Stanley Kubrick | Wikipedia audio article

 

Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March
7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is frequently cited as one
of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history. His films, which are mostly adaptations
of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres and are noted for their realism,
dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of music.
Kubrick was raised in the Bronx, New York City, and attended William Howard Taft High
School from 1941 to 1945. He only received average grades but displayed a keen interest
in literature, photography, and film from a young age, and taught himself all aspects
of film production and directing after graduating from high school. After working as a photographer
for Look magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he began making short films on a shoestring
budget, and made his first major Hollywood film, The Killing, for United Artists in 1956.
This was followed by two collaborations with Kirk Douglas, the war picture Paths of Glory
(1957) and the historical epic Spartacus (1960). His reputation as a filmmaker in Hollywood
grew, and he was approached by Marlon Brando to film what would become One-Eyed Jacks (1961),
though Brando eventually decided to direct it himself.
Creative differences arising from his work with Douglas and the film studios, a dislike
of the Hollywood industry, and a growing concern about crime in America prompted Kubrick to
move to the United Kingdom in 1961, where he spent most of the remainder of his life
and career.

 

His home at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his
wife Christiane, became his workplace, where he did his writing, research, editing, and
management of production details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control
over his films, but with the rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood
studios. His first British productions were two films with Peter Sellers, Lolita (1962)
and Dr. Strangelove (1964). A demanding perfectionist, Kubrick assumed
control over most aspects of the filmmaking process, from direction and writing to editing,
and took painstaking care with researching his films and staging scenes, working in close
coordination with his actors and other collaborators. He often asked for several dozen retakes of
the same shot in a movie, which resulted in many conflicts with his cast. Despite the
resulting notoriety among actors, many of Kubrick’s films broke new ground in cinematography.
The scientific realism and innovative special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were
without precedent in the history of cinema, and the film earned him his only personal
Oscar, for Best Visual Effects.

 

Steven Spielberg has referred to the film as his generation’s
“big bang”, and it is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. For the 18th-century
period film Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick obtained lenses developed by Zeiss for NASA, to film
scenes under natural candlelight. With The Shining (1980), he became one of the first
directors to make use of a Steadicam for stabilized and fluid tracking shots.

 

While many of Kubrick’s
films were controversial and initially received mixed reviews upon release—particularly
A Clockwork Orange (1971), which Kubrick pulled from circulation in the UK following a mass
media frenzy—most were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTA Awards, and underwent
critical reevaluations. His last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was completed shortly before his
death in 1999 at the age of 70. == Early life ==
Kubrick was born in the Lying-In Hospital at 307 Second Avenue in Manhattan, New York
City, to a Jewish family. He was the first of two children of Jacob Leonard Kubrick (May
21, 1902 – October 19, 1985), known as Jack or Jacques, and his wife Sadie Gertrude Kubrick
(née Perveler; October 28, 1903 – April 23, 1985), known as Gert. His sister, Barbara
Mary Kubrick was born in May 1934. Jack Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were
of Polish-Jewish, Austrian-Jewish, and Romanian-Jewish origin, was a homeopathic doctor, graduating
from the New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1927, the same year he married Kubrick’s
mother, the child of Austrian-Jewish immigrants. Kubrick’s great-grandfather, Hersh Kubrick
(also spelled Kubrik or Kubrick), arrived at Ellis Island via Liverpool by ship on December
27, 1899, at the age of 47, leaving behind his wife and two grown children, one of whom
was Stanley’s grandfather, Elias, to start a new life with a younger woman.

 

Elias Kubrick
followed in 1902. At Stanley’s birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton
Avenue in the Bronx. His parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony, but Kubrick
did not have a religious upbringing, and would later profess an atheistic view of the universe.
By the district standards of the West Bronx, the family was fairly wealthy, with his father
earning a good income as a physician. Soon after his sister’s birth, Kubrick began schooling
in Public School 3 in the Bronx and moved to Public School 90 in June 1938. His IQ was
discovered to be above average, but his attendance was poor, and he missed 56 days in his first
term alone, as many as he attended. He displayed an interest in literature from a young age,
and began reading Greek and Roman myths and the fables of the Grimm brothers which “instilled
in him a lifelong affinity with Europe”.

 

He spent most Saturdays during the summer watching
the New York Yankees, and would later photograph two boys watching the game in an assignment
for Look magazine to emulate his childhood excitement with baseball. When Kubrick was
12, his father Jack taught him chess. The game remained a lifelong interest of Kubrick,
appearing in many scenes of his films. Kubrick, who later became a member of the United States
Chess Federation explained that chess helped him develop “patience and discipline” in making
decisions. At the age of 13, Kubrick’s father bought him a Graflex camera, triggering a
fascination with still photography. He befriended a neighbor, Marvin Traub, who shared his passion
for photography. Traub had his darkroom, where the young Kubrick would spend
many hours perusing photographs and watching the chemicals “magically make images on photographic
paper”.

 

The two indulged in numerous photographic projects for which they roamed the streets
looking for interesting subjects to capture, and spent time in local cinemas studying films.
Freelance photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) had a considerable influence on Kubrick’s
development as a photographer; Kubrick would later hire Fellig as the special stills photographer
for Dr. Strangelove (1964). As a teenager, Kubrick was also interested in jazz, and briefly
attempted a career as a drummer. Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941
to 1945. One of his classmates was Edith Gormezano, later known as the singer Eydie Gormé.

 

Though
he joined the school’s photographic club, which permitted him to photograph the school’s
events in their magazine, he was a mediocre student, with a meager 67-grade average. Introverted
and shy, Kubrick had a low attendance record and often skipped school to watch double-feature
films. He graduated in 1945, but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college
admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated hope of higher
education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and contemporary American
schooling as a whole, maintaining that schools were ineffective in stimulating critical thinking
and student interest. His father was disappointed in his son’s failure to achieve excellence
in school, of which he felt Stanley was fully capable.

 

Jack also encouraged Stanley to read
from the former’s library at home, while at the same time permitting Stanley to take up
photography as a serious hobby. == Photographic career == While still in high school, Kubrick was chosen
as an official school photographer. In the mid-1940s, 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. Eventually, he sold a photographic series to Look magazine, having taken a photo
to Helen O’Brien, head of the photographic department, who purchased it for £25.

 

It
was printed on June 26, 1945. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess “for quarters”
in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs. In 1946, he became an apprentice photographer
for Look and later a full-time staff photographer. G. Warren Schloat, Jr., another new photographer
for the magazine at the time, recalled that he thought Kubrick lacked the personality
to make it as a director in Hollywood, remarking, “Stanley was a quiet fellow. He didn’t say
much. He was thin, skinny, and kind of poor—like we all were.” Kubrick quickly became known
for his story-telling in photographs. His first, published on April 16, 1946, was entitled
“A Short Story from a Movie Balcony” and staged a fracas between a man and a woman, during
which the man is slapped in the face, caught genuinely by surprise. In another assignment,
18 pictures were taken of various people waiting in a dental office. It has been said retrospectively
that this project demonstrated an early interest in Kubrick in capturing individuals and their
feelings in mundane environments. In 1948, he was sent to Portugal to document a travel
piece and covered the Ringling Bros.

 

And Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida.
Kubrick, a boxing enthusiast, eventually began photographing boxing matches for the magazine.
His earliest, “Prizefighter”, was published on January 18, 1949, and captured a boxing
match and the events leading up to it, featuring Walter Cartier. On April 2, 1949, he published
a photo essay, named “Chicago-City of Extremes” in Look, which displayed his talent early
on for creating atmosphere with imagery, including a photograph taken above a congested Chicago
street at night. The following year, on July 18, 1950, the magazine published his photo
essay, “Working Debutante – Betsy von Furstenberg”, which featured a Pablo Picasso portrait of
Angel F. de Soto is in the background. Kubrick was also assigned to photograph numerous jazz
musicians, from Frank Sinatra and Erroll Garner to George Lewis, Eddie Condon, Phil Napoleon,
Papa Celestin, Alphonse Picou, Muggsy Spanier, Sharkey Bonano, and others. Kubrick married
his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz on May 28, 1948.

 

They lived together in a small apartment
at 36 West 16th Street, off Sixth Avenue just north of 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. Friends began to notice that Kubrick had become obsessed with
the art of filmmaking—one friend, David Vaughan, observed that Kubrick would scrutinize
the film at the cinema when it went silent, and would go back to reading his paper when
people started talking.

 

He also spent many hours reading books on film theory and writing
down notes. Sergei Eisenstein’s theoretical writings had a profound impact on Kubrick,
and he took a great number of notes from books in the library of Arthur Rothstein, the photographic
technical director of Look magazine. == Film career == ===
Short films (1951–1953) === Kubrick shared a love of film with his school
friend Alexander Singer, who after graduating from high school had the intention of directing
a film version of Homer’s Iliad. Through Singer, who worked in the offices of the newsreel
production company, The March of Time, Kubrick learned that it could cost $40,000 to make
a proper short film, money he could not afford.

 

He had $1500 in savings and managed to produce
a few short documentaries fueled by encouragement from Singer. He began learning all he could
about filmmaking on his own, calling film suppliers, laboratories, and equipment rental
houses. Kubrick decided to make a short film documentary about boxer Walter Cartier, whom
he had photographed and written about for Look magazine a year earlier. He rented a
camera and produced a 16-minute black-and-white documentary, Day of the Fight. Kubrick found
the money independently to finance it. He had considered asking Montgomery Clift to
narrate it, whom he had met during a photographic session for Look, but settled on CBS news
veteran Douglas Edwards. According to Paul Duncan, the film was “remarkably accomplished
for a first film”, and used a backward tracking shot to film a scene in which Cartier and
his brother walk towards the camera, a device that later became one of Kubrick’s characteristic
camera movements. Vincent Cartier, Walter’s brother, and manager, later reflected on his
observations of Kubrick during the filming. He said, “Stanley was a very stoic, impassive
but imaginative type person with strong, imaginative thoughts. He commanded respect in a quiet,
shy way.

 

Whatever he wanted, you complied, he just captivated you. Anybody who worked
with Stanley did just what Stanley wanted”. After a score was added by Singer’s friend
Gerald Fried, Kubrick had spent $3900 in making it and sold it to RKO-Pathé for $4000, which
was the most the company had ever paid for a short film at the time. Kubrick described
his first effort at filmmaking as having been valuable since he believed himself to have
been forced to do most of the work, and he later declared that the “best education in
the film is to make one”.Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Look and
visited professional filmmakers in New York City, asking many detailed questions about
the technical aspects of film-making.

 

He stated that he was given the confidence during this
period to become a filmmaker because of the number of bad films he had seen, remarking,
“I don’t know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a better film than that”.
He began making Flying Padre (1951), a film that documents Reverend Fred Stadtmueller,
who travels some 4,000 miles to visit his 11 churches. The film was originally going
to be called “Sky Pilot”, a pun on the slang term for a priest.

 

During the
the film, the priest performs a burial service, confronts a boy bullying a girl, and makes
an emergency flight to aid a sick mother and baby into an ambulance. Several of the views
from and of the plane in Flying Padre are later echoed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
with the footage of the spacecraft, and a series of close-ups of the faces of people
attending the funeral was most likely inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin
(1925) and Ivan the Terrible (1944/1958). Flying Padre was followed by The Seafarers (1953),
Kubrick’s first color film, which was shot for the Seafarers International Union in June
1953. It has shots of ships, machinery, a canteen, and a union meeting. For the cafeteria
scene in the film, Kubrick chose a long, sideways-shooting dolly shot to establish the life of the seafarer’s
community; this shot is an early demonstration of a technique that would become a signature
of his. The montage of the speaker and audience echoes scenes from Eisenstein’s Strike (1925)
and October (1928). Day of the Fight, Flying Padre and The Seafarers constitute Kubrick’s
only surviving documentary works; some historians believe he made others.

 

=== Early feature work (1953–1955) === After raising $1000 to show his short films
to friends and family, Kubrick found the finances to begin making his first feature film, Fear
and Desire (1953), originally running with the title The Trap, written by his friend
Howard Sackler. Kubrick’s uncle, Martin Perveler, a Los Angeles pharmacy owner, invested further
$9000 on condition that he be credited as executive producer of the film. Kubrick assembled
several actors and a small crew totaling 14 people (five actors, five crewmen, and four
others to help transport the equipment) and flew to the San Gabriel Mountains in California
for a five-week, low-budget shoot. Later renamed The Shape of Fear before finally being named
Fear and Desire is a fictional allegory about a team of soldiers who survive a plane
crash and are caught behind enemy lines in a war. During the film, one
of the soldiers becomes infatuated with an attractive girl in the woods and binds her
to a tree. This scene is noted for its close-ups of the face of the actress.

 

Kubrick had intended
for Fear and Desire to be a silent picture to ensure low production costs; the
added sounds, effects, and music ultimately brought production costs to around $53,000,
exceeding the budget. He was bailed out by producer Richard de Rochemont on the condition
that he helps in de Rochemont’s production of a five-part television series about Abraham
Lincoln is on location in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Fear and Desire was a commercial failure, but garnered
several positive reviews upon release. Critics such as the reviewer from The New York Times
believed that Kubrick’s professionalism as a photographer shone through in the picture,
and that he “artistically caught glimpses of the grotesque attitudes of death, the wolfishness
of hungry men, as well as their bestiality, and in one scene, the wracking effect of lust
on a pitifully juvenile soldier and the pinioned girl, he is guarding”. Columbia University
scholar Mark Van Doren was highly impressed by the scenes with the girl bound to the tree,
remarking that it would live on as a “beautiful, terrifying, and weird” sequence that illustrated
Kubrick’s immense talent guaranteed his future success.

 

Kubrick himself later expressed
embarrassment with Fear and Desire and attempted over the years to keep prints of the film
out of circulation. During the production of “Fear and Desire” Stanley almost killed
his cast with poisonous gasses by mistake. Following Fear and Desire, Kubrick began working on
ideas for a new boxing film. Due to the commercial failure of his first feature, Kubrick avoided
asking for further investments but commenced a film noir script with Howard O. Sackler.
Originally under the title Kiss Me, Kill Me, and then The Nymph and the Maniac, Killer’s
Kiss (1955) is a 67-minute film noir 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, with some $40,000 put forward from Bronx pharmacist
Morris Bousse. Kubrick began shooting footage in Times Square and frequently explored during
the filming process, experimenting with cinematography, and considering the use of unconventional
angles and imagery. He initially chose to record the sound on location but encountered
difficulties with shadows from the microphone booms, restricting camera movement. His decision
to drop the sound in favor of imagery was a costly one; after 12–14 weeks of shooting
the picture, he spent some seven months and $35,000 working on the sound. Alfred Hitchcock’s
Blackmail (1929) directly influenced the film with the painting laughing at a character,
and Martin Scorsese has, in turn, cited Kubrick’s innovative shooting angles and atmospheric
shots in Killer’s Kiss as an influence on Raging Bull (1980).

 

Actress Irene Kane, the
star of Killer’s Kiss, observed: “Stanley’s a fascinating character. He thinks movies
should move, with a minimum of dialogue, and he’s all for sex and sadism”. Killer’s Kiss
met with limited commercial success and made very little money in comparison with its production
budget of $75,000. Critics have praised the film’s camerawork, but its acting and story
are generally considered mediocre.

 

=== Hollywood success and beyond (1956–1962)
=== While playing chess in Washington Square,
Kubrick met producer James B. Harris, who considered Kubrick “the most intelligent,
most creative person I have ever come in contact with”. The two formed the Harris-Kubrick Pictures
Corporation in 1955. Harris purchased the rights to Lionel White’s novel Clean Break
for $10,000 and Kubrick wrote the script, but at Kubrick’s suggestion, they hired film
noir novelist Jim Thompson to write the dialog for the film—which became The Killing (1956)—about
a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong. The film starred Sterling Hayden, with
whom Kubrick had been impressed in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Kubrick and Harris moved to
Los Angeles from New York City signed with the Jaffe Agency to shoot the picture,
which became Kubrick’s first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew.
The Union in Hollywood stated that Kubrick would not be permitted to be both the director
and the cinematographer of the movie, so veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard was hired for
the shooting. Kubrick agreed to waive his fee for the production, which was shot in
just 24 days on a budget of $330,000.

 

He clashed with Ballard during the shooting, and on one
occasion Kubrick threatened to fire Ballard following a camera dispute, despite being
only 27 years old at the time and 20 years Ballard’s junior. Hayden recalled that Kubrick
was “cold and detached. Very mechanical, always confident. I’ve worked with few directors
who are that good”.The Killing failed to secure a proper release across the United States;
the film made little money, and was promoted only at the last minute, as a second feature
to the Western movie Bandido! (1956). Several contemporary critics lauded the film, with
a reviewer for Time comparing its camerawork to that of Orson Welles. Today, critics generally
consider The Killing to be among the best films of Kubrick’s early career; its nonlinear
narrative and clinical execution also had a major influence on later directors of crime
films, including Quentin Tarantino.

 

Dore Schary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was highly impressed
as well, and offered Kubrick and Harris $75,000 to write, direct, and produce a film, which
ultimately became Paths of Glory (1957). Paths of Glory, set during World War I, is
based on Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 antiwar novel, which Kubrick had read while waiting in his
father’s office. Schary was familiar with the novel but stated that MGM would not finance
another war picture, given their backing of the anti-war film The Red Badge of Courage
(1951). After Schary was fired by MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris managed
to interest Kirk Douglas in playing Colonel Dax. The film, shot in Munich, from January
1957, follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission and follows with a
war trial of three soldiers, arbitrarily chosen, for misconduct. Dax is assigned to defend
the men at Court Martial. For the battle scene, Kubrick meticulously lined up six cameras
one after the other along the boundary of no man’s land, with each camera capturing
a specific field and number, and gave each of the hundreds of extras a number for the
zone in which they would die.

 

Kubrick himself operated an Arriflex camera for the battle,
zooming in on Douglas. Paths of Glory became Kubrick’s first significant commercial success
and established him as an up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics praised the film’s unsentimental,
spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Bosley
Crowther of The New York Times wrote: “The close, hard eye of Mr. Kubrick’s sullen camera
bores directly into the minds of scheming men and into the hearts of patient, frightened
soldiers who have to accept orders to die”. Despite the praise, the Christmas release
date was criticized, and the subject was a controversial one in Europe.

 

The film was
banned in France until 1974 for its “unflattering” depiction of the French military, and was
censored by the Swiss Army until 1970. Marlon Brando contacted Kubrick, asking him
to direct a film adaptation of the Charles Neider western novel, The Authentic Death
of Hendry Jones, featuring Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Brando was impressed, saying
that “Stanley is unusually perceptive and delicately attuned to people. He has an adroit
intellect and is a creative thinker—not a repeater, not a fact-gatherer. He digests
what he learns and brings to a new project an original point of view and a reserved passion”.
The two worked on a script for six months, begun by a then-unknown Sam Peckinpah. Many
disputes broke out over the project, and in the end, Kubrick distanced himself from what
would become One-Eyed Jacks (1961).In February 1959, Kubrick received a phone call from Kirk
Douglas asked him to direct Spartacus (1960), based on the true life story of the historical
figure Spartacus and the events of the Third Servile War. Douglas had acquired the rights
to the novel by Howard Fast and blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo began penning the
script.

 

It was produced by Douglas, who also starred as rebellious slave Spartacus, and
cast Laurence Olivier as his foe, the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus.
Douglas hired Kubrick for a reported fee of $150,000 to take over direction soon after
he fired director Anthony Mann. Kubrick had, at 31, already directed four feature films,
and this became his largest by far, with a cast of over 10,000 and a budget of $6 million.
At the time, this was the most expensive film ever made in America, and Kubrick became the
youngest director in Hollywood history to make an epic. It was the first time that Kubrick
filmed using the anamorphic 35mm horizontal Super Technirama process to achieve ultra-high
definition, which allowed him to capture large panoramic scenes, including one with 8,000
trained soldiers from Spain representing the Roman army. Disputes broke out during the
filming. Kubrick complained about not having full creative control over the artistic aspects,
insisting on improvising extensively during the production. Kubrick and Douglas were also
at odds over the script, with Kubrick angering Douglas when he cut all but two of his lines
from the opening 30 minutes. Despite the on-set troubles, Spartacus took $14.6 million at
the box office in its first run.

 

The film established Kubrick as a major director, receiving
six Academy Award nominations and winning four; it ultimately convinced him that if
so much could be made of such a problematic production, he could achieve anything. Spartacus
also marked the end of the working relationship between Kubrick and Douglas. Kubrick and Harris decided to film
Kubrick’s next movie Lolita (1962) in England, due to clauses placed on the contract by producers
Warner Bros. that gave them complete control over every aspect of the film, and the fact
that the Eady plan permitted producers to write off the costs if 80% of the crew were
British. Instead, they signed a $1 million deal with Eliot Hyman’s Associated Artists
Productions, and a clause that gave them the artistic freedom that they desired. Lolita,
Kubrick’s first attempt at black comedy was an adaptation of the novel of the same name
by Vladimir Nabokov, the story of a middle-aged college professor becoming infatuated with
a 12-year-old girl.

 

Stylistically, Lolita, starring Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelley
Winters, and Sue Lyon, was a transitional film for Kubrick, “marking the turning point
from a naturalistic cinema … to the surrealism of the later films”, according to a film critic
Gene Youngblood. Kubrick was deeply impressed by the chameleon-like range of actor Peter
Sellers gave him one of his first opportunities to improvise wildly during shooting while
filming him with three cameras. Lolita was shot over 88 days on a budget of $2 million
at Elstree Studios, between October 1960 and March 1961. Kubrick often clashed with Shelley
Winters, whom he found “very difficult” and demanding, was nearly fired at one point.
Because of its provocative story, Lolita was Kubrick’s first film to generate controversy;
he was ultimately forced to comply with censors and remove much of the erotic element of the
relationship between Mason’s Humbert and Lyon’s Lolita which had been evident in Nabokov’s
novel. The film was not a major critical or commercial success upon release, earning $3.7
million at the box office on its opening run. Lolita has since become acclaimed by film
critics.

 

Social historian Stephen E. Kercher documented that the film “demonstrated that
its director possessed a keen, satiric insight into the social landscape and sexual hang-ups
of cold war America”, while Jon Fortgang of Film4 wrote: “Lolita, with its acute mix of
pathos and comedy, and Mason’s mellifluous delivery of Nabokov’s sparkling lines, remains
the definitive depiction of tragic transgression”. === Collaboration with Peter Sellers (1962–1964)
=== Kubrick’s next project was Dr. Strangelove
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), another satirical black comedy.
Kubrick became preoccupied with the issue of nuclear war as the Cold War unfolded in
the 1950s, and even considered moving to Australia because he feared that New York City might
be a likely target for the Russians.

 

He studied over 40 military and political research books
on the subject and eventually concluded that “nobody knew anything
and the whole situation was absurd”. After buying the rights to the novel Red Alert,
Kubrick collaborated with its author, Peter George, on the script. It was originally written
as a serious political thriller, but Kubrick decided that a “serious treatment” of the
subject would not be believable, and thought that some of its most salient points would
be fodder for comedy. Kubrick and George then reworked the script as a satire (provisionally
titled “The Delicate Balance of Terror”) in which the plot of Red Alert was situated as
a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence, but this idea was also abandoned, and Kubrick
decided to make the film as “an outrageously black comedy”.

 

Just before filming began,
Kubrick hired noted journalist and satirical author Terry Southern to transform the script
into its final form, a black comedy, loaded with sexual innuendo, becoming a film which
showed Kubrick’s talents as a “unique kind of absurdist” according to the film scholar
Abrams. Southern made major contributions to the final script and was co-credited (above
Peter George) in the film’s opening titles; his perceived role in the writing later led
to a public rift between Kubrick and Peter George, who subsequently complained in a letter
to Life magazine that Southern’s intense but relatively brief (November 16 to December
28, 1962) involvement with the project was being given undue prominence in the media,
while his role as the author of the film’s source novel, and his ten-month stint as the
script’s co-writer was being downplayed – a perception Kubrick did little
to address. Kubrick found that Dr.

 

Strangelove, a $2 million production that employed what
became the “first important visual effects crew in the world”, would be impossible to
make in the U.S. for various technical and political reasons, forcing him to move production
to England. It was shot in 15 weeks, ending in April 1963, after which Kubrick spent eight
months editing it. Peter Sellers again agreed to work with Kubrick and ended up playing
three different roles in the film. Upon release, the film stirred up much controversy and mixed
opinions. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther worried that it was a “discredit
and even contempt for our whole defense establishment … the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever
come across”, while Robert Brustein of Out of This World in a February 1970 article called
it a “Juvenalian satire”. Kubrick responded to the criticism, stating: “A satirist is
someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to
make some sort of a joke out of it.

 

However brutal that joke might be”. Today, the film
is considered to be one of the sharpest comedy films ever made and holds a near perfect
97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 79 reviews as of April 2019. It was named the
39th-greatest American film and third-greatest American comedy film of all time by the American
Film Institute, and in 2010, it was named the sixth-best comedy film of all time by
The Guardian. === Ground-breaking cinema (1965–1971) === Kubrick spent five years developing his next
film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), having been highly impressed with science fiction
writer Arthur C.

 

Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End is about a superior race of alien beings
who assist mankind in eliminating their old selves. After meeting Clarke in New York City
in April 1964, Kubrick suggested working on his 1948 short story The Sentinel,
about a tetrahedron that is found on the Moon which alerts aliens of mankind. That
year, Clarke began writing the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and the screenplay was written
by Kubrick and Clarke in collaboration. The film’s theme, the birthing of one intelligence
by another, is developed in two parallel intersecting stories on two very different time scales.
One depicts transitions between various stages of man, from ape to “star child”, as man is
reborn into a new existence, each step shepherded by an enigmatic alien intelligence seen only
in its artifacts: a series of seemingly indestructible eons-old black monoliths. In space, the enemy
is a supercomputer known as HAL who runs the spaceship, a character that novelist Clancy
Sigal described as being “far, far more human, more humorous and conceivably decent than
anything else that may emerge from this far-seeing enterprise”. Kubrick spent a great deal of
time researching the film, paying particular attention to accuracy and detail in what the
future might look like.

 

He was granted permission by NASA to observe the spacecraft being used
in the Ranger 9 mission for accuracy. Filming commenced on December 29, 1965, with the excavation
of the monolith on the moon, and footage was shot in the Namib Desert in early 1967, with the
ape scenes completed later that year. The special effects team continued working diligently
until the end of the year to complete the film, taking the cost to $10.5 million. 2001:
A Space Odyssey was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision
70, giving the viewer a “dazzling mix of imagination and science” through ground-breaking effects,
which earned Kubrick his only personal Oscar, an Academy Award for Visual Effects. Louise
Sweeney of The Christian Science Monitor called the film the “ultimate trip” while praising
one of the scenes where the viewer moves through space while witnessing a vibrant mix of lighting,
color, and patterns. Kubrick said of the concept of the film in an interview with Rolling Stone:
“On the deepest psychological level, the film’s plot symbolized the search for God, and finally
postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God.

 

The film revolves around
this metaphysical conception, and the realistic hardware and the documentary feelings about
everything was necessary to undermine your built-in resistance to the poetical concept”.Upon
release in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an immediate hit among critics, who faulted
its lack of dialog, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. The film appeared
to defy genre convention, much unlike any science-fiction movie before it, and clearly
different from any of Kubrick’s earlier films or stories. Kubrick was particularly outraged
by a scathing review from Pauline Kael, who called it “the biggest amateur movie of them
all”, with Kubrick doing “really every dumb thing he ever wanted to do”.

 

Despite mixed
reviews from critics at that time, 2001: A Space Odyssey gradually gained popularity
and earned $31 million worldwide by the end of 1972. Today, it is widely considered to
be one of the greatest and most influential films ever made and is a staple of All Time
Top 10 lists. Baxter describes the film as “one of the most admired and discussed creations
in the history of cinema”, and Steven Spielberg has referred to it as “the big bang of his
film-making generation”. For biographer Vincent LoBrutto it “positioned Stanley Kubrick as
a pure artist ranked among the masters of cinema”.

 

After completing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick
searched for a project that he could film quickly on a more modest budget. He settled
on A Clockwork Orange (1971) at the end of 1969, an exploration of violence and experimental
rehabilitation by law enforcement authorities, based around the character of Alex (portrayed
by Malcolm McDowell). Kubrick had originally received a copy of Anthony Burgess’s novel
of the same name from Terry Southern while they were working on Dr.

 

Strangelove, but
had rejected it because Nadsat, a street language for young teenagers, was
too difficult to comprehend. In 1969, the decision to make a film about the degeneration
of youth was a more timely one; the New Hollywood movement was witnessing a great number of
films that were centered around the sexuality and rebelliousness of young people, which
no doubt influenced Kubrick in Baxter’s opinion. A Clockwork Orange was shot between 1970–1971
on a budget of £2 million. Kubrick abandoned his use of CinemaScope in the filming, deciding
that the 1.66:1 widescreen format was, in the words of Baxter, an “acceptable compromise
between spectacle and intimacy”, and favored his “rigorously symmetrical framing”, which
“increased the beauty of his compositions”. The film heavily features “pop erotica” of
the period, including a giant white plastic set of male genitals, decor which Kubrick
had intended to give it a “slightly futuristic” look. McDowell’s role in Lindsay Anderson’s
if…. (1968) was crucial to his casting as Alex, and Kubrick professed that he probably
would not have made the film if McDowell had been unavailable.

 

Because of its depiction of teenage violence,
A Clockwork Orange became one of the most controversial films of its time and part
of an ongoing debate about violence and its glorification in cinema. It received an X
rating, or certificate, in both the UK and US, on its release just before Christmas 1971,
though many critics saw much of the violence depicted in the film as satirical, and less
violent than Straw Dogs, which had been released a month earlier.

 

Kubrick personally pulled
the film from release in the United Kingdom after receiving death threats following a
series of copycat crimes based on the film; it was thus completely unavailable legally
in the UK until after Kubrick’s death, and not re-released until 2000. John Trevelyan,
the censor of the film, personally considered A Clockwork Orange to be “perhaps the most
brilliant piece of cinematic art I’ve ever seen,” and believed it to present an “intellectual
argument rather than a sadistic spectacle” in its depiction of violence, but acknowledged
that many would not agree. The negative media hype over the film notwithstanding, A Clockwork
Orange received four Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing, and was named by the New York Film Critics Circle as the Best Film
of 1971. After William Friedkin won Best Director for The French Connection that year, he told
the press: “Speaking personally, I think Stanley Kubrick is the best American film-maker of
the year. In fact, not just this year, but the best, period”.

 

=== Period and horror filming (1972–1980)
=== Barry Lyndon (1975) is an adaptation of William
Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (also known as Barry Lyndon), is a picaresque
novel about the adventures of an 18th-century Irish rogue and social climber. John Calley
of Warner Bros. agreed in 1972 to invest $2.5 million into the film, on condition that Kubrick
approaches major Hollywood stars, to ensure its success. Like previous films, Kubrick
and his art department conducted an enormous amount of research, and he went from knowing
very little about the 18th century at the start of the production to becoming an expert
on it. Extensive photographs were taken of locations and artwork in particular, and paintings
were meticulously replicated from works of the great masters of the period in the film.
The film was shot on location in Ireland, beginning in the autumn of 1973, for $11 million with a cast and crew of 170.

 

The decision to shoot in Ireland stemmed from
the fact that it still retained many buildings from the 18th century period which England
lacked. The production was problematic from the start, plagued with heavy rain and political
strife involving Northern Ireland at the time. After Kubrick received death threats from
the IRA in the New Year of 1974 due to the shooting scenes with English soldiers, he
fled Ireland with his family on a ferry from Dún Laoghaire under an assumed identity,
and filming resumed in England.

 

Baxter notes that Barry Lyndon was the film
that made Kubrick notorious for paying scrupulous attention to detail, often demanding twenty
or thirty retakes of the same scene to perfect his art. Often considered to be his most authentic-looking
picture, the cinematography and lighting techniques that Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott
used in Barry Lyndon were highly innovative. Interior scenes were shot with a specially
adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA to be used in
satellite photography. The lenses allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight,
creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings. Cinematographer
Allen Daviau states that the method gives the audience a way of seeing the characters
and scenes as they would have been seen by people at the time. Many of the fight scenes
were shot with a hand-held camera to produce a “sense of documentary realism and immediacy”.Barry
Lyndon found a great audience in France, but was a box office failure, grossing just $9.5
million in the American market, not even close to the $30 million Warner Bros. needed to
generate a profit. The pace and length of Barry Lyndon at three hours put off many American
critics and audiences, but the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, including
Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Musical Score, more
than any other Kubrick film.

 

As with most of Kubrick’s films, Barry Lyndon’s reputation
has grown through the years and it is now considered to be one of his best, particularly
among filmmakers and critics. Numerous polls, such as The Village Voice (1999), Sight & Sound
(2002), and Time (2005), have rated it as one of the greatest films ever made. As of
March 2019, it has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 64 reviews. Roger Ebert
referred to it as “one of the most beautiful films ever made … certainly in every frame
a Kubrick film: technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human
goodness”.

 

The Shining, released in 1980, was adapted
from the novel of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King. The Shining was
not the only horror film to which Kubrick had been linked; he had turned down the directing
of both The Exorcist (1973) and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), despite once saying in
1966 to a friend that he had long desired to “make the world’s scariest movie, involving
a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience”. The
film stars Jack Nicholson as a writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of a large
and isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains. He spends the winter there with his wife,
played by Shelley Duvall, and their young son, who displays paranormal abilities. During
their stay, they confront both Jack’s descent into madness and the apparent supernatural horrors
lurking in the hotel. Kubrick gave his actors freedom to extend the script, and even improvise
on occasion, and as a result, Nicholson was responsible for the ‘Here’s Johnny!’ line
and scene in which he’s sitting at the typewriter and unleashes his anger upon his wife.

 

So
determined to produce perfection was Kubrick, who often demanded up to 70 or 80 retakes of
the same scene. Duvall, who Kubrick also intentionally isolated and argued with often, was forced
to perform the iconic and exhausting baseball bat scene 127 times. Afterward, Duvall presented
Kubrick with clumps of hair that had fallen out due to the extreme stress of filming.
The bar scene with the ghostly bartender was shot 36 times, while the kitchen scene between
the characters of Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Halloran (Scatman Crothers) ran to 148 takes.
The aerial shots of the Overlook Hotel were shot at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in
Oregon, while the interiors of the hotel were shot at Elstree Studios in England between
May 1978 and April 1979. Cardboard models were made of all of the sets of the film,
and lighting them was a massive undertaking, which took four months of electrical wiring.
Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, weight-balanced camera support,
which allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where the conventional camera
track was impractical. According to Garrett Brown, Steadicam’s inventor, it was the first
picture to use its full potential. Five days after its release on May 23, 1980, Kubrick ordered
the deletion of a final scene, in which the hotel manager Ullman (Barry Nelson) visits
Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is in hospital, believing it to have been unnecessary after witnessing
the audience’s excitement in cinemas at the climax of the film.

 

The Shining opened to
strong box office takings, earning $1 million on the first weekend and earning $30.9 million
in America alone by the end of the year. The original critical response was mixed, and
King himself detested the film and disliked Kubrick. Janet Maslin of The New York Times
praised the “eerie way” in which Kubrick turned an “enormous building into something cramped
and claustrophobic”, which would “undoubtedly amount to one of the screen’s scarier haunted
houses”. The Shining is now considered to be a horror classic and the American Film
Institute has ranked it as the 27th greatest thriller film of all time. === Later work and final years (1981–1999)
=== Kubrick met author Michael Herr through mutual
friend David Cornwell (novelist John le Carré) in 1980 and became interested in his book
Dispatches, about the Vietnam War. Herr had recently written Martin Sheen’s narration
for Apocalypse Now (1979). Kubrick was also intrigued by Gustav Hasford’s Vietnam War
novel The Short-Timers. With the vision in mind to shoot what would become Full Metal
Jacket (1987), Kubrick began working with both Herr and Hasford separately on a script.
He eventually found Hasford’s novel to be “brutally honest” and decided to shoot a film
that closely follows the novel.

 

All of the films were shot for $17 million within
a 30-mile radius of his house between August 1985 and September 1986, later than scheduled
as Kubrick shut down production for five months following a near-fatal accident with a jeep
involving Lee Ermey. A derelict gasworks in Beckton in the London Docklands area posed
as the ruined city of Huế, which makes the film visually very different from other Vietnam
War films.

 

 

Around 200 palm trees were imported via 40-foot trailers by road from North Africa,
for £1000 a tree, and thousands of plastic plants were ordered from Hong Kong
to provide foliage for the film. Kubrick explained he made the film look realistic by using natural
light, and achieved a “newsreel effect” by making the Steadicam shots less steady, which
reviewers and commentators thought contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. According
to critic Michel Ciment, the film contained some of Kubrick’s trademark characteristics,
such as his selection of ironic music, portrayals of men being dehumanized, and attention to
extreme detail to achieve realism. In a later scene, United States Marines patrol the ruins
of an abandoned and destroyed city singing the theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club as
a sardonic counterpoint.

 

The film opened strongly in June 1987, taking over $30 million in the
first 50 days alone, but critically it was overshadowed by the success of Oliver Stone’s
Platoon was released a year earlier. Co-star Matthew Modine stated one of Kubrick’s favorite
reviews read: “The first half of FMJ is brilliant. Then the film degenerates into a masterpiece.”
Roger Ebert was not particularly impressed with it, awarding it a mediocre 2.5 out of
4. He concluded: “Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is more like a book of short stories
than a novel”, a “strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a
ferociously consistent vision on his material”.Kubrick’s final film was Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey.

 

Tom Cruise portrays
a doctor who witnesses a bizarre masked quasireligious orgiastic ritual at a country mansion, a discovery
that later threatens his life. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Freudian
novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story in English), which Kubrick relocated from turn-of-the-century
Vienna to New York City in the 1990s. Kubrick said of the novel: “A difficult book to describe—what
good book isn’t. It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the
importance of sexual dreams and might-have-been with reality.

 

All of Schnitzler’s work is
psychologically brilliant”. Kubrick was almost 70 but worked relentlessly for 15 months
to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16, 1999. He commenced a script
with Frederic Raphael and worked 18 hours a day while maintaining complete confidentiality
about the film. Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship
before release. Kubrick sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a
few months before release, but his sudden death on March 7, 1999, came a few days after
he finished editing. He never saw the final version released to the public, but he did
see the preview of the film with Warner Bros., Cruise, and Kidman, and had reportedly told
Warner executive Julian Senior that it was his “best film ever”.

 

At the time, critical
opinion of the film was mixed, and it was viewed less favorably than most of Kubrick’s
films. Roger Ebert awarded it 3.5 out of 4 stars, comparing the structure to a thriller
and writing that it is “like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided”,
and thought that Kubrick’s use of lighting at Christmas made the film “all a little garish,
like an urban sideshow”. Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post disliked the film, writing
that it “is sad, rather than bad.

 

It feels creaky, ancient, and hopelessly out of
touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty
thing contemporary sexuality has become.” === A.I. Artificial Intelligence and unrealized
projects === ==== A.I. Artificial Intelligence ==== Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kubrick
collaborated with Brian Aldiss on an expansion of his short story “Supertoys Last All Summer
Long” into a three-act film. It was a futuristic fairy tale about a robot that resembles and
behaves like a child, and his efforts to become a ‘real boy like Pinocchio.
Kubrick approached Spielberg in 1995 with the AI script with the possibility of Steven
Spielberg directed it and Kubrick produced it. Kubrick reportedly held long telephone

discussions with Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point
stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg’s sensibilities than his. Following
Kubrick’s death in 1999, Spielberg took the various drafts and notes left by Kubrick and
his writers and composed a new screenplay based on an earlier 90-page story treatment
by Ian Watson written under Kubrick’s supervision and according to Kubrick’s specifications.
In association with what remained of Kubrick’s production unit, he directed the movie A.I.
Artificial Intelligence (2001) which was produced by Kubrick’s longtime producer (and brother-in-law)
Jan Harlan.

 

Sets, costumes, and art direction were based on the works of conceptual artist
Chris Baker, who had also done much of his work under Kubrick’s supervision.Spielberg
was able to function autonomously in Kubrick’s absence, but said he felt “inhibited to honor
him”, and followed Kubrick’s visual schema with as much fidelity as he could, according
to author Joseph McBride. Spielberg, who once referred to Kubrick as “the greatest master
I ever served”, now with production underway, admitted, “I felt like I was being coached
by a ghost.” The film was released in June 2001.

 

It contains a posthumous production
credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication “For Stanley Kubrick”
at the end. John Williams’s score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick
films. ==== Napoleon ==== Following 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick originally
planned to make a film about the life of the French emperor Napoleon. Fascinated by his
life and own “self-destruction”, Kubrick spent a great deal of time planning the film’s development
and conducted about two years of extensive research into Napoleon’s life, reading several
hundred books and gaining access to Napoleon’s memoirs and commentaries. He also
tried to see every film ever made about Napoleon and found none of them appealing, including
Abel Gance’s 1927 film is generally considered to be a masterpiece, but for Kubrick,
a “really terrible” movie. Lo Brutto states that Napoleon was an ideal subject for Kubrick,
embracing Kubrick’s “passion for control, power, obsession, strategy, and the military”,
while Napoleon’s psychological intensity and depth, logistical genius, and war, sex, and
the evil nature of man was all ingredients that deeply appealed to Kubrick. Kubrick drafted
a screenplay in 1961 and envisaged making a “grandiose” epic, with up to 40,000 infantry
and 10,000 cavalries.

 

He had intended to hire the armed forces of an entire country to make
the film, as he considered Napoleonic battles to be “so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets”,
with an “aesthetic brilliance that doesn’t require a military mind to appreciate”. He
wanted them to be replicated as authentically as possible on screen. Kubrick had sent research
teams to scout for locations across Europe, and commissioned screenwriter and director
Andrew Birkin, one of his young assistants in 2001, to the Isle of Elba, Austerlitz,
and Waterloo, taking thousands of pictures for his later perusal. Kubrick approached
numerous stars to play leading roles, including Audrey Hepburn for Empress Josephine, a part
which she could not accept due to semiretirement.

 

British actors David Hemmings and Ian Holm
were considered for the lead role of Napoleon before Jack Nicholson was cast. The film was
well into preproduction and ready to begin filming in 1969 when MGM canceled the project.
Numerous reasons have been cited for the abandonment of the project, including its projected cost,
a change of ownership at MGM, and the poor reception that the 1970 Soviet film about
Napoleon, Waterloo, received. In 2011, Taschen published the book, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon:
The Greatest Movie Never Made is a large-volume compilation of literature and source documents
from Kubrick, such as scene photo ideas and copies of letters Kubrick wrote and received.
In March 2013, Steven Spielberg, who previously collaborated with Kubrick on A.I.

 

Artificial
Intelligence and a passionate admirer of his work announced that he would be developing
Napoleon is a TV miniseries based on Kubrick’s original screenplay. ==== Other projects ====
In the 1950s, Kubrick and Harris developed a sitcom starring Ernie Kovacs and a film
adaption of the book I Stole $16,000,000, but nothing came of them. Tony Frewin, an
assistant who worked with the director for a long period, revealed in March
2013 Atlantic article: “He [Kubrick] was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and
desperately wanted to make a film on the subject.” Kubrick had intended to make a film about the
life story of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a Nazi officer who used the pen name “Dr.

 

Jazz” to
write reviews of German music scenes during the Nazi era. Kubrick had been given a copy
of the Mike Zwerin book Swing Under the Nazis after he had finished production on Full Metal
Jacket, the front cover of which featured a photograph of Schulz-Koehn. A screenplay
was never completed and Kubrick’s film adaptation plan was never initiated. The unfinished Aryan
Papers, based on Louis Begley’s debut novel Wartime Lies, were a factor in the abandonment
of the project. Work on Aryan Papers depressed Kubrick enormously, and he eventually decided
that Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) covered much of the same material. According
to biographer John Baxter, Kubrick had shown an interest in directing a pornographic film
based on a satirical novel written by Terry Southern, titled Blue Movie, about a director
who makes Hollywood’s first big-budget porn film.

 

Baxter claims that Kubrick concluded
that he did not have the patience or temperament to become involved in the porn industry, and
Southern stated that Kubrick was “too ultra-conservative” towards sexuality to have gone
ahead with it, but liked the idea. Kubrick was 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 he is dissatisfied with the film version of The Name of the Rose.
Also, 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
was unwilling to produce a film based on a very popular book.

 

Director Peter Jackson
has reported that Tolkien was against the involvement of the Beatles. == Career influences == Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct
a film knows that, although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper
car at an amusement park when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life
that can equal the feeling. As a young man, Kubrick was fascinated by
the films of Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Kubrick
read Pudovkin’s seminal theoretical work, Film Technique, which argues that editing
makes the film a unique art form, and it needs to be employed to manipulate the medium to
its fullest.

 

Kubrick recommended this work to others for many years. Thomas Nelson describes
this book as “the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick’s]
private aesthetics”. Kubrick also found the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski to be essential
to his understanding of the basics of directing and gave himself a crash course to learn his
methods. Kubrick’s family and many critics felt that his Jewish ancestry may have contributed
to his worldview and aspects of his films. After his death, both his daughter and wife
stated that he was not religious, but “did not deny his Jewishness, not at all”. His
daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, the Aryan Papers, having
spent years researching the subject. Most of Kubrick’s friends and early photography
and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent
Jewish immigrants from Europe. British screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who worked closely with
Kubrick in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick’s films was partly
because he “had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars”.

 

He declared that it was “absurd to try to
understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his
mentality”. Walker notes that Kubrick was influenced by
the tracking and “fluid camera” styles of director Max Ophüls, and used them in many
of his films, including Paths of Glory and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick noted how in
Ophuls’ films “the camera went through every wall and every floor”. He once named Ophüls’
Le Plaisir (1952) as his favorite film. According to film historian John Wakeman, Ophüls himself
learned the technique from director Anatole Litvak in the 1930s, when he was his assistant,
and whose work was “replete with the camera trackings, pans, and swoops which later became
the trademark of Max Ophüls”. Geoffrey Cocks believes that Kubrick was also influenced
by Ophüls’ stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men, while Herr
notes that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst, who earlier tried, but was unable
to adapt Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, the basis of Eyes Wide Shut.

 

Film critic Robert Kolker
sees the influence of Welles’ moving camera shots on Kubrick’s style. LoBrutto notes that
Kubrick identified with Welles and this influenced the making of The Killing, with
its “multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus”.Kubrick admired the work of
Ingmar Bergman expressed it in a personal letter: “Your vision of life has moved me
deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are
the greatest filmmaker at work today […], unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere,
the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness
of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making
of a film; […] and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films.” When
the American magazine Cinema asked Kubrick in 1963 to name his favorite films, he listed
Italian director Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni is number one in his Top 10 list.

 

== Directing techniques == ===
Philosophy === Kubrick’s films typically involve expressions
of an inner struggle, examined from different perspectives.
He was very careful not to present his views of the meaning of his films and to leave
them open to interpretation. He explained in a 1960 interview with Robert Emmett Ginna: “One of the things I always find extremely
difficult, when a picture’s finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, ‘Now, what
is it that you were trying to say in that picture?’ And without being thought too presumptuous
for using this analogy, I like to remember what T. S. Eliot said to someone who had asked
him—I believe it was The Waste Land—what he meant by the poem. He replied, ‘I meant
what I said.’ If I could have said it any differently, I would have”.
Kubrick likened the understanding of his films to popular music, in that whatever the background
or intellect of the individual, a Beatles record, for instance, can be appreciated as both
by the Alabama truck driver and the young Cambridge intellectual, because their “emotions
and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects”.

 

He believed that the subconscious
emotional reaction experienced by audiences was far more powerful in the film medium than
in any other traditional verbal form, and was one of the reasons why he often relied on
on long periods in his films without dialogue, emphasizing images and sound. In a
Time magazine interview in 1975, Kubrick further stated: “The essence of a dramatic form is
to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated.

 

When you say something
directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for
themselves.” He also said: “Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas.
Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious”. Diane Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay
for The Shining with Kubrick, notes that he “always said that it was better to adapt a
book rather than write an original screenplay and that you should choose a work that isn’t
a masterpiece so you can improve on it.

 

Which is what he’s always done, except with Lolita”.
When deciding on a subject for a film, there were several aspects that he looked for,
and he always made films that would “appeal to every sort of viewer, whatever their expectation
of film”. According to his co-producer Jan Harlan, Kubrick mostly “wanted to make films
about things that mattered, that not only had form but substance”. Kubrick believed
that audiences quite often were attracted to “enigmas and allegories” and did not like
films in which everything was spelled out clearly. Although none of his features display
graphic sex scenes, sexuality in Kubrick’s films is usually depicted outside matrimonial
relationships in hostile situations. Baxter states that Kubrick explores the “furtive
and violent side alleys of the sexual experience: voyeurism, domination, bondage and rape” in
his films. He further points out that films like A Clockwork Orange are “powerfully homoerotic”,
from Alex walking about his parents’ flat in his Y-fronts, one eye being “made up with
doll-like false eyelashes”, to his innocent acceptance of the sexual advances of his post-corrective
adviser Deltoid (Aubrey Morris).

 

British critic Adrian Turner notes that Kubrick’s
films appear to be “preoccupied with questions of universal and inherited evil”, and Malcolm
McDowell referred to his humor as “black as coal”, questioning his outlook on humanity.
A few of his pictures were obvious satires and black comedies, such as Lolita and Dr.
Strangelove; many of his other films also contained less visible elements of satire
or irony. His films are unpredictable, examining “the duality and contradictions that exist
in all of us”. Ciment notes how Kubrick often tried to confound audience expectations by
establishing radically different moods from one film to the next, remarking that he was
almost “obsessed with contradicting himself, with making each work a critique of the previous
one”. Kubrick stated that “there is no deliberate
pattern to the stories that I have chosen to make into films. About the only factor
at work each time is that I try not to repeat myself”. As a result, Kubrick was often misunderstood
by critics, and only once did he have unanimously positive reviews upon the release of a film—for
Paths of Glory.

 

=== Writing and staging scenes === Film author Patrick Webster considers Kubrick’s
methods of writing and developing scenes to fit with the classical auteur theory of directing,
allowing collaboration and improvisation with the actors during filming. Malcolm McDowell
recalled Kubrick’s collaborative emphasis during their discussions and his willingness
to allow him to improvise a scene, stating that “there was a script and we followed it,
but when it didn’t work he knew it, and we had to keep rehearsing endlessly until we
were bored with it”. Once Kubrick was confident in the overall
staging of a scene, and felt the actors were prepared, he would then develop the visual
aspects, including camera and lighting placement.

 

Walker believes that Kubrick was one of the “very
few film directors competent to instruct their lighting photographers in the precise effect
they want”. Baxter believes that Kubrick was heavily influenced by his ancestry and always
possessed a European perspective on filmmaking, particularly the Austro-Hungarian empire and
his admiration for Max Ophuls and Richard Strauss. Gilbert Adair, writing in a review
for Full Metal Jacket, commented that “Kubrick’s approach to language has always been of a
reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive
product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of
subjectivity and interiority, by all whims, shades, and modulations of personal expression”.
Johnson notes that although Kubrick was a “visual filmmaker”, he also loved words and
was like a writer in his approach, very sensitive to the story itself, which he found unique.
Before shooting began, Kubrick tried to have the script as complete as possible, but still
allowed himself enough space to make changes during the filming, finding it “more profitable
to avoid locking up any ideas about staging or camera or even dialogue before rehearsals”
as he put it.

 

Kubrick told Robert Emmett Ginna: “I think you have to view the entire problem
of putting the story you want to tell up there on that light square. It begins with the selection
of the property; it continues through the creation of the story, the sets, the costumes,
the photography, and the acting. And when the picture is shot, it’s only partially finished.
I think the cutting is just a continuation of directing a movie. I think the use of musical
effects, optical and finally main titles are all part of telling the story. And I think
the fragmentation of these jobs, by different people, is a very bad thing”.

 

Kubrick also
said: “I think that the best plot is no apparent plot. I like a slow start, the start that
gets under the audience’s skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes
and soft tones and don’t have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense
tools.” ===
Directing === Kubrick was notorious for demanding multiple
takes during filming to perfect his art, and his relentless approach was often extremely
demanding for his actors.

 

Jack Nicholson remarked that Kubrick would often demand up to fifty
takes of a scene. Nicole Kidman explains that a large number of takes he often required
stopped actors from consciously thinking about technique, thereby helping them enter a “deeper
place”. Kubrick’s high take ratio was considered by some critics as “irrational”; he firmly
believed that actors were at their best during the filming, as opposed to rehearsals, due
to the sense of intense excitement that it generates. Kubrick explained: “Actors are
essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while
others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how
hard they try” … “When you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the
crew because it is like getting undressed in front of fifty people. Once you’re accustomed
to them, the presence of even one other person on set is discordant and tends to produce
self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in itself”.

 

He also told biographer Michel
Clement: “It’s invariably because the actors don’t know their lines, or don’t know them
well enough. An actor can only do one thing at a time, and when he learned his lines only
well enough to say them while he’s thinking about them, he will always have trouble as
soon as he has to work on the emotions of the scene or find camera marks. In a strong
emotional scene, it is always best to be able to shoot in complete takes to allow the actor
a continuity of emotion, and it is rare for most actors to reach their peak more than
once or twice. There are, occasionally, scenes that benefit from extra takes, but even then,
I’m not sure that the early takes aren’t just glorified rehearsals with the adding adrenaline
of film running through the camera.”Kubrick would devote his breaks to having
lengthy discussions with actors.

 

Among those who valued his attention was Tony Curtis,
star of Spartacus, who said Kubrick was his favorite director, adding, “his greatest effectiveness
was his one-on-one relationship with actors.” He further added, “Kubrick had his approach
to film-making. He wanted to see the actor’s faces. He didn’t want cameras always in a
wide shot twenty-five feet away, he wanted close-ups, and he wanted to keep the camera moving.
That was his style.” Similarly, Malcolm McDowell recalls the long discussions he had with Kubrick
to help him develop his character in A Clockwork Orange, noting that on set he felt entirely
uninhibited and free, which is what made Kubrick “such a great director”. Kubrick also allowed
actors at times to improvise and to “break the rules”, particularly with Peter Sellers
in Lolita, which became a turning point in his career as it allowed him to work creatively
during the shooting, as opposed to the preproduction stage.
During an interview, Ryan O’Neal recalled Kubrick’s directing style: “God, he works
you hard.

 

He moves you, pushes you, helps you, and gets cross with you, but above all, he
teaches you the value of a good director. Stanley brought out aspects of my personality
and acting instincts that had been dormant … My strong suspicion [was] that I was involved
in something great”. He further added that working with Kubrick was “a stunning experience”
and that he never recovered from working with somebody of such magnificence. === Cinematography === Kubrick credited the ease with which he photographed
scenes to his early years as a photographer. He rarely added camera instructions in the
script, preferring to handle that after a scene is created, as the visual part of film-making
came easiest to him. Even in deciding which props and settings would be used, Kubrick
paid meticulous attention to detail and tried to collect as much background material as
possible, functioning rather like what he described as “a detective”. Cinematographer
John Alcott, who worked closely with Kubrick on four of his films, and won an Oscar for
Best Cinematography on Barry Lyndon remarked that Kubrick “questions everything”, and was
involved in the technical aspects of film-making including camera placement, scene composition,
choice of lens, and even operating the camera which would usually be left to the cinematographer.
Alcott considered Kubrick to be the “nearest thing to a genius I’ve ever worked with, with
all the problems of a genius”.

 

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

 

Kubrick described Steadicam
as being like a “magic carpet”, allowing “fast, flowing, camera movements” in the maze in
The Shining which otherwise would have been impossible. Kubrick was among the first directors
to use video assistance during filming. At the time he began using it in 1966, it was considered
cutting-edge technology, requiring him to build his system. Having it in place during
the filming of 2001, he was able to view a video of a take immediately after it was filmed.
In some films, such as Barry Lyndon, he used custom-made zoom lenses, which allowed him
to start a scene with a close-up and slowly zoom out to capture the full panorama of scenery
and to film long takes under changing outdoor lighting conditions by making aperture adjustments
while the cameras rolled.

 

LoBrutto notes that Kubrick’s technical knowledge about lenses
“dazzled the manufacturer’s engineers, who found him to be unprecedented among contemporary
filmmakers”. Barry Lyndon also used a specially adapted high-speed (f/0.7) Zeiss
camera lens, originally developed for NASA, to shoot numerous scenes lit only with candlelight.
Actor Steven Berkoff recalls that Kubrick wanted scenes to be shot using “pure candlelight”,
and in doing so Kubrick “made a unique contribution to the art of filmmaking going back to painting
… You almost posed like for portraits.” LoBrutto notes that cinematographers all over
the world wanted to know about Kubrick’s “magic lens” and that he became a “legend” among
cameramen around the world.

 

=== Editing and music === Kubrick spent extensive hours editing, often
working seven days a week, and more hours a day as he got closer to deadlines. For Kubrick,
the written dialogue was one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements),
music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin’s treatise on film editing, Kubrick
realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often “re-direct”
a film and he remarked: “I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase
of filmmaking … Editing is the unique aspect of filmmaking which does not resemble
any other art form—a point so important it cannot be overstressed … It can make
or break a film”. Biographer John Baxter stated that “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 only began to emerge during editing”.Kubrick’s attention
to music was an aspect of what many referred to as his “perfectionism” and extreme attention
to minute details, which his wife Christiane attributed to an addiction to music. In his
last six films, Kubrick usually chose music from existing sources, especially classical
compositions. He preferred selecting recorded music over having it composed for a film,
believing that no hired composer could do as well as the public domain classical composers.
He also felt that building scenes from great music often created the “most memorable scenes”
in the best films. In one instance, for a scene in Barry Lyndon which was written into
the screenplay as merely, “Barry duels with Lord Bullingdon”, he spent forty-two working
days in the editing phase. During that period, he listened to what LoBrutto describes as
“every available recording of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century music, acquiring thousands
of records to find Handel’s sarabande used to score the scene”. Jack Nicholson likewise
observed his attention to music for his films, stating that Kubrick “listened constantly
to music until he discovered something he felt was right or that excited him”.Kubrick
is credited with introducing Hungarian composer György Ligeti to a broad Western audience
by including his music in 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.

 

According to Baxter, the
music in 2001 was “at the forefront of Kubrick’s mind” when he conceived the film. During earlier
screening he played music by Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams, and Kubrick and writer Clarke
had listened to Carl Orff’s transcription of Carmina Burana, consisting of 13th century
sacred and secular songs. Ligeti’s music employed the new style of micropolyphony, which used
sustained dissonant chords that shift slowly over time, a style he originated. Its inclusion
in the film became a “boon for the relatively unknown composer” partly because it was introduced
alongside background by Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss.In addition to Ligeti, Kubrick
also enjoyed a collaboration with composer Wendy Carlos, whose 1968 album Switched-On
Bach—which re-interpreted baroque music through the use of a Moog synthesizer—caught
his attention.

 

In 1971, Carlos composed and recorded music for the soundtrack of A Clockwork
Orange. Additional music not used in the film was released in 1972 as Wendy Carlos’s Clockwork
Orange. Kubrick later collaborated with Carlos on The Shining (1980). The opening of the
film—in which the camera follows Jack Torrance’s yellow VW beetle through the mountains to
the Overlook Hotel—employs Carlos’ eerie rendering of “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) from
Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

 

== Personal life == Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart
Toba Metz, a caricaturist, on May 29, 1948, when he was nineteen years old. They had attended
Taft High School together and had lived in the same apartment block on Shakespeare Avenue.
The couple 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 City’s East Village beginning in 1952, married in January
1955, and moved to Hollywood in July 1955, where she played a brief part as a ballet
dancer in Kubrick’s film, Killer’s Kiss (1955). The following year she was the art director for
his film, The Killing (1956).

 

They divorced in 1957. During the production of Paths of
Glory in Munich in early 1957, Kubrick met and romanced the German actress Christiane
Harlan played a small though memorable role in the film. Kubrick married Harlan in
1958, and the couple remained together for 40 years until he died in 1999. Besides
his stepdaughter, they had two daughters together: Anya Renata (April 6, 1959 – July 7, 2009)
and Vivian Vanessa (born August 5, 1960). In 1959 they settled into a home at 316 South
Camden Drive in Beverly Hills with Harlan’s daughter, Katherina, aged six. They also lived
in New York City, during which time Christiane studied art at the Art Students League of
New York, later becoming an independent artist. The couple moved to the United Kingdom in
1961 to make Lolita, and Kubrick hired Peter Sellers to star in his next film, Dr. Strangelove.
Sellers was unable to leave the UK, so Kubrick made Britain his permanent home thereafter.
The move was quite convenient to Kubrick, since he shunned the Hollywood system and
its publicity machine, and he and Christiane had become alarmed by the increase in violence
in New York City. In 1965 the Kubricks bought Abbots Mead on
Barnet Lane, just southwest of the Elstree/Borehamwood studio complex in England.

 

Kubrick worked
almost exclusively from this home for 14 years where, with some exceptions, he researched,
invented special effects techniques, designed ultra-low light lenses for specially modified
cameras, pre-produced, edited, post-produced, advertised, distributed, and carefully managed
all aspects of four of his films. In 1978, Kubrick moved into Childwickbury Manor in
Hertfordshire, a mainly 18th-century stately home, which was once owned by a wealthy racehorse
owner, about 30 mi (50 km) north of London and a 10-minute drive from his previous home
at Abbotts Mead. His new home became a workplace for Kubrick and his wife, “a perfect family
factory” as Christiane called it, and Kubrick converted the stables into extra production
rooms besides ones within the home that he used for editing and storage.A workaholic,
Kubrick rarely took a vacation or left England during the forty years before he died.

 

LoBrutto
notes that Kubrick’s confined way of living and desire for privacy has led to spurious
stories about his reclusiveness, similar to those of Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes, and J.
D. Salinger. Michael Herr, Kubrick’s co-screenwriter on Full Metal Jacket, who knew him well, considers
his “reclusiveness” to be a myth: “[He] was a complete failure as a recluse, unless
you believe that a recluse is simply someone who seldom leaves his house. Stanley saw a
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.” Lo Brutto states that one of the
reasons he acquired a reputation as a recluse was because he insisted on remaining near
his home, but the reason for this was that for Kubrick there were only three places on
the planet he could make high-quality films with the necessary technical expertise and
equipment: Los Angeles, New York City, or around London.

 

He disliked living in Los Angeles
and thought London was a superior film production center to New York City. As a person, Kubrick
was described by Norman Lloyd as “a very dark, sort of a glowering type who was very serious”.
Marisa Berenson, who starred in Barry Lyndon, fondly recalled: “There was great tenderness
in him and he was passionate about his work. What was striking was his enormous intelligence,
but he also had a great sense of humor. He was a very shy person and self-protective,
but he was filled with the thing that drove him twenty-four hours of the day.” Kubrick
was particularly fond of machines and technical equipment, to the point that his wife Christiane
once stated that “Stanley would be happy with eight tape recorders and one pair of pants”.
Kubrick obtained a pilot’s license in August 1947; some have claimed that he later
developed a fear of flying, stemming from an incident in the early 1950s when a colleague
had been killed in a plane crash.

 

Kubrick had been sent the charred remains of his camera
and notebooks which, according to Duncan, traumatized him for life. Kubrick also had
a strong mistrust of doctors and medicine, especially those he did not know, and on one
occasion he had a dentist from the Bronx flown to London to treat him. === Death ===
On March 7, 1999, six days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family
and the stars, Kubrick died in his sleep at the age of 70, suffering a heart attack. His
funeral was held five days later at his home estate at Childwickbury Manor, with only close
friends and family in attendance, totaling approximately 100 people. The media were kept
a mile away outside the entrance gate. Alexander Walker, who attended the funeral, describes
it as a “family farewell, … almost like an English picnic”, with cellists, clarinetists, and singers providing song and music from many of his favorite classical compositions.
Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, was recited.

 

A few of his obituaries mentioned
his Jewish background. Among those who gave eulogies were Terry Semel, Jan Harlan, Steven
Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, and Tom Cruise. He was buried next to his favorite tree on the
estate. In her book dedicated to Kubrick, his wife Christiane included one of his favorite
quotations from Oscar Wilde: “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one
is young.” ==
Legacy == Part of the New Hollywood film-making wave,
Kubrick’s films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be “among the most important
contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century”, and he is frequently cited as one
of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of cinema.

 

Leading directors,
including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, George Lucas, James Cameron,
Terry Gilliam, the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott, and George A. Romero, have cited Kubrick as
a source of inspiration, and additionally in Spielberg’s case, collaboration. On the
DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, Steven Spielberg comments that the way Kubrick “tells a story is antithetical
to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories” and that “nobody could shoot a picture
better in history”. Orson Welles, one of Kubrick’s greatest personal influences and all-time
favorite directors said: “Among those whom I would call ‘younger generation’, Kubrick
appears to me to be a giant.” Akira Kurosawa, another director Kubrick admired, remarked,
“He made many masterpieces.” Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence
by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, Todd Field, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro,
David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noé.

 

Many filmmakers imitate
Kubrick’s inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing, as well as his use of
music, including Frank Darabont. Paul Thomas Anderson, 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 this 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.”Artists in fields other than film have also expressed admiration for Kubrick.
English musician and poet PJ Harvey, in an interview about her 2011 album Let England
Shake, argued that “something about […] what is not said in his films…there’s so much
space, so many silent things – and somehow, in that space and silence everything
becomes clear.

 

With every film, he seems to capture the essence of life itself, particularly
in films like Paths of Glory, [2001: A Space Odyssey], Barry Lyndon…those are some of
my favorites.” The music video for Kanye West’s 2010 song “Runaway” was inspired by Eyes Wide
Shut. Pop singer Lady Gaga’s concert shows have included the use of dialogue, costumes,
and music from A Clockwork Orange. In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia lifetime achievement
award the “Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award”, joining the likes of D. W. Griffith, Laurence
Olivier, Cecil B. DeMille, and Irving Thalberg, all of whom have annual awards named after
them.

 

Kubrick won this award in 1999, and subsequent recipients have included George
Lucas, Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Several people who worked with Kubrick on his films created the 2001 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. The first public exhibition of material from
Kubrick’s archives were presented jointly in 2004 by the Deutsches Filmmuseum
and Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, in cooperation with Christiane Kubrick
and Jan Harlan / The Stanley Kubrick Estate. In 2009, an exhibition of paintings and photos
inspired by Kubrick’s films was held in Dublin, Ireland, entitled “Stanley Kubrick: Taming
Light”. On October 30, 2012, an exhibition devoted to Kubrick opened at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA) and concluded in June 2013. Exhibits include a wide collection
of documents, photographs, and on-set material assembled from 800 boxes of personal archives
that were stored in Kubrick’s home workplace in the UK.

 

Several celebrities attended
and spoke at the museum’s pre-opening gala, including Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and
Jack Nicholson, while Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, appeared at the pre-gala press review. In
In October 2013, the Brazil São Paulo International Film Festival paid tribute to Kubrick, staging
an exhibit of his work and a retrospective of his films. The exhibit opened at the Toronto
International Film Festival (TIFF) in late 2014 and ended in January 2015. Kubrick is
widely referenced in popular culture, and the TV series The Simpsons is said to contain
more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. When the Directors
The Guild of Great Britain gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a cut-together
the sequence of all the homages from the show. Several works have been created that related
to Kubrick’s life, including the made-for-TV mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon (2002),
which is a parody of the pervasive conspiracy theory that Kubrick had been involved with
the faked footage of the NASA moon landings during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Colour Me Kubrick (2005) was authorized by Kubrick’s family and starred John Malkovich
as Alan Conway, a con artist who had assumed Kubrick’s identity in the 1990s.

 

In 2004
film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Kubrick was portrayed by Stanley Tucci; the
the film documents the filming of Dr. Strangelove. In April 2018, the month that marked the 50th
anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the International Astronomical Union named the
the largest mountain of Pluto’s moon Charon after Kubrick. == See also ==
Hawk Films Stanley Kubrick Archive
Stanley Kubrick bibliography Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures Filmworker a documentary with Leon Vitali
about his work with Kubrick == Notes.

As found on YouTube

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