Stanley Kubrick

Early life

Stanley Kubrick was born in the Lying-In Hospital in New York City's Manhattan borough on July 26, 1928. He was the first of two children of Jacob Leonard Kubrick, known as Jack or Jacques, and his wife Sadie Gertrude Kubrick (née Perveler), known as Gert. His sister Barbara was born in 1934. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in the Bronx. His parents married in a Jewish ceremony, but Kubrick was not raised religious. His father was a homeopathic doctor and, by the standards of the West Bronx, the family was fairly wealthy.

Soon after his sister's birth, Kubrick began attending Public School 3 in the Bronx and moved to Public School 90 in June 1938. His IQ was above average but his attendance was poor. He displayed an interest in literature from a young age and began reading Greek and Roman myths and the fables of the Brothers Grimm. When Kubrick was 12, his father Jack taught him chess. The game remained a lifelong interest of Kubrick's, appearing in many of his films. Kubrick, who later became a member of the United States Chess Federation, explained that chess helped him develop "patience and discipline". When Kubrick was 13, his father bought him a Graflex camera, triggering a fascination with still photography. He befriended a neighbor, Marvin Traub, who shared his passion for photography. Traub had his own darkroom where he and the young Kubrick would spend many hours perusing photographs and watching the chemicals "magically make images on photographic paper". The two roamed the streets looking for interesting subjects to photograph and spent time in local cinemas. Freelance photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) had a considerable influence on Kubrick's development as a photographer; Kubrick later hired Fellig as the special stills photographer for Dr. Strangelove (1964). As a teenager, Kubrick was also interested in jazz and briefly attempted a career as a drummer.

Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 1945. He joined the school's photography club, photographing school events in their magazine. He was a mediocre student. Introverted and shy, Kubrick often skipped school to watch films. He graduated in 1945 but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from World War II, eliminated any hope of higher education. Later in life Kubrick maintained that schools were ineffective in stimulating critical thinking and student interest. His father was disappointed in his son's failure to achieve the excellence in school of which he knew Stanley was capable. Jack also encouraged Stanley to read from the family library at home, while permitting Stanley to take up photography as a serious hobby.

Photography career

While in high school, Kubrick was chosen as an official school photographer. In the mid-1940s, since he was unable to gain admission to day session classes at colleges, he briefly attended evening classes at the City College of New York, which had open admissions. Eventually, he sold a photographic series to Look magazine, which was printed on June 26, 1945. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park and Manhattan chess clubs.

In 1946, he became an apprentice photographer for Look and later a full-time staff photographer. Kubrick quickly became known for his story-telling in photographs. In 1948, he was sent to Portugal to document a travel piece, and later that year covered the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida.

A boxing enthusiast, Kubrick eventually began photographing boxing matches for the magazine. His earliest, "Prizefighter", was published on January 18, 1949, and captured a boxing match and the events leading up to it, featuring American middleweight Walter Cartier. On April 2, 1949, he published photo essay "Chicago-City of Extremes" in Look, which displayed his early talent for creating atmosphere with imagery. Kubrick was also assigned to photograph numerous jazz musicians.

Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz on May 28, 1948. They lived at 36 West 16th Street, just north of Greenwich Village. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings. He was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of French director Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's visual style, and by director Elia Kazan, whom he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors. Friends began to notice Kubrick had become obsessed with the art of filmmaking—one friend, David Vaughan, observed that Kubrick would scrutinize the film at the cinema when it went silent, and would go back to reading his paper when people started talking. He spent many hours reading books on film theory and writing notes. He was particularly inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and Arthur Rothstein, the photographic technical director of Look magazine.

Film career

Short films (1951–1953)

Kubrick shared a love of film with his school friend Alexander Singer. Through Singer, who worked in the offices of the newsreel production company The March of Time, Kubrick learned it could cost $40,000 to make a proper short film, a sum he could not afford. He produced a few short documentaries with encouragement from Singer.

Kubrick decided to make a short film documentary about boxer Walter Cartier, whom he had photographed and written about for Look magazine a year earlier. He rented a camera and produced a 16-minute black-and-white documentary, Day of the Fight. Kubrick found the money independently to finance it. He had considered asking Montgomery Clift to narrate it, but settled on CBS news veteran Douglas Edwards. According to Paul Duncan the film was "remarkably accomplished for a first film", and used a backward tracking shot to film a scene in which Cartier and his brother walk towards the camera, a device which later became one of Kubrick's characteristic camera movements. Vincent Cartier, Walter's brother and manager, later reflected, "Stanley was a very stoic, impassive but imaginative type person with strong, imaginative thoughts. He commanded respect in a quiet, shy way. Whatever he wanted, you complied, he just captivated you. Anybody who worked with Stanley did just what Stanley wanted". After a score was added by Singer's friend Gerald Fried, Kubrick had spent $3900 in making it, and sold it to RKO-Pathé for $4000, which was the most the company had ever paid for a short film at the time. Kubrick described his first effort at filmmaking as having been valuable, later declaring that the "best education in film is to make one".

Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Look and visited professional filmmakers in New York City to learn the technical aspects of filmmaking. He stated that he was given the confidence during this period to become a filmmaker because of the number of bad films he had seen, remarking, "I don't know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a better film than that". He began making Flying Padre (1951), a film about Reverend Fred Stadtmueller, who travels some 12,000 miles annually to visit his 11 churches. Flying Padre was followed by The Seafarers (1953), Kubrick's first color film, which was shot for the Seafarers International Union in June 1953. For the cafeteria scene in the film, Kubrick chose a dolly shot to establish the life of the seafarer's community; this kind of shot would later become a signature technique. Day of the Fight, Flying Padre and The Seafarers constitute Kubrick's only surviving documentary works; some historians believe he made others.

Early feature work (1953–1955)

After raising $1000 showing his short films to friends and family, Kubrick found the finances to begin making his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), written by his friend Howard Sackler. Kubrick's uncle, Martin Perveler, a Los Angeles pharmacy owner, invested $9000 on condition that he be credited as executive producer of the film. Kubrick assembled a small crew totaling fourteen people and flew to the San Gabriel Mountains in California for a five-week, low-budget shoot. It is a fictional allegory about a team of soldiers who survive a plane crash and are caught behind enemy lines in a war. One of the soldiers becomes infatuated with an attractive girl in the woods and binds her to a tree. This scene and others are noted for their rapid close-ups on the faces of the cast. Kubrick had intended for Fear and Desire to be a silent picture to ensure low production costs; the added sounds, effects, and music ultimately brought production costs to around $53,000, exceeding the budget. He was bailed out by producer Richard de Rochemont on the condition that he help in de Rochemont's production of a five-part television series about Abraham Lincoln.

Fear and Desire was a commercial failure, but garnered positive reviews upon release. The reviewer from The New York Times believed that Kubrick's professionalism as a photographer shone through in the picture, and that he "artistically caught glimpses of the grotesque attitudes of death, the wolfishness of hungry men, as well as their bestiality, and in one scene, the wracking effect of lust on a pitifully juvenile soldier and the pinioned girl he is guarding". Columbia University scholar Mark Van Doren was highly impressed by the scenes with the girl bound to the tree, remarking that it would live on as a "beautiful, terrifying and weird" sequence which illustrated Kubrick's immense talent and guaranteed his future success. Kubrick himself later expressed embarrassment with Fear and Desire, and attempted over the years to disown it, keeping prints of the film out of circulation. During the production of the film, Kubrick accidentally almost killed his cast with poisonous gasses.

Following Fear and Desire, Kubrick began working on ideas for a new boxing film. Due to the commercial failure of his first feature, Kubrick avoided asking for investments, but commenced a film noir script with Howard O. Sackler. Originally under the title Kiss Me, Kill Me, and then The Nymph and the Maniac, Killer's Kiss (1955) is a film noir about a young boxer's involvement with a woman being abused by her criminal boss. Like Fear and Desire, it was privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends, with some $40,000 put forward from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousse. Kubrick began shooting footage in Times Square, and frequently explored during the filming process, experimenting with cinematography and considering the use of unconventional angles and imagery. He initially chose to record the sound on location, but encountered difficulties with shadows from the microphone booms, restricting camera movement. His decision to drop the sound in favor of imagery was a costly one; after 12–14 weeks shooting the picture, he spent some seven months and $35,000 working on the sound.

Hollywood success and beyond (1955–1962)

While playing chess in Washington Square, Kubrick met producer James B. Harris. The two formed the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation in 1955. Harris purchased the rights to Lionel White's novel Clean Break for $10,000 and Kubrick wrote the script, but at Kubrick's suggestion, they hired film noir novelist Jim Thompson to write the dialog for the film—which became The Killing (1956)—about a racetrack robbery gone wrong. Kubrick and Harris moved to Los Angeles and signed with the Jaffe Agency to shoot the picture, which became Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. The Union in Hollywood stated that Kubrick would not be permitted to be both the director and the cinematographer, resulting in the hiring of veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Kubrick clashed with Ballard during the shooting, and on one occasion threatened to fire Ballard following a camera dispute. The film's star Sterling Hayden recalled Kubrick was "cold and detached. Very mechanical, always confident. I've worked with few directors who are that good". The Killing failed to secure a proper release across the United States; the film made little money, and was promoted only at the last minute, as a second feature to the Western Bandido! (1956). Several contemporary critics lauded the film. Today, critics generally consider The Killing to be among the best films of Kubrick's early career; its nonlinear narrative and clinical execution also had a major influence on later directors of crime films. Dore Schary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) was highly impressed as well, and offered Kubrick and Harris $75,000 to write, direct, and produce a film, which ultimately became Paths of Glory (1957).

Paths of Glory, set during World War I, is based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name. Schary stated that MGM would not finance another war picture, given their backing of the anti-war film The Red Badge of Courage (1951). After Schary was fired by MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris managed to interest Kirk Douglas in playing Colonel Dax. Douglas, in turn, signed Harris-Kubrick Pictures to a three-picture co-production deal with his film production company, Bryna Productions, which secured a financing and distribution deal for Paths of Glory and two subsequent films with United Artists. The film, shot in Munich, from March 1957, included a battle scene for which Kubrick meticulously lined up six cameras one after the other along the boundary of no-man's land, with each camera capturing a specific field and numbered, and gave each of the hundreds of extras a number for the zone in which they would die. Kubrick operated an Arriflex camera for the battle, zooming in on Douglas. Paths of Glory became Kubrick's first significant commercial success, and established him as an up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics praised the film's unsentimental and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Despite the praise, the Christmas release date was criticized, and the subject was controversial in Europe. The film was banned in France until 1974 for its "unflattering" depiction of the French military, and was censored by the Swiss Army until 1970.

Collaboration with Peter Sellers (1962–1964)

Kubrick and Harris decided to start production of Kubrick's next film Lolita (1962) in England, due to clauses placed on the contract by producers Warner Bros. that gave them complete control over the film, and the fact that the Eady plan permitted producers to write off the costs if 80% of the crew were British. They signed a $1 million deal with Eliot Hyman's Associated Artists Productions, and a clause which gave them the artistic freedom that they desired. Lolita, Kubrick's first attempt at black comedy, was an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov, the story of a middle-aged college professor becoming infatuated with a 12-year-old girl. Stylistically, Lolita, starring Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Sue Lyon, was a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema ... to the surrealism of the later films", according to film critic Gene Youngblood. Kubrick was impressed by the range of actor Peter Sellers and gave him one of his first opportunities to improvise wildly during shooting, while filming him with three cameras.

Kubrick shot Lolita over 88 days on a $2 million budget at Elstree Studios, between October 1960 and March 1961. Kubrick often clashed with Shelley Winters, whom he found "very difficult" and nearly fired at one point. Because of its provocative story, Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate controversy; he was ultimately forced to comply with censors and remove much of the erotic element of the relationship between Mason's Humbert and Lyon's Lolita which had been evident in Nabokov's novel. The film was not a major critical or commercial success, earning $3.7 million at the box office on its opening run. Lolita has since become critically acclaimed.

Kubrick's next project was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), another satirical black comedy. Kubrick became preoccupied with the issue of nuclear war as the Cold War unfolded in the 1950s, and even considered moving to Australia because he feared that New York City might be a likely target for the Russians. He studied over 40 military and political research books on the subject and eventually reached the conclusion that "nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd".

After buying the rights to the novel Red Alert, Kubrick collaborated with its author, Peter George, on the script. It was originally written as a serious political thriller, but Kubrick decided that a "serious treatment" of the subject would not be believable, and thought that some of its most salient points would be fodder for comedy. Kubrick's longtime producer and friend, James B. Harris, thought the film should be serious, and the two parted ways, amicably, over this disagreement. Kubrick and George then reworked the script as a satire in which the plot of Red Alert was situated as a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence, but this idea was also abandoned, and Kubrick decided to make the film as "an outrageous black comedy". Just before filming began, Kubrick hired journalist and satirical author Terry Southern to transform the script into its final form, a black comedy, loaded with sexual innuendo, becoming a film which showed Kubrick's talents as a "unique kind of absurdist" according to the film scholar Abrams. Southern made major contributions to the final script, and was co-credited (above George) in the film's opening titles; his perceived role in the writing later led to a public rift between Kubrick and George, who subsequently complained in a letter to Life magazine that Southern's intense but relatively brief involvement with the project was being given undue prominence in the media, while his own role as the author of the film's source novel, and his ten-month stint as the script's co-writer, were being downplayed – a perception Kubrick evidently did little to address.

Science fiction (1965–1971)

Kubrick spent five years developing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), having been highly impressed with science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. After meeting Clarke in New York City in April 1964, Kubrick made the suggestion to work on his 1948 short story "The Sentinel", in which a monolith found on the Moon alerts aliens of mankind. That year, Clarke began writing the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and collaborated with Kubrick on a screenplay. The film's theme, the birthing of one intelligence by another, is developed in two parallel intersecting stories on two different time scales. One depicts evolutionary transitions between various stages of man, from ape to "star child", as man is reborn into a new existence, each step shepherded by an enigmatic alien intelligence seen only in its artifacts: a series of seemingly indestructible eons-old black monoliths. In space, the enemy is a supercomputer known as HAL who runs the spaceship, a character which novelist Clancy Sigal described as being "far, far more human, more humorous and conceivably decent than anything else that may emerge from this far-seeing enterprise".

Kubrick intensively researched for the film, paying particular attention to detail in what the future might look like. He was granted permission by NASA to observe the spacecraft being used in the Ranger 9 mission for accuracy. Filming commenced on December 29, 1965, with the excavation of the monolith on the moon, and footage was shot in the Namib desert in early 1967. The special effects team continued working until the end of the year to complete the film, taking the cost to $10.5 million. 2001: A Space Odyssey was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70, giving the viewer a "dazzling mix of imagination and science" through ground-breaking effects, which earned Kubrick his only personal Oscar, an Academy Award for Visual Effects. Kubrick said of the concept of the film in an interview with Rolling Stone: "On the deepest psychological level, the film's plot symbolized the search for God, and finally postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God. The film revolves around this metaphysical conception, and the realistic hardware and the documentary feelings about everything were necessary in order to undermine your built-in resistance to the poetical concept".

Upon release in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an immediate hit among critics, who faulted its lack of dialog, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. The film appeared to defy genre convention, and was clearly different from any of Kubrick's earlier works. Kubrick was particularly outraged by a scathing review from Pauline Kael, who called it "the biggest amateur movie of them all", with Kubrick doing "really every dumb thing he ever wanted to do". Despite mixed contemporary critical reviews, 2001 gradually gained popularity and earned $31 million worldwide by the end of 1972. Today, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. Baxter describes the film as "one of the most admired and discussed creations in the history of cinema", and Steven Spielberg has referred to it as "the big bang of his film making generation". For biographer Vincent LoBrutto it "positioned Stanley Kubrick as a pure artist ranked among the masters of cinema". The film marked Kubrick's first use of classical music. Roger Ebert writes: Although Kubrick originally commissioned an original score from Alex North, he used classical recordings as a temporary track while editing the film, and they worked so well that he kept them. This was a crucial decision. North's score, which is available on a recording, is a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for 2001 because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action – to give us emotional cues. The classical music chosen by Kubrick exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals.

Period and horror filming (1972–1980)

Barry Lyndon (1975) is an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel about the adventures of an 18th-century Irish rogue and social climber. John Calley of Warner Bros. agreed in 1972 to invest $2.5 million into the film, on condition that Kubrick approach major Hollywood stars, to ensure success. Like previous films, Kubrick and his art department conducted an enormous amount of research on the 18th century. The film was shot on location in Ireland, beginning in the autumn of 1973, at a cost of $11 million. The production was problematic from the start, plagued with heavy rain and political strife involving Northern Ireland at the time. After Kubrick received death threats from the IRA in 1974 due to the shooting scenes with English soldiers, he fled Ireland with his family on a ferry from Dún Laoghaire under an assumed identity and resumed filming in England.

Baxter notes that Barry Lyndon was the film which made Kubrick notorious for paying scrupulous attention to detail, often demanding twenty or thirty retakes of the same scene. Often considered to be his most authentic-looking picture, the cinematography and lighting techniques were highly innovative. Interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA to be used in satellite photography. The lenses allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings. Cinematographer Allen Daviau states that the method gives the audience a way of seeing the characters and scenes as they would have been seen by people at the time. Many of the fight scenes were shot with a hand-held camera to produce a "sense of documentary realism and immediacy".

Barry Lyndon found a great audience in France, but was a box office failure, grossing just $9.5 million in the American market, not even close to the $30 million Warner Bros. needed to generate a profit. The pace and length of Barry Lyndon at three hours put off many American critics and audiences, but the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, more than any other Kubrick film. As with most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon's reputation has grown through the years and it is now considered to be one of his best. Numerous polls, such as The Village Voice (1999), Sight & Sound (2002), and Time (2005), have rated it as one of the greatest films ever made. Ebert referred to it as "one of the most beautiful films ever made ... certainly in every frame a Kubrick film: technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness".

Later work and final years (1981–1999)

Kubrick met author Michael Herr through mutual friend David Cornwell (novelist John le Carré) in 1980, and became interested in his book Dispatches, about the Vietnam War. Kubrick was also intrigued by Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel The Short-Timers. With the vision in mind to shoot what would become Full Metal Jacket (1987), Kubrick began working with both Herr and Hasford separately on a script. He eventually found Hasford's novel to be "brutally honest" and decided to shoot a film which closely follows the novel. The film was shot at a cost of $17 million between August 1985 and September 1986, later than scheduled as Kubrick shut down production for five months following a near-fatal accident with a jeep involving R. Lee Ermey. A derelict gasworks in Beckton in the London Docklands area posed as the ruined city of Huế, which makes the film visually very different from other Vietnam War films. Around 200 palm trees were imported by road from North Africa, at a cost of £1000 a tree, and thousands of plastic plants were ordered from Hong Kong to provide foliage for the film. Kubrick explained he made the film look realistic by using natural light, and achieved a "newsreel effect" by making the Steadicam shots less steady, which reviewers and commentators thought contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film.

According to critic Michel Ciment, the film contained some of Kubrick's trademark characteristics, such as ironic music, portrayals of men being dehumanized, and attention to extreme detail to achieve realism. The film opened strongly in June 1987, taking over $30 million in the first 50 days, but critically it was overshadowed by the success of Oliver Stone's Platoon, released a year earlier. Co-star Matthew Modine stated one of Kubrick's favorite reviews read: "The first half of FMJ is brilliant. Then the film degenerates into a masterpiece." Ebert was not particularly impressed with it, awarding it 2.5 out of 4. He concluded: "Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is more like a book of short stories than a novel", a "strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material".

Kubrick's final film was Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story). Kubrick was almost 70, but worked relentlessly for 15 months to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16, 1999. He commenced a script with Frederic Raphael, and worked 18 hours a day, while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film.

Unfinished and unrealized projects

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss on expanding his short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" into a film. It was a futuristic fairy tale about a robot that resembles a child, and his efforts to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar to Pinocchio. Kubrick approached Steven Spielberg in 1995 with the script. Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Spielberg regarding the film. Following Kubrick's sudden death in 1999, Spielberg took the notes left by Kubrick and his writers and composed a new screenplay based on an earlier 90-page story treatment by Ian Watson written under Kubrick's supervision. In association with what remained of Kubrick's production unit, he directed the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), produced by Kubrick's longtime producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan. Sets, costumes, and art direction were based on the works of conceptual artist Chris Baker, who had also done much of his work under Kubrick's supervision.

Spielberg said he felt "inhibited to honor" Kubrick, and followed Kubrick's visual schema with as much fidelity as he could. Spielberg, who once referred to Kubrick as "the greatest master I ever served", admitted, "I felt like I was being coached by a ghost." The film contains a posthumous production credit for Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at the end. John Williams's score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.

Following 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick planned to make a film about Napoleon. Fascinated by the French leader's life and "self-destruction", Kubrick spent a great deal of time planning the film's development and conducted about two years of research into Napoleon's life, reading several hundred books and gaining access to his personal memoirs and commentaries. He tried to see every film about Napoleon and found none of them appealing, including Abel Gance's 1927 film which is generally considered a masterpiece, but for Kubrick, was a "really terrible" movie. LoBrutto states that Napoleon was an ideal subject for Kubrick, embracing Kubrick's "passion for control, power, obsession, strategy, and the military", while Napoleon's psychological intensity and depth, logistical genius and war, sex, and the evil nature of man were all ingredients which deeply appealed to Kubrick.

Kubrick drafted a screenplay in 1961, and envisaged making a "grandiose" epic, with up to 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. He intended hiring the armed forces of an entire country to make the film, as he considered Napoleonic battles to be "so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets", with an "aesthetic brilliance that doesn't require a military mind to appreciate". He wanted them replicated as authentically as possible on screen. Kubrick sent research teams to scout for locations across Europe, and commissioned screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin to the Isle of Elba, Austerlitz, and Waterloo, taking thousands of pictures. Kubrick approached numerous stars to play leading roles, including Audrey Hepburn for Empress Josephine, a part which she could not accept due to semiretirement.

Career influences

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film knows that, although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car at an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.

As a young man, Kubrick was fascinated by the films of Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Kubrick read Pudovkin's seminal theoretical work, Film Technique, which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, and it needs to be employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest. Kubrick recommended this work to others for many years. Thomas Nelson describes this book as "the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick's] private aesthetics". Kubrick also found the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski to be essential to his understanding the basics of directing.

Kubrick's family and many critics felt that his Jewish ancestry may have contributed to his worldview and aspects of his films. After his death, his daughter and wife stated that he was not religious, but "did not deny his Jewishness, not at all". His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, the Aryan Papers, having spent years researching the subject. Most of Kubrick's 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 Kubrick in his final years, declared that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality".

Walker notes that Kubrick was influenced by the tracking and "fluid camera" styles of director Max Ophüls, and used them in many of his films, including Paths of Glory and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He once named Ophüls' Le Plaisir (1952) as his favorite film. Geoffrey Cocks believes that Kubrick was also influenced by Ophüls' stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men, while Herr notes that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst. Film historian/critic Robert Kolker sees the influence of Orson Welles' moving camera shots on Kubrick's style. LoBrutto notes that Kubrick identified with Welles and that this influenced the making of The Killing, with its "multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus".

Directing techniques

Philosophy

Kubrick's films typically involve expressions of an inner struggle, examined from different perspectives.

He was very careful not to present his own views of the meaning of his films and to leave them open to interpretation. He explained in a 1960 interview with Robert Emmett Ginna Jr.:

One of the things I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, 'Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?' And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T. S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him—I believe it was The Waste Land—what he meant by the poem. He replied, 'I meant what I said.' If I could have said it any differently, I would have.

Kubrick likened the understanding of his films to popular music, in that whatever the background or intellect of the individual, a Beatles record, for instance, can be appreciated both by the Alabama truck driver and the young Cambridge intellectual, because their "emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects". He believed that the subconscious emotional reaction experienced by audiences was far more powerful in the film medium than in any other traditional verbal form, and this was one of the reasons why he often relied on long periods in his films without dialogue, placing emphasis on images and sound. In a 1975 Time magazine interview, Kubrick further stated: "The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves." He also said: "Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious".

Diane Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay for The Shining with Kubrick, notes that he "always said that it was better to adapt a book rather than write an original screenplay, and that you should choose a work that isn't a masterpiece so you can improve on it." He always made films which would "appeal to every sort of viewer, whatever their expectation of film". According to his co-producer Jan Harlan, Kubrick mostly "wanted to make films about things that mattered, that not only had form, but substance". Kubrick believed that audiences quite often were attracted to "enigmas and allegories" and did not like films in which everything was spelled out clearly.

Writing and staging scenes

Film author Patrick Webster considers Kubrick's methods of developing scenes to fit with the classical auteur theory of directing, allowing collaboration and improvisation with the actors during filming. Malcolm McDowell recalled Kubrick's collaborative emphasis and his willingness to allow McDowell to improvise a scene, stating that "there was a script and we followed it, but when it didn't work he knew it, and we had to keep rehearsing endlessly until we were bored with it".

Once Kubrick was confident in the overall staging of a scene, and felt the actors were prepared, he would then develop the visual aspects, including camera and lighting placement. Walker believes that Kubrick was one of "very few film directors competent to instruct their lighting photographers in the precise effect they want".

Gilbert Adair, writing in a review for Full Metal Jacket, commented that "Kubrick's approach to language has always been of a reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all whims, shades and modulations of personal expression". Johnson notes that although Kubrick was a "visual filmmaker", he also loved words and was like a writer in his approach, very sensitive to the story itself. Before shooting began, Kubrick tried to have the script as complete as possible, but still allowed himself enough space to make changes during the filming. Kubrick told Robert Emmett Ginna Jr.: I think you have to view the entire problem of putting the story you want to tell up there on that light square. It begins with the selection of the property; it continues through the creation of the story, the sets, the costumes, the photography and the acting. And when the picture is shot, it's only partially finished. I think the cutting is just a continuation of directing a movie. I think the use of music effects, opticals and finally main titles are all part of telling the story. And I think the fragmentation of these jobs, by different people, is a very bad thing. Kubrick also said: "I think that the best plot is no apparent plot. I like a slow start, the start that gets under the audience's skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don't have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense tools."

Posthumous analysis of his films often highlight a pervasive "misanthropy", an unsentimental style, and being less interested in the specific emotions or personality traits of his characters. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino describes the manner in which Kubrick writes characters and films as "cold" and detached.

Directing style

Kubrick was notorious for filming far more takes than is common during feature production and his relentless approach often placed large demands on his actors. Jack Nicholson remarked that Kubrick would frequently require up to fifty takes of a scene before the director felt justice had been done to the material. Nicole Kidman explained that the dozens of takes he often required had the effect of suppressing an actor's conscious thoughts about technique, diffusing the concentration Kubrick said he could see in the eyes of an actor who was not yet performing at the peak of their ability and helping them to enter a "deeper place". Kubrick echoed this sentiment, saying, "[a]ctors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try".

While Kubrick's high take ratio was considered by some critics to be irrational, he firmly believed that actors were at their best during filming, as opposed to in rehearsals, saying, "[w]hen you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the crew, because it is like getting undressed in front of fifty people. Once you're accustomed to them, the presence of even one other person on set is discordant and tends to produce self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in itself".

In 1987, when Kubrick was asked about his reputation for excessive takes by Rolling Stone, he replied that it was exaggerated but that when it was true, "[i]t happens when actors are unprepared. You cannot act without knowing dialogue. If actors have to think about the words, they can't work on the emotion. So you end up doing thirty takes of something. And still you can see the concentration in their eyes; they don't know their lines. So you just shoot it and shoot it and hope you can get something out of it in pieces." He likewise told biographer Michel Ciment: [a]n actor can only do one thing at a time, and when he learned his lines only well enough to say them while he's thinking about them, he will always have trouble as soon as he has to work on the emotions of the scene or find camera marks. In a strong emotional scene, it is always best to be able to shoot in complete takes to allow the actor a continuity of emotion, and it is rare for most actors to reach their peak more than once or twice. There are, occasionally, scenes which benefit from extra takes, but even then, I'm not sure that the early takes aren't just glorified rehearsals with the adding adrenaline of film running through the camera.

Cinematography

Kubrick credited the ease with which he filmed scenes to his early years as a photographer. He rarely added camera instructions in the script, preferring to handle that after a scene is created, as the visual part of film-making came easiest to him. Even when deciding which props and settings would be used, Kubrick paid meticulous attention to detail and tried to collect as much background material as possible, activities the director likened to being "a detective". Cinematographer John Alcott, who worked closely with Kubrick on four of his films, remarked that Kubrick "questions everything", and was involved in the technical aspects of film-making including camera placement, scene composition, choice of lens, and even operating the camera which would usually be left to the cinematographer. Alcott considered Kubrick to be the "nearest thing to genius I've ever worked with, with all the problems of a genius".

Among Kubrick's innovations in cinematography are his use of special effects, as in 2001, where he used both slit-scan photography and front-screen projection, which won Kubrick his only Oscar for special effects. Some reviewers have discussed Kubrick's use of "one-point perspective", which leads the viewer's eye towards a central vanishing point. The technique relies on creating a complex visual symmetry using parallel lines in a scene which all converge on that single point, leading away from the viewer. Combined with camera motion it could produce an effect that one writer describes as "hypnotic and thrilling". The Shining was among the first half-dozen features to use the then-revolutionary Steadicam (after the 1976 films Bound for Glory, Marathon Man and Rocky). Kubrick used it to its fullest potential, which gave the audience smooth, stabilized, motion-tracking by the camera. Kubrick described Steadicam as being like a "magic carpet", allowing "fast, flowing, camera movements" in the maze in The Shining which otherwise would have been impossible.

Kubrick was among the first directors to use video assist during filming. At the time he began using it in 1966, it was considered cutting-edge technology, requiring him to build his own system. Having it in place during the filming of 2001, he was able to view a video of a take immediately after it was filmed. On some films, such as Barry Lyndon, he used custom-made zoom lenses, which allowed him to start a scene with a close-up and slowly zoom out to capture the full panorama of scenery and to film long takes under changing outdoor lighting conditions by making aperture adjustments while the cameras rolled. LoBrutto notes that Kubrick's technical knowledge about lenses "dazzled the manufacturer's engineers, who found him to be unprecedented among contemporary filmmakers". For Barry Lyndon he also used a specially adapted high-speed (f/0.7) Zeiss camera lens, originally developed for NASA, to shoot scenes lit only with candlelight. Actor Steven Berkoff recalls that Kubrick wanted scenes to be shot using "pure candlelight", and in doing so Kubrick "made a unique contribution to the art of filmmaking going back to painting ... You almost posed like for portraits." LoBrutto notes that cinematographers all over the world wanted to know about Kubrick's "magic lens" and that he became a "legend" among cameramen around the world.

Editing and music

Kubrick spent extensive hours editing, often working seven days a week, and more hours a day as he got closer to deadlines. For Kubrick, written dialogue was one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on film editing, Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often "re-direct" a film, and he remarked: "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking ... Editing is the only unique aspect of filmmaking which does not resemble any other art form—a point so important it cannot be overstressed ... It can make or break a film". Biographer John Baxter stated: 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.

Kubrick's attention to music was an aspect of what many referred to as his "perfectionism" and extreme attention to detail, which his wife Christiane attributed to an addiction to music. In his last six films, Kubrick usually chose music from existing sources, especially classical compositions. He preferred selecting recorded music over having it composed for a film. He also felt that building scenes from great music often created the "most memorable scenes" in the best films. In one instance, for a scene in Barry Lyndon which was written into the screenplay as merely, "Barry duels with Lord Bullingdon", he spent forty-two working days in the editing phase. During that period, he listened to what LoBrutto describes as "every available recording of seventeenth-and eighteenth- century music, acquiring thousands of records to find Handel's sarabande used to score the scene". Nicholson likewise observed his attention to music, stating that Kubrick "listened constantly to music until he discovered something he felt was right or that excited him".

Kubrick is credited with introducing Hungarian composer György Ligeti to a broad Western audience by including his music in 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. According to Baxter, the music in 2001 was "at the forefront of Kubrick's mind" when he conceived the film. During earlier screening he played music by Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams, and Kubrick and writer Clarke had listened to Carl Orff's transcription of Carmina Burana, consisting of 13th century sacred and secular songs. Ligeti's music employed the new style of micropolyphony, which used sustained dissonant chords that shift slowly over time, a style he originated. Its inclusion in the film became a "boon for the relatively unknown composer".

Personal life

Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz, a caricaturist, on May 29, 1948, when he was 19. The couple lived together in Greenwich Village and divorced in 1951. He met his second wife, the Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York City's East Village beginning in 1952, married in January 1955 and moved to Hollywood in July 1955, where she played a brief part as a ballet dancer in Kubrick's film Killer's Kiss (1955). The following year, she was art director for his film The Killing (1956). They divorced in 1957.

During the production of Paths of Glory in Munich in early 1957, Kubrick met and romanced the German actress Christiane Harlan. Kubrick married Harlan in 1958 and the couple remained together until his death in 1999. Besides his stepdaughter, they had two daughters together: Anya Renata and Vivian Vanessa. In 1959, they settled into a home at 316 South Camden Drive in Beverly Hills with Harlan's daughter, Katherina, aged six. They also lived in New York City, during which time Christiane studied art at the Art Students League of New York. The couple moved to the United Kingdom in 1961 to make Lolita, and Kubrick hired Peter Sellers to star in his next film, Dr. Strangelove. Sellers was unable to leave the UK, so Kubrick made Britain his permanent home thereafter. The move was convenient to Kubrick, since he shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine and he and Christiane had become alarmed with the increase in violence in New York City.

In 1965, the Kubricks bought Abbots Mead on Barnet Lane, just south-west of the Elstree/Borehamwood studio complex in England. Kubrick worked almost exclusively from this home for 14 years, where he researched, invented special effects techniques, designed ultra-low light lenses for specially modified cameras, pre-produced, edited, post-produced, advertised, distributed and carefully managed all aspects of four of his films. In 1978, Kubrick moved into Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, a mainly 18th-century stately home, about 30 mi (50 km) north of London. His new home became a workplace for Kubrick and his wife, "a perfect family factory" as Christiane called it, and Kubrick converted the stables into extra production rooms.

A workaholic, Kubrick rarely took a vacation or left England during the forty years before his death. LoBrutto notes that Kubrick's confined way of living and desire for privacy has led to spurious stories about his reclusiveness. Michael Herr, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Full Metal Jacket, considers his "reclusiveness" to be myth: "[He] was in fact a complete failure as a recluse, unless you believe that a recluse is simply someone who seldom leaves his house ... he was one of the most gregarious men I ever knew and it didn't change anything that most of this conviviality went on over the phone." LoBrutto states that one of the reasons Kubrick acquired a reputation as a recluse was that he insisted on remaining near his home. Kubrick believed there were only three places on Earth where he could make high-quality films: Los Angeles, New York City and London. He disliked living in Los Angeles and thought London a superior film production center to New York City.

Death

On March 7, 1999, six days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family and the film's stars, Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of 70, at his manor house in Childwickbury, Hertfordshire. His funeral was held there five days later, with only close friends and family in attendance, totaling about 100 people. The media were kept a mile away outside the entrance gate. Among those who gave eulogies were his brother-in-law Jan Harlan, Terry Semel, Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, and Tom Cruise. He was buried next to his favorite tree on the estate.

Legacy

Cultural impact

Part of the New Hollywood film-making wave, Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century", and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential film directors. According to film historian Robert Kolker, Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, George Lucas, James Cameron, Terry Gilliam, the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott, and George A. Romero, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and additionally in the case of Spielberg and Scott, collaboration. Steven Spielberg comments that the way Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories" and that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history". Orson Welles, one of Kubrick's greatest personal influences and favorite directors, said that: "Among those whom I would call 'younger generation', Kubrick appears to me to be a giant."

Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Brad Bird, Christopher Nolan, Todd Field, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, Gaspar Noé, and Don Hertzfeldt.

Artists in fields other than film have also expressed admiration for Kubrick. English musician and poet PJ Harvey argued that "something about [...] what is not said in his films...there's so much space, so many things that are silent – and somehow, in that space and silence everything becomes clear. With every film, he seems to capture the essence of life itself". The music video for Kanye West's 2010 song "Runaway" was inspired by Eyes Wide Shut. Pop singer Lady Gaga's concert shows have included dialogue, costumes, and music from A Clockwork Orange.

Tributes

In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia lifetime achievement award the "Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award". Many people who worked with Kubrick created the 2001 documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan.

The first public exhibition of material from Kubrick's personal archives was presented jointly in 2004 by the Deutsches Filmmuseum and Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, in cooperation with Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan / The Stanley Kubrick Estate. In 2009, an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films was held in Dublin, Ireland. On October 30, 2012, an exhibition devoted to Kubrick opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and concluded in June 2013. In October 2013, the Brazil São Paulo International Film Festival staged an exhibit of his work and a retrospective of his films. The exhibit opened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in late 2014 and ended in January 2015.

Kubrick is widely referenced in popular culture; for example, the TV series The Simpsons is said to contain more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. When the Directors Guild of Great Britain gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a sequence of all the homages from the show. Several works have been created that related to Kubrick's life, including the made-for-TV mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon (2002), which is a parody of the conspiracy theory that Kubrick had been involved with the faked footage of the NASA Moon landings. Colour Me Kubrick (2005) was authorized by Kubrick's family and starred John Malkovich as Alan Conway, a con artist who had assumed Kubrick's identity in the 1990s. In the 2004 film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Kubrick was portrayed by Stanley Tucci.

In April 2018, the International Astronomical Union named the largest mountain of Pluto's moon Charon after Kubrick.