Stanley Kubrick

• 1. Introduction

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  Stanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting a private screening of his final film for his family and its stars. Between those two dates he made a body of work that critics and filmmakers have spent decades trying to fully understand. He directed films about war, about nuclear annihilation, about violence and rehabilitation, about ghosts and madness, about sexual obsession, and about the very birth of human intelligence. Each one landed differently from the last. Most of them were controversial when they first appeared. Nearly all of them grew in stature over time. How does a boy from the Bronx who barely graduated high school, who spent his teenage years playing chess for spare change and haunting movie theatres, become one of the most studied directors in cinema history? What drove him to demand fifty, seventy, even eighty takes of a single scene? And what did he understand about images and silence that most filmmakers never grasped at all?

• 2. Chess, Cameras, and the Bronx

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  Jack Kubrick, Stanley's father and a homeopathic doctor, gave his twelve-year-old son a chess set, and the game never left him. Kubrick would later join the United States Chess Federation and explain that chess had taught him patience and discipline, two qualities that would define every production he ever ran. A year after the chess set came a Graflex camera, a gift that redirected his life entirely. His neighbor Marvin Traub had a darkroom, and the two teenagers spent long hours there watching chemicals, in Kubrick's own recollection, magically make images on photographic paper. They also roamed the streets in search of subjects, and visited local cinemas together. The freelance photographer Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, had a considerable influence on the young Kubrick's eye. Kubrick would later hire Fellig as the special stills photographer on Dr. Strangelove. At William Howard Taft High School, which Kubrick attended from 1941 to 1945, he joined the photography club and photographed school events for its magazine. He was a mediocre student with poor attendance, preferring the cinema to the classroom. When he graduated in 1945, his grades were too weak for college, and the returning soldiers from World War II had absorbed the remaining spots. His father was disappointed. Kubrick was not deterred. He sold a photographic series to Look magazine, which ran it on the 26th of June 1945, and within a year he had become an apprentice photographer there, and soon after that a full-time staff photographer. His assignments took him to Portugal, to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida, and to boxing matches across the country. His earliest boxing essay, Prizefighter, published on the 18th of January 1949, followed American middleweight Walter Cartier before and during a fight, and planted a seed that would soon grow into his first film.

• 3. First Films on Borrowed Money

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  Day of the Fight, a 16-minute black-and-white documentary about Walter Cartier, cost Kubrick $3,900 to make. He sold it to RKO-Pathe for $4,000, which was reportedly the most the company had ever paid for a short film at the time. Cartier's brother Vincent, who also managed the boxer, described Kubrick as stoic and impassive but imaginative, someone who simply captivated the people around him: whatever he wanted, you complied. The film introduced what would become one of Kubrick's characteristic camera movements: a backward tracking shot in which the two Cartier brothers walk toward the camera. After selling Day of the Fight, Kubrick quit Look, visited professional filmmakers in New York City to learn their craft, and declared he had gained confidence from watching bad films, remarking that he did not know a goddamn thing about movies, but he knew he could make a better film than what he was seeing. Flying Padre followed in 1951, a short about Reverend Fred Stadtmueller, who traveled roughly 12,000 miles annually to serve his eleven churches. Then came The Seafarers in 1953, shot for the Seafarers International Union, and notable as Kubrick's first color film. These three remain his only surviving documentary works, though some historians believe he made others. His first feature, Fear and Desire, released in 1953, was written by his friend Howard Sackler and partly funded by his uncle Martin Perveler, a Los Angeles pharmacy owner, who invested $9,000 in exchange for an executive producer credit. Kubrick shot it over five weeks in the San Gabriel Mountains in California with a crew of fourteen people. Production costs reached roughly $53,000, beyond what had been planned, and the film was a commercial failure, though early reviewers recognized something in its cinematography. Kubrick later expressed embarrassment about it and kept prints out of circulation for the rest of his life. For his next feature, Killer's Kiss, he received around $40,000 from a Bronx pharmacist named Morris Bousse. The film noir he made in Times Square, with its unconventional angles and its seven months of post-production sound work, drew the admiration of Martin Scorsese, who has cited its shooting style as an influence on Raging Bull.

• 4. Kirk Douglas and Hollywood Power

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  Playing chess in Washington Square, Kubrick met producer James B. Harris, who called him the most intelligent and most creative person he had ever encountered. The two formed the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation in 1955. Harris purchased the rights to Lionel White's novel Clean Break for $10,000, and the resulting film, The Killing, was shot in 24 days on a budget of $330,000. The Hollywood union refused to let Kubrick serve as both director and cinematographer, so veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard was hired. Kubrick, twenty years younger than Ballard, threatened to fire him during a camera dispute. The Killing failed to secure a wide release and made little money, but Dore Schary of MGM was impressed enough to offer Kubrick and Harris $75,000 to make another film. That film became Paths of Glory, based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 anti-war novel. It was shot in Munich from March 1957, and Kubrick lined up six cameras along the boundary of no-man's land for the battle sequence, assigning each of the hundreds of extras a numbered zone in which they would fall. Kirk Douglas, who played Colonel Dax defending soldiers at a court-martial, signed Harris-Kubrick Pictures to a three-picture co-production deal through his company Bryna Productions. Paths of Glory was banned in France until 1974 for its portrayal of the French military, and was censored by the Swiss Army until 1970. Its commercial success established Kubrick as a director of serious consequence. Douglas then asked Kubrick, in February 1959, to direct Spartacus, based on the historical figure and the Third Servile War. Douglas had fired the original director Anthony Mann and paid Kubrick a reported $150,000. The production was Kubrick's largest by a vast margin: a cast of over ten thousand people, a budget of $6 million, a single panoramic scene featuring 8,000 trained soldiers from Spain. At the time it was the most expensive film ever made in America. Spartacus took $14.6 million at the box office in its first run, received six Academy Award nominations, and won four. But the on-set disputes with Douglas over the script, including Kubrick cutting all but two of Douglas's lines from the opening thirty minutes, ended the working relationship between them permanently.

• 5. Satire as a Survival Strategy

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  Kubrick moved to England in 1961 and never relocated back to the United States. His first British productions were two films made with Peter Sellers. Lolita, shot over 88 days on a $2 million budget at Elstree Studios between October 1960 and March 1961, was an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel. It was Kubrick's first attempt at black comedy, and film critic Gene Youngblood called it a transitional film marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema to the surrealism of his later work. Lolita earned $3.7 million at the box office on its opening run. The follow-up, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, began its life as a serious political thriller. Kubrick had studied more than forty military and political research books on nuclear war and concluded that nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd. He bought the rights to the novel Red Alert and collaborated with its author, Peter George, on a screenplay. James B. Harris, Kubrick's longtime producer and friend, believed the film should remain serious, and the two parted ways amicably over the disagreement. Kubrick then hired journalist and satirist Terry Southern, whose intensive involvement from the 16th of November to the 28th of December 1962 transformed the script into a black comedy loaded with sexual innuendo. Southern was co-credited above George in the film's titles, a prominence that George later disputed in a letter to Life magazine. Peter Sellers played three roles. The film, a $2 million production shot in 15 weeks ending in April 1963, was followed by eight months of editing. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it the most shattering sick joke he had ever come across. Today it holds a near-perfect rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 91 reviews. The American Film Institute named it the third-greatest American comedy film of all time. The Guardian, in 2010, placed it sixth on its list of the best comedy films ever made.

• 6. Space, Violence, and Classical Music

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  Kubrick met science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in New York City in April 1964 and proposed working from Clarke's 1948 short story The Sentinel, in which a monolith found on the Moon alerts aliens to the existence of mankind. Clarke began writing the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay. Kubrick was granted permission by NASA to observe spacecraft used in the Ranger 9 mission, and filmed footage in the Namib desert in early 1967. The film was shot in Super Panavision 70 as a Cinerama spectacle. Filming had begun on the 29th of December 1965 with the excavation of the monolith on the Moon, and the special effects team worked through the end of the following year, bringing the final cost to $10.5 million. Kubrick had commissioned an original score from Alex North, but had used classical recordings as a temporary track while editing, and they worked so well he kept them. Roger Ebert later wrote that North's score would have been wrong for the film because it would have attempted to underline the action, while the classical pieces chosen by Kubrick existed outside the action and wanted to be sublime. 2001 earned Kubrick his only personal Academy Award, for Visual Effects. Critics were initially hostile; Pauline Kael called it the biggest amateur movie of them all. By the end of 1972 the film had earned $31 million worldwide. Steven Spielberg called it the big bang of his filmmaking generation. Kubrick's next film, A Clockwork Orange, was shot over 1970-1971 on a budget of £2 million. Malcolm McDowell's role in Lindsay Anderson's if.... had been crucial to his casting as Alex, and Kubrick said he probably would not have made the film if McDowell had been unavailable. After copycat crimes were linked to the film and death threats followed, Kubrick personally pulled A Clockwork Orange from release in the United Kingdom. It remained legally unavailable there until after his death, and was not re-released until the year 2000. John Trevelyan, the film's censor, privately considered it perhaps the most brilliant piece of cinematic art he had ever seen, but acknowledged that many would not agree. William Friedkin, after winning Best Director for The French Connection that year, told the press that Kubrick was the best American filmmaker of the year, and in fact the best period.

• 7. Technique and Obsession

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  Childwickbury Manor, where Kubrick settled with his wife Christiane in 1978, became the operational center of all his productions: writing, research, editing, and management all ran from that house. This arrangement gave him almost complete artistic control while retaining the financial backing of major Hollywood studios. Barry Lyndon, shot on location in Ireland beginning in the autumn of 1973 at a cost of $11 million, illustrated what that control could produce. Interior scenes were filmed with a specially adapted high-speed Zeiss camera lens originally developed by NASA for satellite photography, allowing scenes to be lit by candlelight alone and creating images that cinematographer Allen Daviau compared to 18th-century paintings. Kubrick received death threats from the IRA in 1974 because of the shooting scenes involving English soldiers, and fled Ireland with his family on a ferry from Dun Laoghaire under an assumed identity. Barry Lyndon was a box office failure in America, grossing just $9.5 million against the $30 million Warner Bros. needed to turn a profit. It received seven Academy Award nominations and won four, more than any other film Kubrick made. For The Shining in 1980, Kubrick demanded seventy or eighty retakes of the same scene, and became one of the first directors to use the Steadicam to its full potential, as Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown later confirmed. Nicole Kidman, who worked with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, explained that the dozens of takes suppressed an actor's conscious thoughts about technique, helping them enter what she called a deeper place. Kubrick himself said he could see concentration in the eyes of an actor who was not yet performing at the peak of their ability. Full Metal Jacket, shot between August 1985 and September 1986 at a cost of $17 million, used a derelict gasworks in Beckton in the London Docklands to stand in for the ruined city of Hue. Around 200 palm trees were imported from North Africa at a cost of £1,000 each, and thousands of plastic plants were ordered from Hong Kong. Kubrick deliberately made his Steadicam shots less steady to achieve a newsreel effect, a choice that commentators credited with the bleakness the film conveyed.

• 8. The Unfinished and the Final

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  Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999 and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle. Kubrick worked 18 hours a day for 15 months to meet a planned release date of the 16th of July 1999. He sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release, and told Warner executive Julian Senior that it was his best film ever. His death on the 7th of March 1999 came a few days after he finished editing. He never saw the final version. The Napoleon project, which Kubrick had researched for roughly two years after completing 2001: A Space Odyssey, would have been his most ambitious production: he envisaged up to 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry, and considered Napoleonic battles so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets, that he wanted them replicated as authentically as possible. He approached Audrey Hepburn for the role of Empress Josephine and eventually cast Jack Nicholson in the lead. MGM canceled the project in 1969 when it was well into preproduction and ready to begin filming. In 2011, the publisher Taschen compiled the research into a large-volume book, and in March 2013, Spielberg announced he would develop Napoleon as a television miniseries based on Kubrick's original screenplay. Kubrick had also spent years developing A.I. Artificial Intelligence from Brian Aldiss's short story, approaching Spielberg with the script in 1995. After Kubrick's death, Spielberg directed the film in 2001 and said he felt inhibited to honor Kubrick, following his visual schema with as much fidelity as he could. Spielberg, who once called Kubrick the greatest master he ever served, admitted that he felt like he was being coached by a ghost. The film carries a posthumous production credit for Kubrick and the dedication For Stanley Kubrick.