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Stanley Kubrick

 
Who2 Profiles:

Stanley Kubrick, Filmmaker

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Stanley Kubrick
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  • Born: 26 July 1928
  • Birthplace: The Bronx, New York
  • Died: 7 March 1999 (Natural causes)
  • Best Known As: The director of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick wrote and directed some of the most talked-about films of the 1960s and 1970s: the Roman slave saga Spartacus (1960), the Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), the spooky and thoughtful space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, co-written with Arthur C. Clarke), the nightmarish A Clockwork Orange (1971), and the socko horror film The Shining (1980, starring Jack Nicholson). Kubrick's films featured arresting visuals, inventive stories and an often bleak view of humanity. The director was known as a deliberate perfectionist who often filmed dozens of takes of a single shot and took three or more years to plan and shoot a film. He was also famously reclusive, rarely appearing in public and wrapping his later productions in extreme secrecy. He died in 1999 shortly after shooting his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.

After Kubrick's death his long-planned film project, A.I., was completed and released by Steven Spielberg in 2001.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Stanley Kubrick

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(born July 26, 1928, New York, N.Y., U.S. — died March 7, 1999, Childwickbury Manor, near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, Eng.) U.S. film director. He began his career as a photographer for Look magazine (1945 – 50). He directed two documentary films before directing his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953). He won fame with Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and the internationally acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which earned an Academy Award for special visual effects. His later movies include A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). His films are characterized by a cool visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic pessimism.

For more information on Stanley Kubrick, visit Britannica.com.

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Stanley Kubrick

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Although he first won acclaim for films he made during the 1950s such as "Spartacus" and "Lolita", director Stanley Kubrick (born 1928) is best known for his later work, including "Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining", and "Full Metal Jacket".

During his long and distinguished career as a filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick has earned a reputation as a control-obsessed perfectionist who often re-shoots scenes hundreds of times, driving actors and actresses to distraction. Yet a number of his films are considered classics of postwar American cinema, including the one critics most often point to as his masterpiece, the black comedy Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick himself for the most part ignores what people have to say about both him and his movies, believing that his work speaks for itself.

Born in New York City in 1928, Stanley Kubrick grew up in one of the more prosperous families of his Bronx neighborhood. Yet his childhood was rather bleak and unhappy. His father, a doctor, tried his best to stimulate his son's interest in learning. He made books from his library readily available, for example, and also taught the boy to play chess. But Kubrick was a poor student throughout his school years; nothing his teachers presented in class seemed to be able to hold his attention. "I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old, " he is quoted as saying in The Making of Kubrick's 2001. When he turned 13, however, his father bought him a still camera as a birthday present. As time would tell, it was probably the most significant gift he ever received.

Although young Kubrick took a dim view of school, he was an avid moviegoer with a keen sense of what worked and what didn't. "One of the important things about seeing run-of-the-mill Hollywood films eight times a week was that many of them were so bad, " biographer Vincent LoBrutto reports Kubrick told a writer for the New York Times. "Without even beginning to understand what the problems of making films were, I was taken with the impression that I could not do a film any worse than the ones I was seeing. I also felt I could, in fact, do them a lot better."

Experimented with Still Photography

But it was still photography, not film, that brought Kubrick his first commercial success. Rarely without his camera, he made a hobby of taking pictures to document the events unfolding around him. One such occasion presented itself following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945. Kubrick, who was then only 17, came upon a newspaper dealer at his stand surrounded by headlines trumpeting news of the president's death. His subject's dejected posture and mournful facial expression captured the eye of the young photographer, who snapped his picture. But as LoBrutto observed, "Stanley didn't just take the man's picture, he made the situation into a piece of photojournalism." Editors at Look magazine recognized the nascent artistry in his work and bought the photograph for publication. It was the first picture Kubrick had ever sold.

Not long after that, Kubrick landed a job as a staff photographer for Look. He remained in the job for several years and traveled all over the United States. Many of his assignments were simply routine, but some allowed him more freedom to exercise his creativity.

Kubrick's travels eventually inspired him to enroll at Columbia University as a non-matriculating student. In his spare time, he often attended films shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art. And those childhood chess matches with his father finally paid off when he began playing the game for money from time to time in several New York City venues.

Tried His Hand at Filmmaking

In 1951, at the age of 23, Kubrick financed his first film with his own savings. His 16-minute documentary, entitled Day of the Fight, was about boxer Walter Cartier, the subject of one of his Look magazine photo assignments. Kubrick served as director, cinematographer, editor, and sound technician for the film, which RKO bought for its This Is America series. It played at the Paramount Theatre in New York.

Kubrick soon quit his job at Look to pursue filmmaking on a full-time basis. With an advance from RKO, Kubrick made a short documentary, The Flying Padre (1951), about a priest named Father Fred Stadtmueller who traveled around his New Mexico parish in an airplane. Two years later, Kubrick made his first color film, a 30-minute industrial documentary entitled The Seafarers.

Kubrick raised $13, 000 from relatives to help finance his first feature-length film, Fear and Desire (1953). The plot centers around four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who kill four of their adversaries while trying to escape only to discover they've killed their own doubles. (Kubrick's first wife, Toba Metz, whom he married when he was 18, was one of the crew members on the project.) In later years, Kubrick disowned the film, calling it amateurish. On more than one occasion, he has even prevented it from being shown in public.

Kubrick's next film was Killer's Kiss (1955), financed with $40, 000 raised from friends and relatives. It tells the story of an aging boxer who becomes involved with a gangster's girlfriend. He followed this with The Killing (1956), which focuses on a gang of small-time hoods and their elaborate plan to rob a racetrack. Widely regarded as an above-average crime thriller, it is the film Kubrick himself reportedly considers the true beginning of his filmmaking career.

Scored First Cinematic Triumph

In 1957, Kubrick directed Paths of Glory (1957), an adaptation that he, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson wrote of the best-selling Humphrey Cobb novel of the same name. No studio had been willing to take on this particular project until Kirk Douglas agreed to star. Filmed in Germany, Paths of Glory is about three soldiers tried for cowardice; it is regarded as one of the best films ever made about the insanity of war.

Despite the kudos he received for Paths of Glory, Kubrick ran into some difficulties with his next few projects, which never even reached the production stage. His fortunes took a turn for the better, however, when the original director of Spartacus, Anthony Mann, was fired and producer Kirk Douglas offered Kubrick the job, making the 32-year-old filmmaker the youngest person ever to direct a Hollywood epic. It took 167 days to shoot, employed some 10, 000 people, and cost more than $12 million, an astronomical sum in those days. Although Spartacus was a hit upon its release in 1960 and attracted some Academy Award attention, it left Kubrick feeling as if he had had too little creative control. As a result, he later sought to dis-associate himself from the film.

Having acquired the rights to Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita with its themes of sexual obsession and pedophilia, director Kubrick and producer James B. Harris headed to England to do the film. The two men ended up rewriting Nabokov's script, leaving only about 20 percent of the original (by Nabokov's own estimate). The novel's subject matter was handled very subtly in the film, primarily through looks and double-entendres. But this toned-down version left many moviegoers and critics disappointed because they felt it was not true to the frank eroticism of the original story.

Ever since making Lolita, the thrice-married Kubrick has called England home; he even refuses to leave the country to work elsewhere. Notoriously reclusive, he lives in a semi-rural manor house in Childwickbury, near St. Albans. He rarely grants interviews, but when he does, he demands total control over the circumstances and the result. "He doesn't like people much; they interest him mainly when they do unspeakably hideous things or when their idiocy is so malignant as to be horrifyingly amusing, " Kubrick biographer John Baxter quoted Kubrick's onetime collaborator Calder Willingham as saying. That assessment would seem to be supported by Kubrick's next film, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Tackled Diverse Themes

Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis led the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. Based on Peter George's novel Red Alert, it is what some consider the blackest comedy in movie history. The film is both a suspenseful Cold War thriller and a wicked farce that lampoons both the military and political establishments. It was a resounding hit, with Kubrick receiving Academy Award nominations as co-author, director, and producer.

Kubrick next hired science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke to develop a story about man's encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. The result was the landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It netted Kubrick more Academy Award nominations for writing and directing and his only Academy Award for designing and directing the movie's complicated special effects. Critics generally panned 2001, but audiences loved it. Regarded as a technological triumph of filmmaking, it is also noteworthy for the fact that it contains fewer words than any other commercial sound film of its length in history (about 40 minutes' worth over the course of nearly 3 hours). "The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize it, " Kubrick once explained, as reported online at Criterion's The Films of Stanley Kubrick. "I tried to create a visual experience."

In 1971, Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange for the screen and also filled his customary roles of producer and director. Controversial because of its violent scenes, the film initially garnered an "X" rating in the United States. Kubrick nevertheless wound up with three Academy Award nominations (for writer, producer, and director) as well as the New York Film Critics' Best Picture and Best Director honors. It played in England for nearly a year to sellout crowds before Kubrick and Warner Brothers removed it from theaters in the wake of several crimes that appeared to be modeled on acts of violence depicted in the film.

Kubrick's next film, Barry Lyndon (1975), represented quite a departure from his previous works. Based on the eighteenth-century novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, it was an expensive, meticulously detailed costume drama that did not do well at the box office. But it was a hit with critics and with Kubrick's fellow filmmakers, who nominated it for seven Academy Awards. Three of those were for Kubrick himself as the movie's writer, director, and producer.

Five years later, Kubrick adapted Stephen King's novel The Shining for the screen. Although it was a financially successful film, it left critics unmoved and angered King, who deeply resented the changes Kubrick had made to his original story. King eventually bought back the rights to The Shining and approved a 1997 television remake that he felt was more in line with how he himself envisioned the characters and themes.

In 1987, Kubrick released Full Metal Jacket, based on Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers. A brutal look at Marine basic training and the subsequent combat experiences of a group of recruits sent to Vietnam, the film tackled one of Kubrick's favorite themes-dehumanization, particularly amid war and violence. But some moviegoers and critics took issue with the fact that he insisted on shooting the movie in London rather than in a more appropriate locale. To make his sets look as authentic as possible, Kubrick demolished a number of 1930s-era buildings to create his own rubble, brought in palm trees from Spain, and imported over 100, 000 plastic tropical plants from Hong Kong.

Scheduled for release in late 1998, Eyes Wide Shut took nearly two years for Kubrick to complete. Based on a novel by Frederic Raphael, it is a tale of jealousy and sexual obsession involving a married couple who are both psychiatrists. Problems plagued the project almost from the beginning. Star Tom Cruise reportedly balked at having to reshoot so many of his scenes and was furious that the delays finally forced one of his co-stars, Harvey Keitel, to quit due to a scheduling conflict. His departure meant that six months' worth of work had to be scrapped.

Despite his eccentricities, Kubrick is an acknowledged master of the modern cinema. His thought-provoking, carefully crafted films address timeless themes such as the absurdity of war, the nature of crime and punishment, obsessive love, madness, and even the enigma of humankind's evolution. The fact that he has not yet had a blockbuster success during his career is of no concern to him; he aims to please himself above all, which is perhaps the source of his perfectionism. As Kubrick remarked in a 1997 speech upon accepting the D.W. Griffith Award from the Director's Guild of America, a transcript of which is available online at http://pages.prodigy.com, "although [directing a film] can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling."

Further Reading

Agel, Jerome, editor, The Making of Kubrick's 2001, New American Library, 1970.

Baxter, John, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, Carroll & Graf, 1997.

Ciment, Michael, Kubrick, Holt, 1984.

Falsetto, Mario, editor, Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, G.K. Hall & Co., 1996.

Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, Continuum, 1993.

LoBrutto, Vincent, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, Donald I. Fine Books, 1997.

Nelson, Thomas, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze, Indiana University Press, 1982.

Entertainment Weekly, December 15, 1995; April 11, 1997.

Film Comment, September-October 1996.

New Statesman, October 3, 1997.

Omni, May 1993.

People Weekly, January 27, 1997; June 9, 1997.

"Criterion's The Films of Stanley Kubrick, " http://www.voyagerco.com/criterion/indepth.cgi? (March 4, 1998).

"Stanley Kubrick's Videotaped DGA Acceptance Speech, " http://pages.prodigy.com/kubrick/dgaspe.htm (May 19, 1998).

"Stanley Kubrick: The Master Filmmaker, " http://pages.prodigy.com/kubrick (May 19, 1998).

Quotes By:

Stanley Kubrick

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Quotes:

"A film is -- or should be -- more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

"The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes."

"The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes."

"If you can talk brilliantly enough about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered."

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Stanley Kubrick

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Biography

As one of the most universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era, Stanley Kubrick enjoyed a reputation and a standing unique among the filmmakers of his day. A perennial outsider, he worked far beyond the confines of Hollywood, maintaining complete artistic control and making movies according to the whims and time constraints of no one but himself, but with the rare advantage of studio financial support for all of his endeavors. Working in a vast range of styles and genres spanning from black comedy to horror to crime drama, Kubrick was an enigma, living and creating in almost total seclusion, far away from the watchful eye of the media. His films were a reflection of his obsessive nature, perfectionist masterpieces which remain among the most provocative and visionary motion pictures ever made. Born July 26, 1928 in New York City, Kubrick initially earned renown as a photographer, selling his first free-lance pictures to Look magazine while still in high school. By the age of 17 he was working as a Look staff photographer, travelling the world in their employ for several years. He subsequently enrolled as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University, attending classes taught by the likes of Calvin Trillin and Mark Van Doren. In the late 1940s Kubrick became enamored of filmmaking, attending Museum of Modern Art showings regularly. To supplement his income, he also played chess for money in Greenwich Village. In 1951, Kubrick used his life savings to finance his first film, Day of the Fight, a 16-minute documentary profiling boxer Walter Cartier. The piece was later purchased by RKO for its This Is America series and played at the Paramount Theatre in New York. Encouraged by his success, Kubrick quit his post at Look to pursue filmmaking full-time. Soon, RKO assigned him to helm a short for their documentary series Pathe Screenliner. Titled Flying Padre, the nine-minute work spotlighted Fred Stadtmueller, a priest who piloted a Piper Cub around his 400-mile New Mexico parish. In 1953 the Atlantic and Gulf Coast District of the Seafarers International Union commissioned Kubrick to direct a half-hour industrial documentary called The Seafarers, his first color film. With the aid of relatives, Kubrick raised some $13,000 in order to finance his feature debut, the war story Fear and Desire. Filmed in the San Gabrielle mountains near Los Angeles with a crew of less than ten people (including Kubrick's then-wife Toba Metz), the picture was filmed silently, with its dialogue dubbed-in later (a measure which ultimately added $20,000 to the final cost). Shown only briefly on the New York arthouse circuit, Fear and Desire failed to earn back its initial investment and was later disowned by its creator. His sophomore feature, the gangland melodrama Killer's Kiss, followed in 1955. A more successful effort, it was sold to United Artists and received worldwide distribution, playing primarily as a second feature. In 1956 Kubrick directed his first studio picture, The Killing. A heist film told via an ambitious overlapping time structure, the film starred Sterling Hayden, with dialogue from the legendary hard-boiled crime novelist Jim Thompson. The result was the director's first artistic triumph, and it brought him to the attention of MGM production head Dore Share, where Kubrick was teamed with novelist Calder Willingham to develop future projects. After preparing a screenplay based on Steven Zweig's story "The Burning Secret" which went unproduced, Thompson joined the duo to adapt the Humphrey Cobb war novel Paths of Glory. Studio after studio rejected the project until Kirk Douglas agreed to star, resulting in a financing deal with United Artists. Shot in Germany, the 1957 film won considerable critical acclaim, and further cemented Kubrick's reputation as a rising talent. However, the next two years left him in a state of limbo, as a pair of proposed projects -- I Stole 16 Million Dollars, a planned vehicle for Douglas based on the life of safecracker Herbert Emmerson Wilson, and an untitled film about Mosby's Rangers, a southern guerilla force active during the U.S. Civil War -- both failed to come to fruition. Kubrick then spent some six months on pre-production work for the Marlon Brando western One-Eyed Jacks, only to look on helplessly as Brando decided at the eleventh hour to direct the picture himself. Finally, in 1959 he replaced Anthony Mann on Spartacus, a lavish historical epic starring Douglas, Laurence Olivier, and Tony Curtis. The most costly film produced in Hollywood to date, with a budget of over $12 million, it proved to be a major hit, winning the Golden Globe Award for "Best Picture." In 1962 Kubrick resurfaced with the controversial Lolita, based on the infamous Nabokov novel about a man's infatuation with his teenaged stepdaughter. Due to a number of financial and legal difficulties, the film was shot in England, where Kubrick continued to live and work after the project's completion. He next turned to his first undisputed masterpiece, the 1964 Cold War-era black comedy Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a brilliant adaptation of the Peter George novel Red Alert starring Peter Sellers in three different roles. In December of 1965 Kubrick began production on what was to become his crowning achievement, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke story The Sentinel, the 1968 film -- a complex meditation on man's instinctive desire for violence, set against a backdrop of an American spacecraft's contact with extraterrestrial intelligence -- quickly emerged as a landmark in motion picture history, growing in status to become recognized as one of the greatest and most thought-provoking movies ever released. A biography of Napoleon was projected as the follow-up, but when expected costs proved too prohibitive, the film never moved beyond the planning stages. Instead, Kubrick turned to another controversial novel, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. A satiric 1971 essay on crime and punishment set in a violent future world, the film initially scored an "X" rating in the U.S. but proved surprisingly popular regardless, even netting several Oscar nominations. In Britain, A Clockwork Orange played theatrically for a year without incident, but was pulled after a number of copy-cat crimes which authorities blamed on the picture's influence, including a brutal gang-rape mirroring a scene in the film. Moving from the future to the past, in 1975 Kubrick adapted William Makepeace Thackery's 19th century novel Barry Lyndon, a lavish costume drama detailing the rise and fall of an Irish rogue (Ryan O'Neal) during the 1700s. In 1980, Kubrick helmed The Shining, an adaptation of a horror novel by author Stephen King. While one of the director's greatest popular successes, critical notice was less kind, and he spent the early half of the decade away from the camera, plotting his next move. The result was 1987's Full Metal Jacket, a Vietnam War drama which scored with both audiences and critics. Despite the film's success, Kubrick again went into hibernation. Finally, in late 1996 Kubrick began work on Eyes Wide Shut, starring husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. In 1997, Kubrick was given two of the film world's highest honors, winning the D.W. Griffith Award from the Director's Guild of America as well as the Golden Lion Award at the 54th Venice International Film Festival. Two years later, Eyes Wide Shut was released to extremely mixed reviews; a dreamlike erotic odyssey, it proved to be Kubrick's last film. He died of natural causes on March 7 of that year, leaving behind one of the cinema's most provocative, varied, and altogether brilliant legacies. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Stanley Kubrick

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"Kubrick" redirects here. For other uses, see Kubrick (disambiguation).
Stanley Kubrick

During filming of Barry Lyndon (1975)
Born July 26, 1928(1928-07-26)
Manhattan, New York, United States
Died March 7, 1999(1999-03-07) (aged 70)
Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Cause of death Heart attack
Ethnicity Jewish American
Occupation Film director, film producer, film editor, screenwriter, cinematographer
Years active 1951–1999
Notable work(s) Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Paths of Glory, Spartacus
Style Psychological, Nonlinear, Surrealistic, Noir, Black comedy
Influenced by Max Ophüls, Sergei Eisenstein, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Orson Welles, Pavel Klushantsev
Influenced Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Michael Mann, George A. Romero, Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Gaspar Noé, Michael Moore, Tim Burton, P.T. Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Matt Groening, Frank Darabont
Spouse Toba Etta Metz (1948–51; divorced)
Ruth Sobotka (1954–57; divorced)
Christiane Harlan (1958–99; his death)

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and cinematographer, 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, a slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, technical perfectionism, reluctance to talk about his films, and reclusiveness. He maintained almost complete artistic control, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors.

Several of his films broke new cinematic ground. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was a science-fiction film noted for innovative visual effects and scientific realism. Barry Lyndon (1975) used specially-designed lenses to film scenes lit by natural candlelight. The Shining (1980) was the first film to make extensive use of a Steadicam to allow stabilized and fluid tracking shots. Kubrick was cinematographer for four of his thirteen films, and produced, directed, and wrote all or part of the screenplays for nearly all his films.

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. Some of his films created controversy. A Clockwork Orange (1971) was not shown in Britain for many years because it inspired copycat crimes. Lolita (1962) faced opposition in the United States because of its theme of underage sexuality. Paths of Glory (1957) was banned in France for its anti-war portrayal of French soldiers.

Kubrick's films often initially met with lukewarm reception, only to be acclaimed years later as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on later generations of filmmakers. Some authors of novels he adapted, such as Stephen King, were highly critical of Kubrick's adaptations of their work, though others, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Gustav Hasford were pleased. He was widely admired by other prominent filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg who called Space Odyssey his generation's "big bang." Film historian Michel Ciment notes that "his films are among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century."[1]

Contents

Early years

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, New York, the first of two children of Jacques (Jacob) Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Sadie Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–85), who were both Jewish. His sister, Barbara Mary Kubrick, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were Jewish of Austrian, Romanian and Polish origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx.[2]:6

The Kubrick biographer Geoffrey Cocks writes that Kubrick's family was not religious, although his parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony.[3] When the 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 did not attend synagogue, like many Jews who led secular lives.

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."[2]:24 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".[3] Many of his friends from his "close-knit neighborhood" would become involved with his early films, including writing music scores and scripts.[3]

Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession, appearing in many scenes in his films. He explains the value of playing chess to his career:

If chess has any relationship to filmmaking, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.[4]:11

His father 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. He encouraged him to read from his library at home while at the same time permitting him to take up photography as a serious hobby.[3]

Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 45. He was a poor student, with a meager 67 grade average.[5] According to his English teacher, "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 . . . "[2]:23 Kubrick had a poor attendance record, and often skipped school to take in double-feature films.[2]:15 He graduated in 1945, but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated hope 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.

Kubrick as a Look magazine photographer in 1949

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).[2]:33 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.[6] 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 his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz in May 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 the director Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style, and by the director Elia Kazan, whom he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors.[1]

Career

1950s

Short films

In 1951, Kubrick made a few short documentaries, beginning with The March of Time newsreels to movie theatres. His first was the independently financed Day of the Fight (1951), notable for using reverse tracking shot, later to one of Kubrick's recognized camera movements.[7] Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Look and began work on others, including, Flying Padre (1951) and The Seafarers (1953), Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving documentary works, although some historians believe he made others.[8] He also served as second unit director on an episode of the TV show, Omnibus, about Abraham Lincoln, clips of which are included in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001).

Fear and Desire (1953)

Fear and Desire (1953) was 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 his friend Howard Sackler. Fear and Desire garnered a few respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Kubrick was later embarrassed by the film as an amateur effort and tried to keep it out of circulation.[9] It was shown for the first time on Turner Classic Movies in December 2011.[10]

Killer's Kiss (1955)

Killer's Kiss is a one hour film noir film about a young heavyweight 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, and production was again made with "a virtual one-man crew," with Kubrick co-writing the script with Sackler.[11]

Although the film met with limited commercial success,[12][13] film historian Alexander Walker notes that it was an "oddly compelling work that tells much about the young Kubrick and explains why he stirred up immediate critical notice."[4]:45 The film had a number of striking aspects, states Walker: "Kubrick's talent for lighting and photographing a scene so as to abstract its latent emotional value"; and the tone of the film with its urban loneliness and melancholy.[4]:45

The Killing (1956)

The Killing is a fictional story of a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong, starring Sterling Hayden. This is Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. Its non-linear narrative would have a major influence on later directors, including Quentin Tarantino,[14][15][16] The Killing followed many of the conventions of film noir, in both its plotting and cinematography style, and although the genre peaked in the 1940s, many critics regard this film as one of its best.[17] Not a financial success, it still received good reviews,[18] and brought Kubrick and his producer partner, James B. Harris, to the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,[19] which offered them its massive collection of stories from which to choose their next project.

Long before it became widely practiced in films, Kubrick portrayed war as brutal, using stark black-and-white images in Paths of Glory. This became far more common after the Vietnam era, although prior war films such as All Quiet on the Western Front had similar imagery.

Paths of Glory (1957)

Kubrick's next film, Paths of Glory, set during World War I, is based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel, and stars Kirk Douglas. It follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. The film was not a significant commercial success, but it was critically acclaimed and 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.[20] The film was banned in both France and (for less time) Germany for many years for its fictionalized depictions of the French military.

Departure from One-Eyed Jacks

Upon his return to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months on the Marlon Brando vehicle One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Kubrick had been earlier announced as its director when titled Gun's Up. It was Charles Neider's novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones to be produced by Marlon Brando. 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."[21] The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando and released in 1961.

1960s

Kubrick worked on a number of unproduced screenplays in addition to preproduction work on Lolita until Kirk Douglas asked him to take over his production of the epic Spartacus (1960) from Anthony Mann, who had been fired by the studio two weeks into shooting.

Spartacus (1960)

The life story of the historical figure Spartacus and the events of the Third Servile War, also called "The Gladiator War," stars Kirk Douglas as rebellious slave Spartacus and Laurence Olivier as his foe, the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus. Due to conflicts with Douglas, who also produced the film, Spartacus would become the only Kubrick film in which he had no hand in the screenplay, final editing, [22] producing credit, or casting.[23][24][25][26]

Spartacus was a critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major director, winning four Oscars. However, due to the film's embattled production, Kubrick was determined to find ways of working with Hollywood financing while still remaining independent of its production system, which he called "film by fiat, film by frenzy."[27]

Lolita (1962)

KubrickLolita2.jpg

In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film Lolita, his first attempt at black comedy. It 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 14-year-old nymphet. It starred Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon. Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate controversy because of its provocative story.[28] Kubrick toned down the screen adaptation to remove much of the eroticisim in the novel[2]:225 and made it into "an epic comedy of frustration rather than lust," writes film author Adrian Turner.[11]

Stylistically, Lolita was a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema...to the surrealism of the later films, notes film critic Gene Youngblood.[29] The film received mixed reviews, with some critics praising it for its daring subject matter, while others, like Pauline Kael, describing it as the "first new American comedy" since the 1940s. "Lolita is black slapstick and at times it's so far out that you gasp as you laugh."[2]:224

Dr. Strangelove

Peter Sellers' three roles in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
Sellers was one of only two actors[30] whom Kubrick allowed free rein to improvise his own dialogue and have great influence in creating his character.

Group Captain Mandrake sitting at an IBM 7090 console,[31]
President Merkin Muffley,
and Dr. Strangelove.

Kubrick's next project, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), became a cult film, 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 a renegade general played by Sterling Hayden. Peter Sellers, who had played a key role in Lolita, acted the part of three different people and was allowed to improvise his characters throughout much of the film.

The screenplay was based upon the entirely serious and straight thriller Red Alert by Peter George. Roger Ebert called it the best satirical film ever made.[32]

The "StarGate" sequence, one of many ground-breaking visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was primarily for these that Stanley Kubrick won his only personal Oscar award.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). During preproduction, he viewed as many science-fiction films as he could find in search of ideas and effects, many compiled by his staff archivist. The film was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70. A massive production for its time, it is famous for its groundbreaking visual effects, minimal use of dialogue and usage 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. In addition to well-known compositions, Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti; it was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. 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".[33] 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 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.[34] One of the film's few defenders was Penelope Gilliatt,[35] 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.

The film met with initially mixed reviews from critics, Kubrick noted in an interview that the most negative ones coming from New York critics. The conflicted reactions of audiences to the film is dramatized in John Updike's novel Rabbit Redux in which the lead character and other audiences are confused and baffled by the film. However, the film garnered a very positive one from other film directors, and inspired film director Frederico Fellini to initiate a correspondence with him, and the two remained in contact thereafter. Other directors with an immediate positive reaction to the film were Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Zefferelli, and John Boorman.[2]:314 Many today consider it among the greatest science fiction films ever made,[36] as well as one of the most influential.[37] Steven Spielberg called it his generation's "big bang".[38] It is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists.[39]

1970s

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 Orange (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."[40]

Kubrick photographed A Clockwork Orange quickly. 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.[41] For the score, Kubrick enlisted the electronic music composer Wendy Carlos to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer.

The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence, and was issued with an X rating in the United States.[42] 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.[43][44] The controversy was exacerbated when copycat crimes were committed in England by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in A Clockwork Orange. After receiving death threats to both himself and 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. 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.

Clockwork Orange marked Kubrick's first collaboration with his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who produced all his subsequent films. Harlan largely acted as a music expert for this film. Kubrick would ask for music with a certain effect or sound and Harlan would suggest various classical pieces that would be suitable

Special lenses were developed for Barry Lyndon to allow filming using only natural light.

Barry Lyndon

In the early 1970s Kubrick did extensive pre-production work on an eventually canceled film project on Napoleon. The studio pulled the plug due to another film about the French emperor doing poorly at the box office. However, Kubrick's next film was set in the same time period.

Barry Lyndon (1975) was an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon (also known as Barry Lyndon), a picaresque novel about the adventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and social climber. The cinematography and lighting techniques Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon were highly innovative. Most notably, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. Many scenes were lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings.[45] 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.

Barry Lyndon found a great audience in Europe, particularly in France. However, its measured pace and length at three hours put off many American critics and audiences, although 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, particularly among filmmakers. The director Martin Scorsese has cited it as his favorite Kubrick film. Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique", although he had panned it when much younger.[46]

During the filming in Ireland, Kubrick was notified that the IRA had considered him a possible target due to his use of English soldiers. With recent memories of the death threats he had received surrounding A Clockwork Orange Kubrick relocated the production to England overnight in just a few days.[47][48] Kubrick's reputation as a recluse originated at this time.

1980s

The Shining

Kubrick's film was among the earliest to make notably innovative and extensive use of the Steadicam, which can track motion smoothly without a dolly track.

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.

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. 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.[49] The Shining particularly 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).[50] This process was difficult for the actress Shelley Duvall, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman.

The novel's author Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little."[51] King objected to 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.

It was during the filming of The Shining that Kubrick's reputation for taking multiple takes grew. Nicholson's scene with the ghostly bartender was shot thirty-six times. Director John Boorman stated upon seeing the film that the performances came out of extremity and exhaustion,[2]:431 a comment that would be echoed years later by Nicole Kidman.

The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction has treated the film more favorably. Among horror movie fans, The Shining is a cult classic, often appearing at the top of best horror film lists alongside Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). 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," "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," and "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 in the US of Barry Lyndon.

Kubrick developed a close friendship with his co-screenwriter, novelist Diane Johnson, during the film production. They conversed about a wide range of topics from psychoanalysis to horror and fairy tales. Johnson had several dinners with Kubrick's family and found him to be a warm family man.[2]:413 During filming, Kubrick allowed his youngest daughter, Vivian, to make a documentary on the making of the film, an unusual move for him as he normally commanded a highly secure and closed set. As she was constantly filming on set herself, Kubrick often asked her about what had been talked about and decided in earlier days of shooting.[2]:434

Full Metal Jacket

Seven years later, Kubrick made his next film, Full Metal Jacket (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".[2]:469-470 Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film.[52] R. Lee Ermey served as the film's technical adviser in addition to his acting duties.[53][54]

Kubrick's youngest daughter, Vivian, did the original music for the film under the pseudonym of Abigail Mead. It runs roughly the same length as the many pop tunes of the era in the score. When her work was submitted to the Academy of Motion Pictures for Oscar consideration, it was immediately rejected as not sufficiently substantial and that the songs played a more pivotal role in the film.[2]:482

Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews upon its release, but found a reasonably large audience. It was overshadowed in the first year by Oliver Stone's Platoon and Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge. As with Kubrick's other films, its critical assessment has increased since its initial release.[citation needed]

1990s

Work on A. I

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.[55] 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.[56] 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.[citation needed] In addition, John Williams' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.[57]

Eyes Wide Shut

A central conflict in the film is between Dr. Harford's adventures in the sexual underworld of New York and his family life. Here he finds that his wife has discovered the Venetian mask he wore at the masked ball with bizarre sex rituals the previous evening.

Kubrick's final film was Eyes Wide Shut (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 relocated from turn-of-the-century 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".[58]

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.[58] Co-star Nicole Kidman observed that "Stanley's expectations of people were not really high."[58]

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 . . . "[59]:141Eyes 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. He never saw the final version released to the public.[1]:311

The 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."[1]:311

Nicole Kidman said that, while some critics describe the film's theme as "dark," in essence "it is a very hopeful film." During an interview in the documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, she says that Kubrick was indirectly stressing the moral values of "commitment and loyalty," adding that "ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut is about that commitment."[58] Sydney 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."[58] Michel Ciment agrees with Kidman, and 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:

Kubrick, shortly before his death, for the first time in his career, offers us a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, the dawn at the end of the nocturnal journey . . . Alice [Kidman] learns the lesson of her and Bill's emotional odyssey: "Maybe, I think, we should be grateful ... grateful that we've managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream."[1]

Personal life

See also: Stanley Kubrick's political and religious beliefs

Marriages and family

Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz in May 1948, when he was nineteen years of age. They lived together in Greenwich Village and divorced three years later, in 1951.

He met his second wife, the Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York's East Village from 1952 until their marriage in January 1955. They moved to Hollywood six months afterwards, where she had a brief part as a ballet dancer in Kubrick's next film, Killer's Kiss (1955). The following year she was art director for his next film, The Killing (1956). They divorced in 1957.

During the production of Paths of Glory (1957) in Munich, Kubrick met and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan, who played a small though memorable role. She was his girlfriend at the time, and Kubrick created a new ending to the film which he felt was too grim. Herr describes the part and its significance:

A young German girl has been captured by the French, and they force her to sing for them in a tavern. They intend to humiliate her, but when she sings, her innocence and the suffering that they've all been through move them to tears of shame and humanity. . . . [It] gave the film an unforgettable ending. The actress was incredible. Then she and Stanley got married, and the marriage lasted forty years.[60]:48

Kubrick married Harlan in 1958, and in 1959 they settled into a home in Beverly Hills with their stepdaughter, Katherina, age six, and Christiane was then pregnant with their first child, Anya.[2]:165 They also lived in New York, during which time Christiane studied art at the Art Students League of New York and became an independent artist who, notes LoBrutto, wanted "solace to think, study, and practice her craft."[2]:224

Christiane and Kubrick remained together 40 years, until his death in 1999. His daughters, Anya and Vivian, were born during the filming of Spartacus, roughly a year apart.

Actor Jack Nicholson, who starred in The Shining (1980), observed that "Stanley was very much a family man."[58] Similarly, Nicole Kidman, who starred in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), adds that Christiane "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."[58]

Settling in England

Kubrick's Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England

Kubrick moved out of Hollywood in his early career years and later shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine,[61] resulting in little media coverage of him as a personality.[62] He purchased the Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, where Kubrick set up his life so that family and business were one.[63] Christiane Kubrick told the London Times how rough New York had become, with children having to be escorted to school by police, people being rude, and smashed glass all over the street.[2]:271 Although he thrived on the manic energy of New York, Kubrick soon adapted to the more genteel atmosphere of England.

LoBrutto notes that living in England brought peace to the Kubrick family.[2]:328 Christiane recalls that after moving to England, one of the first British radio shows they heard was on gardening. The area's many landscaped parks, gardens and animals was an enormous contrast to New York.[2]:335 Kubrick told a journalist "It's very pleasant, very peaceful, very civilized here. London is in the best sense the way New York was" in the early 1900s.[2]:341

Home and workplace

At home, children and animals would frequently come in and out of the room as he worked on a script or met with an actor. Kubrick's many dogs and cats, toward which he showed an extraordinary affection, were often brought onto film sets or editing rooms.[64]

His wife, Christiane, called their home "a perfect family factory." A film trailer was kept in the driveway, and she took care of keeping visiting crew, staff, and actors, well fed and cared for. They both made special effort to keep their home warm and friendly, yet they shared a need for privacy. She adds, "When Stanley is relaxed he plays chess and likes to be very quiet. . . . Stanley is so gentle, such a shy and sensitive person."[2]:374-375

Kubrick rarely left England during the forty years before he died. "He lived a simple (outer) life, and a largely devotional one," writes Herr, who describes his home and workplace:[60]:38

His enormous house was as much a studio as a home, a double studio actually, one for him and his movies and one for his wife, Christiane, and her painting. It was a space of perpetual creative activity. He was thought by the press, and so by the public, to be sequestered there . . . like he was Howard Hughes . . . or the Wizard of Oz. This is because none of them could ever imagine living the kind of life Stanley lived.[60]:38

Despite once holding a pilot's license, Kubrick became averse to air travel with a fear of flying, and refused to take airplane trips.[65] However, Kubrick kept in constant contact with business associates in the U.S. and elsewhere mostly by telephone, calling associates at all hours for conversations that lasted from under a minute to many hours. Many of Kubrick's admirers and friends spoke of these telephone conversations with great affection and nostalgia after his death.[60]:64 Kubrick also frequently invited people to his house, ranging from actors to close friends, admired film directors, writers, and intellectuals. He rarely took vacations, even after completing a major film, and would simply begin preparing for his next one by catching up on seeing movies that came out during the last year and searching through books and magazines for his next project idea.[2]:495-496

Kubrick was an early user of desktop computers and had five that he worked with at home.[60]:43 LoBrutto describes Kubrick's home office:

Kubrick's personal office mirrored the pragmatic cluttter of his New York apartment. An arsenal of tape recorders facilitate the mammoth shooting script process . . . the office warehoused an enormous record collection of every recorded modern musical composition available. . . . A heady thinker and heavy smoker, Kubrick always had a cigarette in his hand.[2]:282

Personal characteristics

His appearance was not well known in his later years, to the extent that a British man named Alan Conway successfully impersonated Kubrick locally for a number of years.[66] Biographer Vincent LoBrutto notes that his privacy led to spurious stories about his reclusiveness, "producing a mythology more than a man," similar to those about Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes, and J. D. Salinger.[2]:1

However, Michael Herr, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Full Metal Jacket, and someone who knew him well, 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. Stanley saw a lot of people . . . 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."[60]:3 He hated being photographed, notes Herr, although he let a few people, including his daughter, Vivian, take a few candids when working.[60]:15

Herr also describes his voice and conversational style, noting that he had an "especially fraternal temperament" and quite a few women found him "extremely charming." He adds that despite his living in England, his Bronx accent was still noticeable:

Stanley's voice was very fluent, melodious even. In spite of the Bronx nasal-caustic, . . . it was as close to the condition of music as speech can get and still be speech, like a very well-read jazz musician talking, . . . with lots of innuendo. . . I never heard him try to do other voices, or dialects, even when he was telling Jewish jokes."[60]:4-5

"Stanley always seemed supernaturally youthful to his friends," writes Herr. "His voice didn't age over the almost twenty years that I knew him [and] he had a disarming way of 'leavening' serious discourse with low adolescent humor, . . ."[60]:22 Ciment adds that "he was "soft-spoken, with a crisp, surprisingly youthful voice, alternately serious and humorous in tone."[1]:41

Kubrick dressed simply, wearing the same style clothes every day: beat chinos, a basic blue work shirt, a ripstop cotton fatigue jacket with many pockets, and a pair of well-worn running shoes. "Many producers and actors thought he dressed like a beatnik," notes Herr,[60]:14-15 and his wife thought his baggy trousers made him look like a "balloon vendor." His meals were also simple, "he has no time to waste," writes Ciment.[1]:41

His eyes were "dark, focused, and piercing:"

He looked out from a perceptibly deep place, and the look went far inside of you, if you were what he happened to be looking at. . . I know that quite a few people, mostly actors, have unraveled when they got caught in Stanley's beams, even though there was rarely much anger in them. Stanley's look was just so deliberate, cool as functioning intelligence itself, demanding satisfaction, or resolution, of some kind of answer to some kind of problem . . . .[60]:16-17

However, writes screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who worked with him on Eyes Wide Shut, "vanity was not his style; he never cited his own work with complacency and often admired other people's. He could be pitiless, but never conceited. . . he solicited my views quite as if I were some venerable oracle."[67] That view was shared by Herr: "Nobody who really thinks he's smarter than everyone else could ask as many questions as he always did, . . . and trying to see every movie ever made."[60]:25 His inquisitiveness about photography and films started when he was a teenager. He later infiltrated film facilities around New York, hung around editing rooms, laboratories and equipment stores, constantly asking questions.[60]:26

Herr also notes similarities between Kubrick's temperament and satirist and comedian Lenny Bruce, who was nearly the same age:

He was jazz mad, and went to the clubs, and a Yankees fan, so he went to the ball games too, all of this in New York in the late forties and early fifties, a smart spacey wide-awake kid like that, it's no wonder he was such a hipster, a '40s-bred, '50s minted, tough-minded, existential, highly evolved classic hipster. His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruce's than to any other director's, and this was not merely an aspect of his. He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.[60]:26

His temperament as a hipster also reflected Kubrick's likes and dislikes in everyday society. Among those, writes Herr, were his aversions to "waste, haste, carelessness to details, . . . [and] bullshit in all its proliferating manifestations, subtle and gross, from the flabby political face telling lies on TV to the most private, much more devastating lies we tell ourselves." According to Herr, Kubrick felt that "hypocrisy was not some petty human foible, it was the corrupted essence of our predicament. . . "[60]:44

After he moved to England, he especially enjoyed watching his favorite TV shows, including The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Roseanne, thinking they were excellent comedies that portrayed American life. "He was fiercely unpretentious," notes Herr. "He was exclusive, he had to be, but he wasn't a snob. It wasn't America he couldn't take. It was L.A."[60]:47 According to Ciment, "social standing means nothing to him and he has no interest in acquiring it; money serves exclusively to guarantee him independence."[1]:41

Desire for privacy

Herr points out that most of what people knew about Kubrick came from the press, primarily the entertainment press. However, few of the journalists that wrote about his life actually met him or knew little about it. He rarely gave interviews, "because he thought you had to be crazy to do interviews unless you had a picture coming out," adds Herr, who explains:

I can understand, in a time when so many celebrities are so eager to hurl themselves into our headlights, why anyone who doesn't want to talk with the entertainment press might seem eccentric, reclusive, and misanthropic, . . .[60]:70

Among the notable aspects of his desire for privacy, in his home and film life, was that he never talked about his movies while they were being made. Nor did he like discussing them even afterwards, except to friends. He most of all avoided discussing their "meaning," notes Herr, because "he believed so completely in their meaning that to try and talk about it could only spoil it" for the listener. "He might tell you how he did it, but never why." When he was once asked how he thought up the ending for 2001, he replied, "I don't know. How does anybody ever think of anything?"[60]:70-71

This aspect of his penchant for privacy may have also contributed to the negative reviews of many of his films or about him personally. Herr states that "it can never turn out well when a square takes a hipster for his subject."[60]:77 Similarly, Ciment argues that his refusal to "become one of the 'family' may have also "wrecked his chances of ever being honored" in Hollywood as a director, similar to the way Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and Robert Altman were denied Oscars, all of them considered at the time to be "rebels" within the film world.[1]:43

When he did grant interviews, however, he did so "with good grace and modesty," writes Ciment. A chauffeur would drive reporters to either a pub or to his home office, which was also his editing room. Interviewers would join him in his room "piled high with cans of film, newspapers, files and card-indexes, like some enormous artist's loft in Montparnasse or Greenwich Village — where this 'eternal student' can work away in privacy."[1]:41

Death

On March 7, 1999—four days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Warner Bros. executives, Kubrick died 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.[68]

Unrealized projects

Main article: Stanley Kubrick's 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. Kubrick had done much research on Napoleon and it was well into pre-production, when the studio suddenly pulled the plug after another big-budget biopic about Napoleon entitled Waterloo failed financially. Work on Aryan Papers depressed Kubrick enormously, and he eventually decided that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List covered much of the same material.

Kubrick was also unable to direct a film of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum as Eco had given his publisher instructions to never sell the film rights to any of his books after his dissatisfaction with the film version of The Name of the Rose. However, Eco was unaware specifically of Kubrick's interest and later said he would have relented had he known of it.

When the film rights to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings 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.[69]

Artistry

Influences

His family and critics felt that his Jewish ancestry contributed to his worldview and aspects of his films. After his death, both his daughter and wife stated that "He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all."[3] His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, to have been called Aryan Papers. He had spent years researching the subject.[70] 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.[3] The British screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who worked closely with Kubrick in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick's films was partly because he "had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars."[3] He said that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality."[3] He noted that by the time Kubrick died, "few of the obituaries mentioned that he was a Jew."[71]

In terms of filmmaking style, 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.[4] His "fascination with the fluid camera" of Ophuls, writes critic Gene D. Phillips, was also used effectively in 2001: A Space Odyssey.[72] 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."[24] He once named Ophüls' Le Plaisir as his favorite film. Ophüls derived this technique from his early work as assistant with the director Anatole Litvak in the 1930s; his cinematography style is described as "replete with the camera trackings, pans and swoops which later became the trademark of Max Ophuls."[73]

Geoffrey Cocks believes that Kubrick was also influenced by Ophüls' stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men.[3] The critic Robert Kolker sees the influence of Welles on the moving camera shots, while the biographer Vincent LeBrutto states that Kubrick consciously identified with Welles.[2]:318 LeBrutto sees Welles' influence on Kubrick's The Killing, and its "multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus,"[2]:126 as well as on the style of the closing credits of Paths of Glory. Quentin Curtis in The Daily Telegraph describes Welles as "[Kubrick's] great influence, in composition and camera movement."[74] Kubrick was so impressed by John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle that he wanted to cast Sterling Hayden in his first major feature, The Killing.[2]:114

Although Kubrick did not acknowledge Fritz Lang as an influence, Walker holds that Lang's interests are analogous to Kubrick's with regard to an interest in myth and "the Teutonic unconscious".[4] Michael Herr's memoir Kubrick says that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst.[75] In particular, Pabst had for several decades considered adapting Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, the basis of Eyes Wide Shut, but he did not find a suitable approach.[76]

As a young man, Kubrick was fascinated by the films of Russian filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin.[2]:55 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 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".[77]

The Russian documentary film maker Pavel Klushantsev made a groundbreaking film in the 1950s entitled Road to the Stars. It is believed to have significantly influenced Kubrick's technique in 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly in its accurate depiction of weightlessness and a rotating space station. Encyclopedia Astronautica describes some scenes from 2001 as a "shot-for-shot duplication of Road to the Stars".[78] Specific comparisons of shots from the two films have been analyzed by the filmmaker Alessandro Cima.[79] A 1994 article in American Cinematographer says, "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 preceded him in this.[80]

Kubrick greatly admired the films of Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, Jean Renoir, and Federico Fellini, but critics have not assessed the degree of their influence on him. 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.[81]

Late in life, Kubrick became enamored with the works of David Lynch, being particularly fascinated by Lynch's first major film Eraserhead.[82][83] He asked the cast members of The Shining to watch it to establish the appropriate mood.

Technique

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 acting,[84] 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.[85]

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.[86]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.[85]

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".[87] 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."[88]

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 Sentinel as well as having its own planned novelization), and he occasionally wrote screenplays in collaboration with writers (usually novelists, but a journalist in the case of Full Metal Jacket) who had limited screenwriting experience.[89] 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.

Roger Ebert and others have noted the oft-recurring "Kubrick stare"

Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange
Private "Pyle" in Full Metal Jacket
Jack Torrance in 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;[90] in Eyes Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages.[91] Kubrick always personally supervised the foreign voice-dubbing and the actual script translation into foreign languages for all of his films.[91] 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.[92] 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.[93] 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),[94] but it was Kubrick who extended this idea to the big screen. 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 upbeat Singin’ in the Rain for the somewhat graphic rape scene of A Clockwork Orange, and the Trashmmen's catchy, poppy surf rock hit, "Surfin' Bird" in Full Metal Jacket.

More generally, Kubrick employed a lot of "black humor" especially in his two films with Peter Sellers, and to a lesser degree in A Clockwork Orange and The Shining

In his review of Full Metal Jacket, Roger Ebert[95] 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.[96]

Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls, which Kubrick biographer calls his "corridor" compositions,[4] 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.[97]

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,[98] with prisoners as "pawns in the game".

Frequent and memorable collaborators

Photographer Dmitri Kasterine considered this to be the best of his many on-set photographs of Stanley Kubrick taken over the course of three of his films. On the set of A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick takes shelter from the rain under a camera platform, holding the camera he used for handheld work. Kasterine writes "He was the least lazy of men, but there's something very relaxed about the pose"[99] Most of Kasterine's Kubrick portraits may be seen here [2]

Photographer Dmitri Kasterine, himself regarded as "one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Britain from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s",[100] 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.[101] 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.[101]

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.[102][103][104] 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.[105] Similarly, Diane Johnson has stated

I completely agreed with Michael Herr's assessment. I visited the Kubricks when Michael was there and Michael and I have talked about him a little bit since then. My Kubrick was very much like the Kubrick that Herr described. I think that Frederic Raphael must be a dangerous paranoid. I don't know what that was about.[103]

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)

Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian Kubrick directed a 30-minute BBC documentary on the making of The Shining and composed the musical soundtrack to his film Full Metal Jacket. His wife's paintings appear in two of his films A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut.

Influence on film and television

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 photography 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.[106]

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,[107] 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.[108][109] 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.[110] Front-screen projection has been used in James Bond and Superman films, and the Steadicam has been employed in Star Wars films.

Influence on film industry

Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott, and George A. Romero,[111] have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration.[112][113] 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."[114] The directors Richard Linklater,[115] Sam Mendes,[116] Joel Schumacher,[117] Taylor Hackford,[118] and Darren Aronofsky[119] have all mentioned Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films.

Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan,[120] David Fincher,[121] Guillermo del Toro,[122] David Lynch,[123] Lars Von Trier,[124] Michael Mann,[125] and Gaspar Noé.[126] 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.[127] The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent,[128] contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The storytelling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Dr. Strangelove.[129] 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,[130] and modeling the look of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in his version of Alice in Wonderland on the Grady girls in The Shining.[131] Film critic Roger Ebert also noted that Burton's Mars Attacks! was partially inspired by Dr. Strangelove.[132] The video for The Killers song Bones (2006), Burton's only music video, 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)[133] 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."[134] 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."[135]

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.[136]

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

It completely misses the human element. Kubrick's work on screen tends to be the eye of a scientist examining humanity as if it were a paramecium under a microscope. Sometimes that worked brilliantly, and sometimes it took a really good book like The Shining and totally fucked it up. It's an utter failure as an adaptation of great material. However, it doesn't take away from his extraordinary achievements in his other films. And I think that 2001 is his crown jewel."[137]

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 Refn's 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".[138] The apparent influence of Kubrick on his film Bronson was noted by the Los Angeles Times[139] and the French publication Evene[140] However, when asked by Twitch about the very frequent comparisons by critics of the film Bronson to A Clockwork Orange, Refn denied the influence.[141] Refn stated

Of course if you put violence with classical music, people think it's obvious that's Clockwork Orange, because Kubrick used it very well and you always look at it as a reference. There are similarities between my Bronson and the Alex character from Clockwork Orange. There is kind of anti-authoritarian popculture iconish quality, but I stole every single thing from Kenneth Anger.Bronson is a mixture of [Anger's] Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Scorpio Rising (1964).

Homages

In 2001, a number of persons who worked with Kubrick on his films created the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who had executive produced Kubrick's last four films.[142] It consists of several chapters each covering one of Kubrick's films, as well as an introductory section on Kubrick's childhood.

In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia life-time achievement award the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award.[143] Kubrick is among filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Laurence Olivier, 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.

In popular culture

The TV series The Simpsons is said to contain more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound to many of his films, including 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining.[144] 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.[145]

In 2009, an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films was held in Dublin, Ireland, entitled 'Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light'.[146] In 2010, painter (and film storyboard artist) Carlos Ramos held an exhibition entitled "Kubrick" in Los Angeles, featuring paintings in a variety of styles based on scenes from Stanley Kubrick films.[147]

Pop singer Lady Gaga's song Bad Romance was claimed as paying homage visually to Kubrick, including the use of dialogue, costumes, and music from A Clockwork Orange.[148]

Films about elements of Kubrick's life

Main articles: Alan Conway, Colour Me Kubrick, and Dark Side of the Moon (mockumentary)
See also: Moon landing hoax#Stanley Kubrick involvement and 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)#Mock hoaxes and Conspiracy Theory

In the early 1990s, a con artist named Alan Conway frequented the London entertainment scene claiming to be Stanley Kubrick, and temporarily deceived New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, as well as multiple aspiring actors. Kubrick's personal assistant, Anthony Frewin, who helped track Conway down, wrote the screenplay for a film based on the Conway affair Colour Me Kubrick starring John Malkovich as Alan Conway. Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, was also a consultant for the film. The film contains several tongue-in-cheek homages to scenes from Kubrick's films. Conway was earlier the subject of a short documentary film The Man Who Would be Kubrick.

In 2002, the French documentary film maker William Karel (occasionally referred to as "Europe's Michael Moore") made initial plans for a documentary on Stanley Kubrick, but changed course. Karel was fascinated by the pervading conspiracy theory that Kubrick had faked footage of the NASA moon landings during the filming of Space Odyssey, and chose to make a parody "mockumentary" entitled Dark Side of the Moon advancing the same thesis entirely in jest. He had the help of Kubrick's surviving family who both acted as consultants for the film and gave scripted fake interviews. 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.

Kubrick has been portrayed on film by actor Stanley Tucci in the film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Although Sellers acted in two of Kubrick's films, the material here is almost wholly focused on their work together in Dr. Strangelove.

Filmography

Documentary short films

As director, writer, cinematographer, and sound

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.

Feature films

Year Film Director
 Producer
 Screenplay
(in part or whole)		 Editor
 Cinematographer
 Special effects
designer and director
1953 Fear and Desire
NoN
NoN
NoN
NoN
1955 Killer's Kiss
NoN
NoN
NoN
NoN
NoN
1956 The Killing
NoN
NoN
1957 Paths of Glory
NoN
NoN1
NoN
NoN1
1960 Spartacus
NoN
1962 Lolita
NoN
NoN1
1964 Dr. Strangelove
NoN
NoN
NoN
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey
NoN
NoN
NoN
NoN
1971 A Clockwork Orange
NoN
NoN
NoN
1975 Barry Lyndon
NoN
NoN
NoN
1980 The Shining
NoN
NoN
NoN
1987 Full Metal Jacket
NoN
NoN
NoN
1999 Eyes Wide Shut
NoN
NoN
NoN
NoN1
2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence Underlying concept and "dedicated to"2

1 Uncredited

2Stanley 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.

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 the 2000 documentary Inside 'The Spy Who Loved Me'.

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, Saturns and Razzies)
1953 Fear and Desire
1955 Killer's Kiss
1956 The Killing Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source
1957 Paths of Glory
1960 Spartacus Won Golden Globe: Best Drama Picture, Nominated Golden Globe: Best Director
Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source
1962 Lolita 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 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 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 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 Nominated for Razzie: Worst Director
Nominated for Saturn: Best Director
1987 Full Metal Jacket Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay (nomination shared with Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford)
1999 Eyes Wide Shut

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 times for his work in science fiction.[149]

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See also

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Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Faber and Faber, Inc. (1980; 1999)p. 36, cover
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: a Biography, Penguin (1999)
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Cocks, Geoffrey. The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust, Peter Lang Publishing (2004) pp. 22–25, 30
  4. ^ a b c d e f Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis, Conundrum Ltd. (1999)
  5. ^ Schwam 2000, p. 70.
  6. ^ Baxter 1999, p. 32.
  7. ^ Paul 2003, pp. 25, 46, 62. Online: Google Books link
  8. ^ Thuss 2002, p. 110. Online: Google Books link
  9. ^ Baxter 1997, p. 56. Online: Google Books link
  10. ^ MIKE HALE (December 14, 2011). "Channel Surfing: ‘Fear and Desire’". New York Times. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/channel-surfing-fear-and-desire/. Retrieved 15 December 2011. 
  11. ^ a b Turner, Adrian, ed. World Film Directors, vol. II (1988) pp. 544-552
  12. ^ Philips 2001, p. 190. Online: Google Books link
  13. ^ Philips 1999, p. 127. Online: Google Books link
  14. ^ Lucas (no date). Online at: 7 Classic Movies that Influenced Quentin Tarantino: Horror, Suspense, Film Noir – and Plenty of Laughs
  15. ^ Hughes, Howard (2006). Crime Wave: The Filmgoers' Guide to the Great Crime Movies. London: I.B.Tauris. p. 186. ISBN 1845112199, 9781845112196. 
  16. ^ Sleeper 1997. Online at: la Fiction du Pulp: Tarantino's trail of bread crumbs leads to the French New Wave
  17. ^ Online: Stanley Kubrick Exhibition. Newsletter no. 9, October 2004.
  18. ^ Roud 1980 p. 562. Online: Google Books link
  19. ^ Jackson et al 2001. Online: Google Books link
  20. ^ See for example: Denby 2008. Online at: The First Casualty
  21. ^ Ginna, Robert Emmett (1960). "The Odyssey Begins". Entertainment Weekly. 
  22. ^ Cooper 1996. Online: Spartacus: Still Censored After All These Years
  23. ^ Harlan 2001. Online at: Stanley Kubrick: A Brief Overview; see also review of Spartacus: Spartacus (Criterion)
  24. ^ a b Kagan 2000, p. 69.
  25. ^ Sperb 2006, p. 60.
  26. ^ Philips 2001, p. 102.
  27. ^ Southern, Terry 2002, p. 74. Online: Google Books link
  28. ^ Bogdanovich 1999. Online: What They Say About Stanley Kubrick
  29. ^ Youngblood 2008. Online: Lolita
  30. ^ The other was R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket
  31. ^ Tulsa TV Memories. U.N.C.L.E., SAGE, SABRE, Strangelove & Tulsa: Connections
  32. ^ Roger Ebert (July 11, 1999). "Dr. Strangelove (1964)". rogerebert.com. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990711/REVIEWS08/907110301/1023. Retrieved August 14, 2011. 
  33. ^ Rolling Stone wrote an article about the film's popularity with the Woodstock counter-culture in late 1968
  34. ^ Renata Adler of the New York Times called it "somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring" and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it "monumentally unimaginative"and "a disaster because it is much too abstract to make its abstract points". Her review is anthologized in her collection For Keeps. John Simon called in "a shaggy god story" in New Leader
  35. ^ Gilliatt 1968. Online: After Man [review of 2001: A Space Odyssey]
  36. ^ American Film Institute. Online: AFI's 10 Top 10
  37. ^ For example this essay at the US Centennial of Flight Commission
  38. ^ Carr 2002, p. 1.
  39. ^ British Film Institute. Online at: BFI Critic's Top Ten Poll.
  40. ^ Ciment 1982. Online at: Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange: An interview with Michel Ciment
  41. ^ Strick and Houston 1972. Online at: Interview with Stanley Kubrick regarding A Clockwork Orange
  42. ^ "A Clockwork Orange 40th Anniversary Screening With Malcolm McDowell". Salt Lake City Weekly. August 6, 2010. http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/event-59108-a-clockwork-orange-40th-anniversary-screening-with-malcolm-mcdowell.html. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  43. ^ Review of Straw Dogs remake in Los Angeles Times
  44. ^ Review of Straw Dogs at The Spinning Image
  45. ^ Ed DiGiulio. "Two Special Lenses for "Barry Lyndon"". American Cinematographer. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm. Retrieved March 5, 2011. 
  46. ^ Friedman, Lester, and Brent Notbohm 2000, p. 36.
  47. ^ Duncan p. 152
  48. ^ Baxter p. 289
  49. ^ Brown, G. (1980) "The Steadicam and The Shining", American Cinematographer, August, 61 (8), pp. 786–9, 826–7, 850–4. Reproduced at The Kubrick Site without issue date or pages given
  50. ^ Webster, Patrick (2010). Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films. McFarland. p. 221. ISBN 0786459166, 9780786459162. 
  51. ^ Bianculli 1997. Online at: 'The Shining,' By the Book
  52. ^ various. "Regarding Full Metal Jacket". The Kubrick Site. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0030.html. Retrieved March 5, 2011. 
  53. ^ The Kubrick Site. Online at: Regarding Full Metal Jacket: A Discussion
  54. ^ Ericson 2004. Online at: The measure of a man: Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket"
  55. ^ Myers (no date). Online at: A.I.(review)
  56. ^ Variety 2001. Online at: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
  57. ^ "John WILLIAMS: A.I. Artificial Intelligence : Film Music CD Reviews- August 2001 MusicWeb(UK)". Musicweb-international.com. http://www.musicweb-international.com/film/2001/Aug01/Artificial_Intelligence.html. Retrieved March 7, 2010. 
  58. ^ a b c d e f g Harlan, Jan (producer/director), Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, documentary film (2001)
  59. ^ Webster, Patrick. Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita Through Eyes Wide Shut, McFarland (2011)
  60. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Herr, Michael. Kubrick, Grove Press (2000)
  61. ^ Hare 2008, p. 166.
  62. ^ For example, the BBC obituary of him at [1]. See also Walker, 2000, p.360
  63. ^ Howard 2000, p. 16.
  64. ^ Baxter 1999, p. 31.
  65. ^ Rhodes 2008, p. 17.
  66. ^ Anthony 1999. Online at: The counterfeit Kubrick
  67. ^ Raphael, p. 159
  68. ^ Holden 1999. Online at: Stanley Kubrick, Film Director With a Bleak Vision, Dies at 70
  69. ^ See interview in "Show" magazine vol. 1, Number 1 1970
  70. ^ "Unmade Stanley Kubrick: Aryan Papers", Empire Online
  71. ^ Raphael, Frederic. Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick, Ballantine, 1999 pp. 107–108
  72. ^ Kubrick, Stanley, and Phillips Gene D. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Univ. Press of Mississippi (2001) p. 80
  73. ^ Wakeman, John (ed.) World Film Directors: 1890–1945, H. W. Wilson Co. (1987) pp. 677–683
  74. ^ Quentin Curtis (1996). "An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an anorak...". Daily Telegraph. UK. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0048.html. Retrieved January 21, 2011. 
  75. ^ Herr, Michael (2001). Kubrick. Grove Press. p. 27. ISBN 0802138187, 9780802138187. 
  76. ^ Rasche, Hermann (2007). Processes of transposition: German literature and film. Rodopi. p. 75. ISBN 9042022841, 9789042022843. 
  77. ^ Nelson 2000, p. 5
  78. ^ "Road to the Stars". Astronautix.com. http://www.astronautix.com/articles/roastars.htm. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  79. ^ "Road to the Stars – 1957 Soviet Space Vision with Stunning Special Effects". Candlelight Stories. January 19, 2011. http://www.candlelightstories.com/2011/01/19/road-to-the-stars-1957-soviet-space-vision-with-stunning-special-effects/. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  80. ^ "Klushantsev: Russia's Wizard of Fantastika". American cinematographer (ASC Holding Corp) 75. 1994. 
  81. ^ excerpted in Entertainment Weekly Robert Emmett Ginna (Apr 9, 1999). "Stanley Kubrick speaks for himself". Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,272999~7~~,00.html. Retrieved January 21, 2011. 
  82. ^ Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with Lynch, conducted, edited, and introduced by filmmaker Chris Rodley (Faber & Faber Ltd., 1997, ISBN 978-0-571-19548-0; revised edition published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005, ISBN 978-0-571-22018-2). p.77
  83. ^ Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. (Faber & Faber, 2003. ISBN 978-0-571-21108-1) p. 308
  84. ^ Philips 2001, p. 199.
  85. ^ a b Baxter 1999, p. 40.
  86. ^ For discussion of Kubrick's method of multiple takes see Lobrutto 1997, pp. 398, 423–31, 440–446. Page 398: "Kubrick continued to work in a directorial style that included running up a lot of takes on a single setup— a philosophy that embraced the theory that film stock is the cheapest part of making a film."
  87. ^ Bordelon, Jenna (November 17, 2011). "The Hollywood Reporter". The Hollywood Reporter. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/video-awards-watch-roundtable-actors-55245. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  88. ^ "The Kubrick FAQ Part 4". Visual-memory.co.uk. February 22, 2002. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index4.html. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  89. ^ Terry Southern for Doctor Strangelove, Arthur C. Clarke for 2001, and Diane Johnson for The Shining
  90. ^ Film review: Special, Issues 25–35, Visual Imagination Ltd., 1999 page 42
  91. ^ a b Michael Watt (July 2000). "Do You Speak Christian?". Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 29. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/29/dubbing1.php. Retrieved June 8, 2011. 
  92. ^ A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. CO's Walter Carlos and Shining's Wendy Carlos are one and the same.
  93. ^ The closing scenes or credits of Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket all employ jolly music in an ironic way in their closing credits or final scenes. However, although the closing scenes of Full Metal Jacket have the soldiers singing the Mickey Mouse song, the closing credits use The Rolling Stones' song Paint It Black.
  94. ^ Leanard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures on Poetry [Harvard Univ. Press: 1976], pp. 384–9.
  95. ^ Ebert 1987. Online at: Full Metal Jacket (review)
  96. ^ "The Theory Of The Gaze in Stanley Kubrick - MA thesis". http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/thesis/view/12. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  97. ^ See Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis by Mario Falsetto and University of the Arts London – The Stanley Kubrick Archive arrives at University of the Arts London
  98. ^ Falsetto, Mario (2001). Stanley Kubrick: a narrative and stylistic analysis. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 40. ISBN 0275969746, 9780275969745. 
  99. ^ Andrew Pulver (August 11, 2010). "Photographer Dmitri Kasterine's best shot". London: UK Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/11/dmitri-kasterine-best-shot-photography#. Retrieved August 8, 2011. 
  100. ^ "National Portrait Gallery:Photographs by Dmitri Kasterine". National Portrait Gallery. September 11, 2010. http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/20101/twentieth-century-portraits-photographs-by-dmitri-kasterine.php. Retrieved August 8, 2011. 
  101. ^ a b "Twentiety Century Portraits: Photographs by Dmitri Kasterine", National Portrait Gallery, London, U.K.
  102. ^ Geoffrey Cocks; James Diedrick; Glenn Wesley Perusek (2006). "Writing The Shining". Depth of field: Stanley Kubrick, film, and the uses of history. Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-299-21614-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=E1PrIkji88EC. Retrieved August 21, 2011. 
  103. ^ a b Mark Steensland. "The Terror Trap". The Shining Adapted. http://www.terrortrap.com/interviews/dianejohnson/. Retrieved August 21, 2011. 
  104. ^ Terrance Gelenter, Diane Johnson (Feb 21, 2009). Novelist Diane Johnson hosted by Terrance. Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_ZxCMts70c. Retrieved August 22, 2011. 
  105. ^ "Christiane Kubrick's Website". Eyeswideshut.warnerbros.com. http://eyeswideshut.warnerbros.com/ck/ckenglish.htm. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  106. ^ The technique is discussed in detail in an article in American Cinematographer.
  107. ^ Ciment Kubrick
  108. ^ Serena Ferrara, Steadicam: Techniques and Aesthetics (Oxford: Focal Press, 2000), 26–31.
  109. ^ Brown, G. (1980) The Steadicam and The Shining. American Cinematographer, August, 61 (8), pp. 786–9, 826–7, 850–4. Reproduced at The Kubrick Site without issue date or pages given
  110. ^ "Doctor Who: Evolution of a Title Sequence". Bbc.co.uk. August 20, 1963. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A907544. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  111. ^ "Romero, George A. (post-Land of the Dead)". http://www.dreadcentral.com/interviews/romero-george-a-post-land-dead. 
  112. ^ See Harlan 2001 for interviews with Scorsese and Spielberg.
  113. ^ See Greenwald 2007 for an interview with Scott.
  114. ^ LoBrutto, Vincent (May 7, 1999). Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. http://books.google.com/books?id=fU78LdDClHUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Vincent+LoBrutto&hl=en&ei=7C-iTrqrI8W4tgeVhvyeBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Welles&f=false. Retrieved November 24, 2011. 
  115. ^ "BFI". http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Richard&surname=Linklater. 
  116. ^ "BFI". http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Sam&surname=Mendes. 
  117. ^ "BFI". http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Joel&surname=Schumacher. 
  118. ^ "BFI". http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Taylor&surname=Hackford. 
  119. ^ Trevor Hogg. "Visual Linguist: A Darren Aronofsky Profile (Part 1)". flickeringmyth.com. http://flickeringmyth.blogspot.com/2010/12/visual-linguist-darren-aronofsky.html. Retrieved March 20, 2011. 
  120. ^ Biography for Christopher Nolan at the Internet Movie Database
  121. ^ Biography for David Fincher at the Internet Movie Database
  122. ^ Biography for Guillermo del Toro at the Internet Movie Database
  123. ^ Biography for David Lynch at the Internet Movie Database
  124. ^ "Films that inspired directors". http://kottke.org/09/12/films-that-inspired-directors. 
  125. ^ "A Mann's Man World Page 2 – News – Los Angeles – LA Weekly". http://www.laweekly.com/2006-07-27/news/a-mann-s-man-s-world/2/. [dead link]
  126. ^ "Gaspar Noé Talks Digital Filmmaking, Stanley Kubrick, Wanting To Work With Kristen Stewart & The "Sentimental, Erotic" Film He Wants To Make Next". http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2010/09/gaspar-noe-talks-digital-filmmaking.html. 
  127. ^ Nicholas Sheffo. "The Work Of Jonathan Glazer (Directors Label/Volume Five)". Fulvue DriveIn. http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2712/Work+Of+Jonathan+Glazer+Directors+Label+. Retrieved December 4, 2010. 
  128. ^ "Movie Review: Naked Lunch and Barton Fink (1991)". Horror Fanzine. February 17, 2010. http://horrorfanzine.com/movie-review-naked-lunch-and-barton-fink-1991/. Retrieved December 23, 2010. 
  129. ^ Allen, William Rodney; Joel and Ethan Coen (2006). The Coen brothers: interviews. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 208. ISBN 1578068894, 9781578068890. 
  130. ^ John Hartl (July 14, 2005). "‘Chocolate Factory’ is a tasty surprise". MSNBC. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/8547003/ns/today-entertainment/. Retrieved December 5, 2010. 
  131. ^ Geoff Boucher (Feb. 10, 2010). "Tim Burton took a ‘Shining’ to Tweedledee and Tweedledum". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on November 15, 2010. http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/02/10/tim-burton-took-a-shining-to-tweedledee-and-tweedledum/. Retrieved February 17, 2011.  Director Tim Burton erroneously refers to the Grady girls as twins.
  132. ^ "Mars Attacks! review – Roger Ebert". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19961213/REVIEWS/612130302/1023. Retrieved June 5, 2011. 
  133. ^ John H. Richardson (September 22, 2008). "The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson". Esquire. http://www.esquire.com/features/75-most-influential/paul-thomas-anderson-1008-2. Retrieved February 25, 2011. 
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  135. ^ WILLIAM ARNOLD (January 3, 2008). "Daniel Day-Lewis is absolutely mesmerizing in There Will Be Blood". Seattle Pi. http://www.seattlepi.com/movies/345931_blood04q.html. Retrieved February 25, 2011. 
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References

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Albert R. Broccoli (1989) · Michael Caine (1990) · Peter Ustinov (1992) · Martin Scorsese (1993) · Anthony Hopkins (1995) · Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein (1996) · Dustin Hoffman (1997) · John Travolta (1998)  · Stanley Kubrick (1999)  · Steven Spielberg (2000)  · George Lucas (2001)  · Hugh Grant (2003)  · Tom Hanks (2004)  · Tom Cruise (2005)  · Denzel Washington (2007)  · Sean Penn (2008)  · Robert De Niro (2009)  · Jeff Bridges (2010)
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Worldwide Contribution to Filmed Entertainment

Howard Stringer (2003)  · Kirk Douglas (2009)  · Ridley Scott & Tony Scott (2010)  · John Lasseter (2011)
British Artist of the Year

Rachel Weisz (2006)  · Kate Winslet (2007)  · Tilda Swinton (2008)  · Emily Blunt (2009)  · Michael Sheen (2010)  · Helena Bonham Carter (2011)


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