) - The SeafarersThe SeafarersThe Seafarers is Stanley Kubrick's third film, a short for the Seafarers International Union, directed in June 1953.There are shots of ships, machinery, a canteen, and a union meeting. The film was shot in color, and was supervised by the staff of The Seafarers Log, the union magazine...
(1953, Seafarers International Pictures)
(also editor)
Day of the Fight
Day of the Fight
Day of the Fight is a 1951 American short subject documentary film shot in black-and-white and also the first picture directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick financed the film himself, and it is based on an earlier photo feature he had done as a photographer for Look magazine in 1949...
was part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series. The Flying Padre was an RKO-Pathe Screenliner. The Seafarers and Spartacus were Kubrick's only color films prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Feature films
| Year | Film | Director |
Producer |
Screenplay (in part or whole) |
Editor |
Cinematographer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1953 | Fear and Desire Fear and Desire Fear and Desire is a military action/adventure film by Stanley Kubrick. It is Kubrick’s first feature film and is also one of his least-seen productions... |
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| 1955 | Killer's Kiss Killer's Kiss Killer's Kiss is a 1955 film noir directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Kubrick and Howard Sackler. It is the second feature film directed by Kubrick... |
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| 1956 | The Killing | |||||
| 1957 | Paths of Glory Paths of Glory Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Set during World War I, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refused to continue a suicidal attack... |
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| 1960 | Spartacus Spartacus (film) Spartacus is a 1960 American epic historical drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel of the same name by Howard Fast... |
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| 1962 | Lolita Lolita (1962 film) Lolita is a 1962 comedy-drama film by Stanley Kubrick based on the classic novel of the same title by Vladimir Nabokov. The film stars James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Sue Lyon as Dolores Haze and Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze with Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty.Due to the MPAA's restrictions at... |
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| 1964 | Dr. Strangelove | |||||
| 1968 | 2001: A Space Odyssey 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel... |
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| 1971 | A Clockwork Orange A Clockwork Orange (film) A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick... |
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| 1975 | Barry Lyndon Barry Lyndon Barry Lyndon is a 1975 British-American period romantic war film produced, written, and directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray which recounts the exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer... |
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| 1980 | The Shining The Shining (film) The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. A writer, Jack Torrance, takes a job as an... |
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| 1987 | Full Metal Jacket Full Metal Jacket Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 war film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is an adaptation of the 1979 novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford and stars Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Arliss Howard and Adam Baldwin. The film follows a platoon of U.S... |
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| 1999 | Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle . The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, and was his last film. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually-charged adventures of Dr... |
1 Uncredited
Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the underlying concept of Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence which was produced after his death, by his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan
Jan Harlan
Jan Harlan is a film producer and the brother of Christiane Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's widow. He was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on May 5, 1937....
. Kubrick is thanked in the credits, but is not credited as writer. A new screenplay was written by Steven Spielberg based on a 90-page story treatment done in 1990 by Ian Watson which in turn had closely followed Kubrick's stated directives. The film is based on a short story by Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE is an English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society...
.
Home video and screen size
With the exception of Space Odyssey, Kubrick had authorized only cropped and screen-fitted transfers of his films to videotape. When he died in 1999, Warner Home Video released these films with the transfers that Kubrick approved. In 2007, Warner Home Video remastered five of his later films in High-Definition, releasing the titles for the first time in widescreen format, preserving the theatrical screen ratios.During the laserdisc era, The Criterion Collection released six earlier Kubrick films, but released only Spartacus and 2001 in widescreen, although others had been widescreen in theatres. Earlier DVD releases of The Killing, Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove (whether by Criterion, MGM, or Sony) were standard 4:3 screen, while later releases were widescreen.
Earlier widescreen releases of 2001 were slightly cropped due to being transferred from a 35mm print, but this was corrected in the most recent DVD release.
Awards and nominations
All of Stanley Kubrick's later films, except for The Shining, were nominated for Oscars or Golden Globes, in various categories. 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. This was Kubrick's only personal Oscar win among 13 nominations. Nominations for his films were mostly in the areas of cinematography, art design, screenwriting, and music. Only four of his films were nominated by either an Oscar or Golden Globe for their acting performances, Spartacus, Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, and A Clockwork Orange.Personal awards for Kubrick:
| Year | Title | Awards (limited to Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Razzies) |
|---|---|---|
| 1953 | Fear and Desire Fear and Desire Fear and Desire is a military action/adventure film by Stanley Kubrick. It is Kubrick’s first feature film and is also one of his least-seen productions... |
|
| 1955 | Killer's Kiss Killer's Kiss Killer's Kiss is a 1955 film noir directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Kubrick and Howard Sackler. It is the second feature film directed by Kubrick... |
|
| 1956 | The Killing | Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source |
| 1957 | Paths of Glory Paths of Glory Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Set during World War I, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refused to continue a suicidal attack... |
|
| 1960 | Spartacus | Won Golden Globe: Best Drama Picture, Nominated Golden Globe: Best Director Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source |
| 1962 | Lolita Lolita (1962 film) Lolita is a 1962 comedy-drama film by Stanley Kubrick based on the classic novel of the same title by Vladimir Nabokov. The film stars James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Sue Lyon as Dolores Haze and Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze with Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty.Due to the MPAA's restrictions at... |
Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay (Kubrick's extensive work on this was uncredited- the nominee was Vladimir Nabokov) Nominated for Golden Globes: Best Director |
| 1964 | Dr. Strangelove | Nominated for Oscars: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay Won BAFTA Awards: Best British Film, Best Film from any Source, Nominated BAFTA: Best British Screenplay (nomination shared with Peter George and Terry Southern) |
| 1968 | 2001: A Space Odyssey 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel... |
Won Oscar : Best Special Effects Nominated for Oscars: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (nomination shared with Arthur C. Clarke) Nominated for BAFTA: Best Film |
| 1971 | A Clockwork Orange A Clockwork Orange (film) A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick... |
Nominated for Oscars: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay Nominated for Golden Globes: Best Director, Best Drama Picture Nominated for BAFTA Awards: Best Direction, Best Film, Best Screenplay Won 2 recognitions by The New York Film Critics: Best Director, Best Picture |
| 1975 | Barry Lyndon Barry Lyndon Barry Lyndon is a 1975 British-American period romantic war film produced, written, and directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray which recounts the exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer... |
Nominated for Oscars : Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay Nominated for 2 Golden Globes: Best Director, Best Drama Picture Won BAFTA Award: Best Direction Nominated: Best Film |
| 1980 | The Shining The Shining (film) The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. A writer, Jack Torrance, takes a job as an... |
Nominated for Razzie: Worst Director Nominated for Saturn: Best Direction |
| 1987 | Full Metal Jacket Full Metal Jacket Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 war film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is an adaptation of the 1979 novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford and stars Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Arliss Howard and Adam Baldwin. The film follows a platoon of U.S... |
Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay (nomination shared with Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford) |
| 1999 | Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle . The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, and was his last film. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually-charged adventures of Dr... |
Kubrick received two awards from major film festivals: "Best Director" from the Locarno International Film Festival
Locarno International Film Festival
The Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...
in 1959 for Killer's Kiss, and "Filmcritica Bastone Bianco Award" at the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
in 1999 for Eyes Wide Shut. He also was nominated for the "Golden Lion
Golden Lion
Il Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...
" of the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for Lolita. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the "Career Golden Lion" in 1997. He received the D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America
Directors Guild of America
Directors Guild of America is an entertainment labor union which represents the interests of film and television directors in the United States motion picture industry...
, and another life-achievement award from the Director's Guild of Great Britain
Director's Guild of Great Britain
The Directors Guild of Great Britain is a professional organization which represents directors across all media, including film, television, theatre, radio, opera, commercials, music videos, corporate film/video and training, documentaries, multimedia and "new technology"...
, and the Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival. Posthumously, the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" for life achievement in 2008. He also received the coveted Hugo Award
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...
three time for his work in science fiction.
In 1997, three of Kubrick's films were selected by the American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
for their list of the 100 Greatest Movies in America: 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
at #22, Dr. Strangelove at No.26 and A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange (film)
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
at #46. In 2007, the AFI updated their list with 2001 ranked at #15, Dr. Strangelove ranked at No.39 and Clockwork Orange ranked at #70; Spartacus
Spartacus (film)
Spartacus is a 1960 American epic historical drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel of the same name by Howard Fast...
was one of the new selections, ranking at #81.
See also
- Stanley Kubrick ArchiveStanley Kubrick ArchiveThe Stanley Kubrick Archive is held by the University of the Arts London in their Archives and Special Collection Centre at the London College of Communication. The Archive opened in October 2007 and contains material collected and owned by the film director Stanley Kubrick . It was transferred...
- Stanley Kubrick's BoxesStanley Kubrick's BoxesStanley Kubrick's Boxes is a 2008 documentary film directed by Jon Ronson about the film director Stanley Kubrick. Ronson's intent was not to create a biography of the filmmaker but rather to understand Kubrick by studying the director's vast personal collection of memorabilia related to his...
- Stanley Kubrick: A Life in PicturesStanley Kubrick: A Life in PicturesStanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a 2001 documentary about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, made by his long-time assistant and brother-in-law Jan Harlan...
- List of famous amateur chess players
Further reading
- Lyons, V and Fitzgerald, M. (2005) ‘’Asperger syndrome : a gift or a curse?’’ New York : Nova Science Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59454-387-6
- Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick ; Kinematograph Nr. 14, Frankfurt/Main, 2004. ISBN 978-3-88799-069-5 (English edition)
Documentary
- Stanley Kubrick: A Life in PicturesStanley Kubrick: A Life in PicturesStanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a 2001 documentary about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, made by his long-time assistant and brother-in-law Jan Harlan...
. Documentary film. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Home Video, 2001. 142 min.
External links
- Video: Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures Introduction, 2.5 minutes
- Video: Compilation of film clips, 8 minutes
- Detailed analysis about Stanley Kubrick (French language)
- Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
- Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of CommunicationLondon College of CommunicationThe London College of Communication is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, located in Elephant and Castle. It has about 5,000 students on 60 courses in media and design courses preparing students for careers in the creative industries...
- The Authorized Stanley Kubrick Web Site by Warner Bros.
- The Kubrick Site
- Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide
- Kubrick on Senses of Cinema (In Depth Biography)
- Multi-media Kubrick archive
- The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
: Citizen Kubrick - List of interviews and Look photographs
- List of all the published Look photographs
- The Hechinger Debacle
- Stanley Kubrick Interviews, by Stanley Kubrick, Gene D. PhillipsGene D. PhillipsGene D. Phillips is an American author, educator, and Catholic priest. Phillips has been a prolific author of biographical books on filmmakers, and has published extended interviews with many filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, and Joseph Losey.Phillips was raised...
- Photo gallery: Kubrick on set