Stanley Kubrick

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

Stanley Kubrick
File:Kubrick-Lyndon.jpg During filming of Barry Lyndon (1975)
Born	(1928-07-26)July 26, 1928 Manhattan, New York, United States
Died	March 7, 1999(1999-03-07) (aged 70) Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Cause of death	Heart attack
Occupation(s)	Film director, film producer, film editor, screenwriter, cinematographer
Years active	1951–1999
Notable work	Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Paths of Glory, Spartacus
Style	Psychological, Nonlinear, Surrealistic, Noir, Black comedy
Spouse(s)	Toba Etta Metz (1948–51; divorced) Ruth Sobotka (1954–57; divorced) Christiane Harlan (1958–99; his death)

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

Several of his films were considered cinematically groundbreaking, including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) noted among the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made; Barry Lyndon (1975), with its use of specially-designed super fast lenses to capture low-light scenes; The Shining (1980), the first film to use the new Steadicam extensively to allow stabilized and fluid tracking of motion. Kubrick was cinematographer for four of his thirteen films, and produced, directed, and wrote all or part of the screenplays for nearly all his films.

All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s onward, except The Shining, were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some of his films created controversy, including A Clockwork Orange (1971), a result of violent scenes; Lolita (1961), with its theme of underage sexuality; and Paths of Glory (1957), banned in France for its anti-war portrayal of French soldiers, and which brought him critical attention as a director.

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

Life and career

Early years

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

The Kubrick biographer Geoffrey Cocks writes that Kubrick's family was not religious, although his parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony. When the critic Michel Ciment asked him in 1980 whether he had a religious upbringing, Kubrick replied "No, not at all." He had no bar mitzvah and did not attend synagogue, like many Jews who led secular lives.

A friend of Kubrick's family notes that although his father was a prominent doctor, "Stanley and his mom were such regular people. They had no airs about them." As a boy, he was considered "bookish" and generally uninterested in activities in his Bronx neighborhood. According to a friend, "When we were teenagers hanging around the Bronx, he was just another bright, neurotic, talented guy—just another guy trying to get into a game with my softball club and mess around with girls". Many of his friends from his "close-knit neighborhood" would become involved with his early films, including writing music scores and scripts.

Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. Kubrick later recalled the significance of his chess hobby to his career:

I used to play chess twelve hours a day. You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

He also bought his son a Graflex camera when he was thirteen, triggering a fascination with still photography. As a teenager, Kubrick was interested in jazz, and briefly attempted a career as a drummer. His father was disappointed in his failure to achieve excellence in school, which he felt Stanley was capable of. His father encouraged him to read from his large library at home while at the same time permitting him to take up photography as a serious hobby. These additional interests outside of school may have contributed to his poor performance as a student.

Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 45. He was a poor student, with a meager 67 grade average. According to his English teacher, Kubrick was not a great student. But, "the idea of literature and the reading of literature, from a non-academic, from a more human point of view, clearly was what interested him. He was a literary guy even as a young man . . . " Kubrick had a poor attendance record, and often skipped school to take in double-feature films. He graduated in 1945, but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated hope of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that nothing about school interested him. His parents sent him to live with relatives for a year in Los Angeles in the hopes that it would help his academic growth.

File:KubrickForLook.jpg

Kubrick as a Look magazine photographer in 1949

While still in high school, he was chosen as an official school photographer for a year. In 1946, since he was not able to gain admission to day session classes at colleges, he briefly attended evening classes at the City College of New York (CCNY). Eventually, he sought jobs as a freelance photographer, and by graduation, he had sold a photographic series to Look magazine. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs. He became an apprentice photographer for Look in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer. (Many early [1945–50] photographs by Kubrick have been published in the book Drama and Shadows [2005, Phaidon Press] and also appear as a special feature on the 2007 Special Edition DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

During his Look magazine years, Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz (b. January 24, 1930) on May 29, 1948. They lived together in Greenwich Village. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the cinemas of New York City. He was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of the director Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style, and by the director Elia Kazan, who he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors.

1950s

Short films

In 1951, Kubrick's friend Alex Singer persuaded him to start making short documentaries for The March of Time, a provider of newsreels to movie theatres. Kubrick agreed, and shot the independently financed Day of the Fight in 1951. The film notably employed a reverse tracking shot, which would become one of Kubrick's signature camera movements. Kubrick is said to have sold Day of the Fight to RKO Radio Pictures for a profit of $100, although Kubrick claimed he lost $100. Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Look and began working on his second short documentary, Flying Padre (1951), funded by RKO. A third short film, The Seafarers (1953), a promotional for the Seafarers' International Union, was filmed just after his first feature Fear and Desire to recoup costs. It and was Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre. Historians believe he made other shorts which have been lost—most notably World Assembly of Youth (1952). He also served as second unit director on an episode of the Omnibus television program about the life of Abraham Lincoln. None of these shorts has been officially released, though they have been widely bootlegged. Clips are used in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.

Fear and Desire

Kubrick moved to narrative feature films with Fear and Desire (1953), the story of a team of soldiers caught behind enemy lines in a fictional war. Kubrick and his then-wife, Toba Metz, were the only crew on the film, which was written by his friend Howard Sackler. Their marriage ended during the production of this film. Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Later in life, Kubrick was embarrassed by the film, which he dismissed as an amateur effort. He refused to allow Fear and Desire to be shown at retrospectives and public screenings and tried to keep it out of circulation. At least one copy remained in the archives of the film printing company, and the film subsequently surfaced in bootleg copies. It was shown for the first time on television in December 2011 on Turner Classic Movies.

Killer's Kiss

He met his second wife, the Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York's East Village from 1952 until their marriage on January 15, 1955. They moved to Hollywood that summer. Sobotka, made a cameo appearance as a ballet dancer in Kubrick's next film, Killer's Kiss (1955) and served as art director on The Killing (1956). Killer's Kiss is a film noir film, slightly more than an hour in length, about a young heavyweight boxer's involvement with a neighboring woman being abused by her criminal husband. Like Fear and Desire, it was privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends, and met with limited commercial and critical success. Kubrick's first two films would be his only films not adapted from any prior source material.

The Killing

Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a young producer named James B. Harris, and the two became close friends. Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, financed three out of the next four Kubrick pictures. The two bought the rights to the Lionel White novel Clean Break, which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson turned into The Killing, which tells the story of a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong. Starring Sterling Hayden, The Killing was Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. The story is told using a non-linear narrative, an unusual device for 1950s American cinema, and was imitated nearly 40 years later in the film Reservoir Dogs. Director Quentin Tarantino acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence, even referring to Reservoir Dogs as "my Killing". The Killing followed many of the conventions of film noir, in both its plotting and cinematography style. The genre peaked in the 1940s, but many critics regard this film as one of its best. While it was not a financial success, it received good reviews.

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

The widespread admiration for The Killing brought Harris-Kubrick Productions to the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio offered them its massive collection of copyrighted stories from which to choose their next project.

Paths of Glory

Kubrick's next film, Paths of Glory, was released in 1957. Set during World War I and based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name, it follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are unduly charged with cowardice and sentenced to death. Kirk Douglas starred, and was instrumental in securing financing for the production. The film was not a significant commercial success, but it was critically acclaimed and widely admired within the industry, establishing Kubrick as a major up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics have praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. The film was banned in France for many years for its unflattering depiction of the French military.

Marriage to Christiane Harlan

During the production of Paths of Glory in Munich, Kubrick met and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan, who played a small though memorable role in the film that Kubrick wrote in late in the development process. Kubrick divorced Sobotka in 1957, and married Harlan in 1958. In 1959 they settled into a home in Beverly Hills as their stepdaughter, Katherina, was six years old, and Christiane was pregnant with their first child, Anya.Christiane and Stanley Kubrick remained together until his death in 1999.

Upon his return to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months on the Marlon Brando vehicle One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Kubrick had been earlier announced as its director when titled Gun's Up. It was Charles Neider's novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones to be produced by Marlon Brando. On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of One-Eyed Jacks so that he could begin production on Lolita. In 1960 he expanded on his reasoning, telling an interviewer: "When I left Brando's picture, it still didn't have a finished script. It had just become obvious to me that Brando wanted to direct the movie. I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando, to see that nobody shot him down." The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando and released in 1961.

Departure from One-Eyed Jacks

In 1956, Kubrick was announced as director of Gun's Up, the working title for the production of Charles Neider's novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones to be produced by Marlon Brando. Shortly after this announcement, the name of the film was changed to One-Eyed Jacks. On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of One-Eyed Jacks so that he could begin production on Lolita. In 1960 he expanded on his reasoning, telling an interviewer: "When I left Brando's picture, it still didn't have a finished script. It had just become obvious to me that Brando wanted to direct the movie. I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando, to see that nobody shot him down." The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando and released in 1961.

1960s

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

Spartacus

Based upon the historic story of a doomed uprising of Roman slaves, Spartacus (1960) was a difficult production. Creative differences arose between Kubrick and Douglas, and the two reportedly had a stormy working relationship. Spartacus is the only Kubrick film in which the director had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, no producing credit, or any say in casting. Frustrated by his lack of creative control, Kubrick later largely disowned the film, which angered Douglas. The friendship the two men had formed on Paths of Glory was destroyed by their experience of making Spartacus. Years later, Douglas referred to Kubrick as "a talented shit." Spartacus was a critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major director. It won four Oscars, including an award for Peter Ustinov for his role as the slave dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's direction. Due to the film's embattled production, Kubrick was determined to find ways of working with Hollywood financing while remaining independent of its production system, which he called "film by fiat, film by frenzy."

Both of Stanley Kubrick's biological daughters, Anya and Vivian, were born during the filming of Spartacus roughly a year apart.

Lolita

Kubrick was forced for censorship reasons to tone down the film's overt sexuality, which he hinted at both verbally and visually through gestures and double entendre. Here (in a scene not in the novel), Humbert (James Mason) plays chess with Lolita's mother, Charlotte, who says, "You're going to take my Queen." Humbert replies, "That was my intention," while Lolita kisses her stepfather goodnight. Chess was a favorite motif of both novelist Vladimir Nabokov and Stanley Kubrick. The critic Tom Nelson argues the whole film is metaphorically a "cinematic chess game", embodying themes of "deception and enchantment".

In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film Lolita (1962). He lived there for the rest of his life. He originally wanted to film in the UK because of its laxer censorship laws. He had to film Dr. Strangelove there, since divorce proceedings prevented Peter Sellers from leaving the country, and Kubrick needed the large capacity of the Shepperton Studios to film 2001: A Space Odyssey. After filming the first two of these films in England, while in the early planning stages of 2001, Kubrick decided to settle there permanently.

Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate major controversy. It was an adaptation of the novel of the same name by the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, which had been condemned by the Legion of Decency because of its subject matter — an affair between a middle-aged professor named Humbert Humbert and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. The film's tagline, "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?" referred to the difficult subject matter.

Kubrick realized that to get a Production Code seal, necessary for wide audiences, the screenplay would have to downplay the book's provocative theme. Kubrick omitted all material referring to Humbert's lifelong infatuation with "nymphets," and may have tried to ensure the actress playing Lolita looked like an older teenager. James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited co-screenwriter of Lolita, decided with Kubrick to raise Lolita's age. Kubrick consulted with the censors during production and the film was only "slightly edited", removing some eroticism between Lolita and Humbert. As a result, the final cut toned down the novel's more sensual aspects, leaving much to the viewer's imagination. Kubrick later said that if he had known of the severity of the censorship he would face, he probably would not have made the film.

Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his own novel for the screen. Nabokov first wrote an over-long than a shorter screenplay, but Kubrick revised the dialogue line by line while Nabokov retained full writing credit. Nabokov estimated that only 20% of his work made it into the final screenplay written by Kubrick. Partly in order to maximize the use of the talents of Peter Sellers, Kubrick notably expanded the character of Clare Quilty. He added the plot device of Quilty masquerading as various people, enabling Sellers to employ multiple accents.

Reviews of the film were mixed; many praised it for its daring subject matter; others were surprised by the lack of intimacy between Lolita and Humbert. Recent reviews in conjunction with its DVD release have been overwhelmingly positive. The film critic Gene Youngblood holds that stylistically, Lolita is a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema...to the surrealism of the later films."

Lolita was the first of Kubrick's films made in England although he did not choose to settle their permanently till Space Odyssey. During that time, he maintained a New York address, and his wife was taking art lessons in New York's Arts Student League.

Lolita was edited by Anthony Harvey who later went on to become an important film director in his own right. Harvey found Kubrick's distinctive approach to editing refreshing, and remembered Kubrick as an extraordinary conversationalist with detailed interest in a wide spectrum of subjects which he explored in small detail. After the film, he spent a holiday in Paris with Kubrick's family and recalls that he was "very fond" of him.

Dr. Strangelove

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

Group Captain Mandrake sitting at an IBM 7090 console,

President Merkin Muffley,

and Dr. Strangelove.

Kubrick's next project, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), became a cult film, especially famous for its anti-war message, and is now considered a classic. It is a satire on the "hawkish" American advocates of use of the atomic bomb, as embodied in the character of the renegade General Jack D. Ripper, who leads an unauthorized nuclear attack on Russia. The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments which would become explosive only a few years after its release. Roger Ebert called it the best satirical film ever made. The screenplay was based upon the entirely serious and straight thriller Red Alert, by the ex-RAF flight lieutenant Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant). But, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear conflict so absurd that he chose to turn the story into a sinister, macabre comedy. According to Kubrick:

My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.

Peter Sellers, who had played a pivotal part in Lolita and had appeared in several previous films in multiple roles, was hired to play four roles in Dr. Strangelove. He eventually played three, due to an injured leg and his difficulty in mastering bomber pilot Major "King" Kong's Texas accent. Due to Sellers' relative obscurity in the US at the time, most American viewers did not initially realize he was playing three roles, all with very different accents and appearances. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing", but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and allowed Sellers to improvise, as he had on Lolita.

During the filming of Strangelove, Kubrick began testing the lighting of scenes by taking Polaroid snapshots of the set. Although Polaroid reads light differently than 35mm film, Kubrick soon learned to understand the difference. This usage later became an industry standard in the film industry, but Kubrick started using the technique quite early.

As he had with Lolita, Kubrick filmed Strangelove in England, partly due to the fact that Sellers was not allowed to leave England at the time. On both films, Kubrick noted the relatively low cost of filming in England. Both he and Christiane were noting the New York was an increasingly tense place in which to live, and began to wonder if England might be a better place to raise a family.

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

2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). During preproduction, he viewed as many science-fiction films as he could find in search of ideas and effects, many compiled by his staff archivist. The film was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70. A massive production for its time, it is famous for its groundbreaking visual effects, minimal use of dialogue and usage of classical music instead of an original score. It was also noted for its scientific realism in depicting space flight as well as its slightly surreal and enigmatic narrative. In addition to well-known compositions, Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti; it was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. The film became quickly popular with the counter-culture youth movement of the 1960s, who were especially enchanted by the "psychedelic" and mysterious nature of the film's closing sequence of astronaut David Bowman's journey through the "Stargate". After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form; however, his subsequent films would still maintain some level of ambiguity.

Kubrick extensively used traveling matte photography to film space flight, a technique also used nine years later by George Lucas in making Star Wars, although that film also used motion-control effects unavailable to Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of slit-scan photography to film the Stargate sequence. The film also featured the most extensive use of front-screen projection to date in the Dawn of Man sequence, for which Kubrick designed a special high-resolution front-screen projector.

The film opened in widescreen Cinerama and initially toured as a "roadshow" picture, with program booklets sold in the lobbies of the theatre. Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not an immediate hit. Initial criticism attacked the film's lack of dialogue, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. One of the film's few defenders was Penelope Gilliatt, who called it (in The New Yorker) "some kind of a great film". However, word-of-mouth among young audiences (especially the 1960s counterculture audience) made the film an eventual hit. Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award Kubrick received was for supervising the film's special effects.

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

Friendship, lifestyle, and relocation to England

During the filming of Space Odyssey Kubrick became friendly with his wife's painting teacher, Harry Sternberg. He described Kubrick as one of the most dynamic and energetic people he had ever met, and thought he fantastic that such two opposite people as he and Christianne (whom he described as a model of collected calm) could be a couple. Kubrick hosted a set of elegant weekly dinners for the cast and crew of the film to which he also invited prominent scientists and writers. Actor Keir Dullea developed an impression of Kubrick as a Renaissance man and was impressed by well he could hold his own in conversation with eminent art historians.

It was also during this film that Kubrick grew his beard and began to stop dressing as formally as he had in the past. His wife, Christiane, was been quoted both as saying "Stanley dresses like a balloon peddlar" and "Stanley would be perfectly happy with eight tape recorders and one pair of pants". In a profile by Jeremy Bernstein, he described Kubrick as looking like a bohemian riverboat gambler or Bohemian poet, and often appearing vaguely distracted.

At this time, Kubrick decided to move permanently to England. Although he thrived on the manic energy of New York, he soon adapted to the more genteel atmosphere of England. Christiane Kubrick told the London Times how rough New York had become with children being escorted to school by police, people being rude, and smashed glass all over the street. After residing for a while at the Dorchester hotel and several other English locations, Kubrick moved to a "rambling estate" in Hertfordshire, England. One of the rooms became his wife's painting studio and another became Kubrick's office filled with cameras and tape-recorders. Biographer LoBrutto identifies this as a period in which Kubrick was driven into "deeper introversion" due to his logical mind and his "existential cognizance" of death that was often seen in his film. He became more precise in his habits, protective of his safety, and often worked from his home. LoBrutto describes Kubrick has living in an all-encompassing world like Hugh Hefner in the Playboy mansion, except that Hefner was a hedonist, while Kubrick a "control freak". LoBrutto notes that during the preproduction of Napoleon, Kubrick needed oral surgery while knowing none of the local dentists. Given his proverbial fear of flying, he would not fly to New York. He flew out his old dentist from New York and had him perform the work in the American embassy in England, the only place locally where his dentist's license was valid.

LoBrutto also notes that living in England brought peace to the Kubrick family. Christiane recalls that when moving to England one of the first British radio shows they heard was on gardening. The area's many landscaped parks, gardens and animals was an enormous contrast to New York. In landscaping their own house, the Kubrick's employed the services of MGM's Bill Rowson, who had done a lot of landscaping work for MGM films. Kubrick told a journalist "It's very pleasant, very peaceful, very civilized here. London is in the best sense the way New York was" in the early 1900s.

1970s

A Clockwork Orange

After 2001, Kubrick initially attempted to make a film about the life of Napoleon. When financing fell through, Kubrick searched for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He settled on A Clockwork Orange (1971). His adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel of the same name is an exploration of violence in human society. It takes place in a futuristic Great Britain that is both authoritarian and chaotic, and stars Malcolm McDowell as Alex De Large, a hooligan who gleefully beats, robs, and rapes without remorse. After landing in prison, Alex undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment, known as the Ludovico technique, that inhibits his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. The movie hints that the promotion of the treatment is politically motivated, and Alex becomes a pawn in a political game. Kubrick's vision makes comparisons between the left and right ends of the political spectrum, with characters drawn from each extreme, ultimately suggesting that there is little difference between the two. He stated, "They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."

Kubrick photographed A Clockwork Orange quickly. Despite the low-tech nature of the film as compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick showed his talent for innovation; at one point, he threw "an old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera" off a rooftop in order to achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted the electronic music composer Wendy Carlos to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer.

The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence, and was issued with an X rating in the United States. It was released in the same year as Straw Dogs and Dirty Harry, and the three films sparked a debate in the media about the social effects of cinematic violence. The controversy was exacerbated when copycat crimes were committed in England by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in A Clockwork Orange. After receiving death threats to both himself and family as a result of the controversy, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain. It was unavailable in the United Kingdom until its re-release in 2000, a year after Kubrick's death, although it could be seen in continental Europe. In the mid-1990s, a documentary entitled Forbidden Fruit, about the censorship controversy, was released in Britain. Kubrick was unable to prevent the documentary makers from including footage from A Clockwork Orange in their film.

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

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

Barry Lyndon

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

Barry Lyndon (1975) was an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon (also known as Barry Lyndon), a picaresque novel about the adventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and social climber. The cinematography and lighting techniques Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon were highly innovative. Most notably, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. Many scenes were lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings. Like its two predecessors, the film does not have an original score. Irish traditional songs (performed by The Chieftains) are combined with classical works from the period.

Barry Lyndon found a great audience in Europe, particularly in France. However, its measured pace and length at three hours put off many American critics and audiences, although the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, more than any other Kubrick film. As with most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon's reputation has grown through the years, particularly among filmmakers. The director Martin Scorsese has cited it as his favorite Kubrick film. Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique", although he had panned it when much younger.

1980s

The Shining

File:SteadicamDanny.jpg

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

The Shining, released in 1980, was adapted from the novel of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King. The film stars Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a failed writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel. He lives there with his wife, Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall) and their young son, Danny (played by Danny Lloyd), who is gifted with a form of telepathy. As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awaken, driving Jack into a homicidal psychosis.

To convey the claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track was impractical. Garrett Brown, Steadicam's inventor, was closely involved with this production and regarded it as the first picture to fully employ the new system's potential. The Shining particularly gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a perfectionist. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet of film were shot). This process was difficult for the actress Shelley Duvall, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman.

The novel's author Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." King objected to Kubrick's omission of Jack Torrance's return to sanity at the end of the novel, and relatively sympathetic character at the opening of the story.

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

The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction has treated the film more favorably. Among horror movie fans, The Shining is a cult classic, often appearing at the top of best horror film lists alongside Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Much of its imagery, such as the elevator shaft disgorging blood and the ghost girls in the hallway, are among the most recognizable and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film, as are the lines "Redrum," "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," and "Here's Johnny!". The financial success of The Shining renewed Warner Brothers' faith in Kubrick's ability to make artistically satisfying and profitable films after the commercial failure in the US of Barry Lyndon.

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

Full Metal Jacket

Seven years later, Kubrick made his next film, Full Metal Jacket (1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel The Short-Timers. Kubrick said to film critic Steven Hall that his attraction to Gustav Hasford's book was because it was "neither antiwar or prowar", held "no moral or political position", and was primarily concerned with "the way things are."

Filming a Vietnam War film in England was a considerable challenge for Kubrick and his production team. Much of the filming was done in the Docklands area of London, with the ruined-city set created by production designer Anton Furst. As a result, the film is visually very different from other Vietnam War films such as Platoon and Hamburger Hill, most of which were shot in the Far East. Instead of a tropical, Southeast-Asian jungle, the second half of the story unfolds in a city, illuminating the urban warfare aspect of a war generally portrayed (and thus perceived) as jungle warfare, notwithstanding significant urban skirmishes like the Tet offensive. As actor Adam Baldwin put it "When you think of Vietnam, it's natural to imagine jungles. But this story is about urban warfare". Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. R. Lee Ermey served as the film's technical adviser in addition to his acting duties.

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

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

1990s

====Work on A. I' Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss on an expansion of his short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" into a three-act film. It was a futuristic fairy-tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a child, and his efforts to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar to Pinocchio. Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Steven Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his. In 1999, following Kubrick's death, Spielberg took the various drafts and notes left by Kubrick and his writers and composed a new screenplay and, in association with what remained of Kubrick's production unit, made the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The film was released in June 2001. It contains a posthumous producing credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at the end. The film contains many recurrent Kubrick motifs, such as an omniscient narrator, an extreme form of the three-act structure, the themes of humanity and inhumanity, and a sardonic view of psychiatry. In addition, John Williams' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.

Eyes Wide Shut

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

Kubrick's final film was Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a wealthy Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story in English), which Kubrick relocated from turn-of-the-century Vienna to New York City in the 1990s. The film's theme has been described by actor Jack Nicholson as delving into questions on the "dangers of married life," and the "silent desperations of keeping an ongoing relationship alive".

Kubrick's wife noted his long-standing interest in the project, saying "over the years he would see friends getting divorced and remarried, and the topic [of the film] would come up." She knew that this was a subject he wanted to make into a film. Co-star Nicole Kidman observed that "Stanley's expectations of people were not really high," although she also saw that his wife, to whom he had been married for over 41 years, "was the love of his life. He would talk about her, he adored her, something that people didn't know. His daughters adored them . . . I would see that, and he would talk about them very proudly." Nicholson agrees that "Stanley was very much a family man."

Although Kubrick was almost seventy years of age, he worked relentlessly for 15 months in order to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16, 1999. He worked 18 hours a day, all the while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film. Press releases were sent to the media, stating briefly that "Stanley Kubrick's next film will be Eyes Wide Shut, a story of jealousy and sexual obsession . . . "Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. Kubrick sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release, but his sudden death on March 7, 1999 came a few days after he finished editing. He never saw the final version released to the public.

The biographer Michel Ciment believes that "he literally worked himself to death," trying to complete the film to his liking. Ciment explains that Kubrick's desire to keep this, and many of his earlier films, private and unpublicized during its production, was an expression of Kubrick's "will to power," and not a penchant for secrecy: "Kubrick felt, quite rightly, that the public generally knows far too much about a film before it opens and that the surrounding media frenzy made the joy of surprise and pleasure of discovery impossible."

Nicole Kidman said that, while some critics describe the film's theme as "dark," in essence "it is a very hopeful film." During an interview in the documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, she says that Kubrick was indirectly stressing the moral values of "commitment and loyalty," adding that "ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut is about that commitment." Sydney Pollack, who acted in the film, adds that "the heart of [the film] was illustrating a truth about relationships and sexuality. But it was not illustrated in a literal way, but in a theatrical way." Michel Ciment agrees with Kidman, and notes the positive meaning underlying the film, pointing out how some of it is voiced through the dialog, and suggests that the words "resonate like an epitaph" to Kubrick:

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

Death

On March 7, 1999—four days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Warner Bros. executives, Kubrick died in his sleep from a heart attack at the age of 70. He was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England. Following his death, several directors and actors discussed their experiences with Kubrick. Steven Spielberg said in a 1999 interview that Dr. Strangelove made him forget about being drafted into the Army.

Character

See also: Stanley Kubrick's political and religious beliefs

Kubrick's Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England

Kubrick was known to be deeply averse to air travel. Despite once holding a pilot's license, Kubrick had a fear of flying and refused to take airplane trips. As a result, he rarely left England in the last forty years of his life. In addition, Kubrick shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine, resulting in little media coverage of him as a personality. Upon purchasing the Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, Kubrick set up his life so that family and business were one. Children and animals would frequently come in and out of the room as he worked on a script or met with an actor. His appearance was not well known in his later years, to the extent that a British man named Alan Conway successfully impersonated Kubrick in order to meet several well-known actors and get into exclusive clubs. Conway is the subject of the film Colour Me Kubrick (2005), written by Kubrick's assistant Anthony Frewin and directed by Brian Cook, Kubrick's First Assistant Director for 25 years.

Despite his aversion to international travel, Kubrick was in constant contact with family members and business associates, often by telephone, and called his collaborators at all hours of the day and night for conversations that lasted from under a minute to several hours. Many of Kubrick's admirers and friends spoke of these telephone conversations with great affection and nostalgia after his death, especially Michael Herr and Steven Spielberg. In his memoir of Kubrick, Herr stated that dozens of people have claimed to have spoken to Kubrick on the day of his death and remarked that "I believe all of them." Kubrick also frequently invited people to his house, ranging from actors to close friends, admired film directors, writers, and intellectuals.

It was little-known by the public during Kubrick's life that he was also an animal lover. He owned many dogs and cats, and showed an extraordinary affection for them. He is reported to have owned dogs his whole life and Kubrick's widow, Christiane, in her book version of Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures, wrote that Kubrick brought his cats onto film sets and editing rooms with him in order to spend more time with them. Matthew Modine remembers Kubrick being deeply upset when a family of rabbits was accidentally killed during the making of Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick was so beside himself that he cancelled shooting for the rest of the day. Philip Kaplan, one of Kubrick's lawyers and friends, told the story that Stanley once cancelled, at the last moment, a meeting with him and another lawyer who had flown to London from the United States because he had sat up all night with a dying cat and was in no shape to participate.

Kubrick had an occasional reputation for being tactless and rude to those he worked with. Although Kubrick became close friends with Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell during filming, Kubrick abruptly terminated the friendship soon after the film was complete. McDowell was deeply hurt by this, and the schism between the two men lasted until Kubrick's death. Malcolm McDowell acknowledged in retrospect that some of his statements about Kubrick were "unfair" and were a "cry out" to Kubrick to reconnect with him. Kirk Douglas often commented on Kubrick's unwillingness to compromise, his out-of-control ego, and his ruthless determination to make a film his own distinct work of art instead of a group effort, and denigrated Kubrick in his 1989 memoir The Ragman's Son, though he is friendlier to Kubrick in his 2007 memoir Let's Face It. Douglas continues to be proud of his achievement in producing the film Spartacus, about which Kubrick has consistently made negative statements, mostly focused on the script.

Michael Herr's memoir of Kubrick, and Matthew Modine's book Full Metal Jacket Diary show a much kinder, saner, and warmer version of Kubrick than the frequently touted view of him as cold, demanding, and impersonal.

There was a popular perception of Kubrick as a recluse, generated by his being known to rarely travel, by car or train, outside his estate, and to avoid interviews and the spotlight. Moreover, his obsessive, perfectionistic style, and specific, intense interests have led some researchers to speculate he may have had Asperger's Syndrome. This fed into further public perception of Kubrick as an eccentric misanthrope, which Kubrick's family and friends felt were entirely off-the-mark stereotypes. His stepdaughter Katharina recalls that her sister Anya once stated that "the more she reads about daddy the more she thinks that Howard Hughes was probably a perfectly normal person." When his widow, Christiane, was asked which books on Kubrick were not reliable, she singled out Frederic Raphael's Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick and John Baxter's Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (not to be confused with the identically titled book by Vincent LoBrutto). The posthumous family production of the documentary and book Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (film documentary directed by Jan Harlan, book tie-in written by Christiane Kubrick née Harlan) was partly intended to offset the negative impressions created by these works, and the film opens with discussion of this stereotype of Kubrick.

Unrealized projects

Main article: Stanley Kubrick's unrealized projects

Kubrick both developed and was offered several film ideas which never saw completion. The most notable of these were an epic biopic of Napoleon and a Holocaust-themed film entitled Aryan Papers. Kubrick had done much research on Napoleon and it was well into pre-production, when the studio suddenly pulled the plug after another big-budget biopic about Napoleon entitled Waterloo failed financially. Work on Aryan Papers depressed Kubrick enormously, and he eventually decided that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List covered much of the same material.

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

When the film rights to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings were sold to United Artists, The Beatles approached Kubrick to direct them in a film based on the books, but Kubrick told John Lennon he felt the story was unfilmable.

Artistry

Influences

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

In terms of filmmaking style, Alexander Walker, in his book Stanley Kubrick Directs, notes that Kubrick often mentioned Max Ophüls as an influence on his moving camera, especially the tracking shots in Paths of Glory. His "fascination with the fluid camera" of Ophuls, writes critic Gene D. Phillips, was also used effectively in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick described this effect in discussing Ophuls' films le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madam De: "the camera went through every wall and every floor." He once named Ophüls' Le Plaisir as his favorite film. Ophüls derived this technique from his early work as assistant with the director Anatole Litvak in the 1930s; his cinematography style is described as "replete with the camera trackings, pans and swoops which later became the trademark of Max Ophuls."

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

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

As a young man, Kubrick was fascinated by the films of Russian filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Kubrick read Pudovkin’s seminal theoretical work, Film Technique, which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, and it needs to be employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest. Kubrick recommended this work to others for years to come. Thomas Nelson describes this book as "the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick's] private aesthetics".

The Russian documentary film maker Pavel Klushantsev made a groundbreaking film in the 1950s entitled Road to the Stars. It is believed to have significantly influenced Kubrick's technique in 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly in its accurate depiction of weightlessness and a rotating space station. Encyclopedia Astronautica describes some scenes from 2001 as a "shot-for-shot duplication of Road to the Stars". Specific comparisons of shots from the two films have been analyzed by the filmmaker Alessandro Cima. A 1994 article in American Cinematographer says, "When Stanley Kubrick made '2001: a Space Odyssey' in 1968, he claimed to have been first to fly actor/astronauts on wires with the camera on the ground, shooting vertically while the actor's body covered the wires" but observes that Klushantsev had preceded him in this.

Kubrick greatly admired the films of Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, Jean Renoir, and Federico Fellini, but critics have not assessed the degree of their influence on him. In an early interview with Horizon magazine in the late 1950s, Kubrick stated,

I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them.

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

Technique

For Kubrick, written dialogue was one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on film acting, Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often "re-direct" a film.

As he explained to a journalist,

Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing; acting comes from the theatre; and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could be assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as Spartacus (when he first had an ample budget for film stock), was endless exploratory re-shooting of scenes that was an exhaustive investigation of all possible variations of a scene.This enabled him to walk into the editing room with copious options. John Baxter has written:

Instead of finding the intellectual spine of a film in the script before starting work, Kubrick felt his way towards the final version of a film by shooting each scene from many angles and demanding scores of takes on each line. Then over months ... he arranged and rearranged the tens of thousands of scraps of film to fit a vision that really only began to emerge during editing.

Actor Robert Duvall (who never worked for Kubrick) stated on the fifth in The Hollywood Reporter's roundtable series in 2010 that he thought Kubrick's knack for an unusually high number of takes (often over 50) made him an "actor's enemy". He stated that both A Clockwork Orange and The Shining were "great movies" but contained "the worst performances he had ever seen in movies". On the other hand, Nicole Kidman (who co-starred in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) held that the value of Kubrick's enormous number of takes was that actors stopped consciously thinking about acting technique and went to a deeper place. She stated "He believed that what it does to you, as an actor, was that you would lose control of your sense of self, of the part of you that was internally watching your own performance. Eventually, he felt, you would stop censoring yourself."

Trademark characteristics

Stanley Kubrick's films have several trademark characteristics. All but his first two full-length films and 2001 were adapted from existing novels (2001 being based on The Sentinel as well as having its own planned novelization), and he occasionally wrote screenplays in collaboration with writers (usually novelists, but a journalist in the case of Full Metal Jacket) who had limited screenwriting experience. Many of his films had voice-over narration, sometimes taken verbatim from the novel. With or without narration, all of his films contain extensive character's-point-of-view footage.

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

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Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange

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Private "Pyle" in Full Metal Jacket

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Jack Torrance in The Shining

Kubrick paid close attention to the releases of his films in other countries. Not only did he have complete control of the dubbing cast, but sometimes alternative material was shot for international releases—in The Shining, the text on the typewriter pages was re-shot for the countries in which the film was released; in Eyes Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages. Kubrick always personally supervised the foreign voice-dubbing and the actual script translation into foreign languages for all of his films. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice translations have been produced for any of the films he had control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only subtitles are used for translation.

Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of his films except Full Metal Jacket used mostly pre-recorded classical music, in two cases electronically altered by Wendy Carlos. He also often used merry-sounding pop music in an ironic way during scenes depicting devastation and destruction, especially in the closing credits or end sequences of a film.

In his review of Full Metal Jacket, Roger Ebert noted that many Kubrick films have a facial closeup of an unraveling character in which the character's head is tilted down and his eyes are tilted up, although Ebert does not think there is any deep meaning to these shots. Lobrutto's biography of Kubrick notes that his director of photography, Doug Milsome, coined the phrase the "Kubrick crazy stare". The connection of this stare with psychoanalysis is often made through the concept of "The Gaze" and its implications in visual culture.

Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls, which Kubrick biographer calls his "corridor" compositions, The use of long takes, while not an unknown technique before Kubrick, became known in the film community as a "Kubrickian" trademark—for instance the extended tricycle-riding sequence in The Shining or the long pullback from Alex's face at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange.

Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, often playing on the set of his films. Chess appears as a motif or a plot device in three of his films, The Killing, Lolita, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mario Falsetto believes that the marble floor in the room of the prisoner's trial in Paths of Glory is deliberately chosen to represent a chess board, with prisoners as "pawns in the game".

Kubrick often employed the use of music as a "black joke" to achieve a chilling, ironic effect (one now often employed by Quentin Tarantino) by incongruously combining mismatched moods and styles. Igor Stravinsky was arguably the innovator of this musical technique during his Neo-Classic period (1920s to the 1950s), but it was Kubrick who extended this idea to the big screen. This gives the intended emotional impact of a scene even more power. Brief examples of this include Vera Lynn singing We'll Meet Again in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove (during a nuclear holocaust), using some older classical music for the futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and using Gene Kelly's upbeat Singin’ in the Rain for the somewhat graphic rape scene of A Clockwork Orange, and the Trashmmen's catchy, poppy surf rock hit, "Surfin' Bird" in Full Metal Jacket.

Themes

Through his films, Kubrick often addressed concern with the over-mechanization of society which, in its attempt to create a safe environment, creates an artificial sterility that breeds the very evils it tries to exclude. Multiple critics have noted that Kubrick's earlier films have more straightforward linear narrative while the later films are moderately and subtly surreal reflecting a sense of social dislocation and confusion. The emotional distance Kubrick maintains from many of his characters have caused critics to see Kubrick as a cold and detached rationalist, while the recurrence of strongly psychopathic characters from Alex DeLarge to Jack Torrance in his films have caused many to view Kubrick's outlook as deeply pessimistic. In his book Nihilism in Film and Television, Kevin L. Stoehr writes "If there is one film director whose movies express consistently, in terms of both form and content, the pervasive dangers and creative opportunities of nihilism in contemporary culture, that filmmaker is the late Stanley Kubrick". A frequently recurring observation on the Kubrick film that Spielberg completed A.I is that it uneasily meshes Spielberg's rosy optimistic outlook with Kubrick's pessimistic one, although one reviewer wrote “[Spielberg] has done a remarkable job in balancing Kubrick's pessimism with his optimism without having one overcrowd the other”.

Newspaper obituaries of Kubrick, the Encyclopædia Britannica and Vincent LoBrutto's biography of the director (which was spoken of approvingly by Kubrick's wife) all characterize Kubrick broadly as pessimistic. Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote: “if Mr. Kubrick's misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity.” So also did Kubrick's most severe critic, Pauline Kael. The charge was repeated in reviews of the multi-film DVD boxed set of his films in 2007, a New Jersey film critic writing “And yet preserved too – like an ugly insect trapped in amber – are some of the artist's most problematic qualities, including a bitter pessimism, a cruel humor and an almost godlike superiority that often viewed other people – and particularly women – as little more than impediments." A pessimistic streak was found in essays collected in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, one of which characterizes Eyes Wide Shut as “a kind of Sartrean pessimism about our inevitable dissatisfaction with romantic love.”

Not all critics agree with this assessment. Other essays in the same anthology find Eyes Wide Shut to be largely optimistic. James Naremore in On Kubrick characterizes Kubrick as a modernist in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka with their distrust of mass society. As such, Naremore notes that Kubrick's detachment from his subjects does not make him a dour pessimist, although Kubrick does often dwell on “the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality”. Peter Kramer's study of 2001 argues it is meant to counterweight the pessimism of Kubrick's previous Dr. Strangelove.

Some view Kubrick's pessimism as either at least overstated by others or even more apparent than real, an impression created by Kubrick's refusal of any bland or cheap optimism, refusal to make films that conform to conventional ideas of a spectacle, and a desire to employ films as a wake-up call to humanity to understand its capacity for evil. The editors of The Kubrick Site note that Kubrick avoids cinematically conventional ways of structuring stories. This does indeed create for many viewers a sense of emotionless detachment from the human subjects as noted above. For example, Kubrick often prefers lengthy dialogue scenes shot from one camera angle with no cutting. But the editors of TKS believe this is done in order to establish a life of characters beyond dialogue which "helps to reveal, in the spaces and silences, some of the emotional nature permeating the film's world" as well as a realistic sense of the characters' situatedness in time and society. Kubrick's focus is not just on individual characters but on the larger society around them and how it affects their motivation, often in negative ways. The authors also stress that however bleak Kubrick's outlook (intermittently) is, he is not a misanthrope.

A recent outspoken dissenter from pessimistic readings of Kubrick is literature and film critic Julian Rice. His book Kubrick's Hope argues that although there is a powerful vision of evil in Kubrick, there is vision of redemption and goodness in Kubrick's films stronger than often initially recognized, a vision focused both on family feeling and access to the sublime depths of the subconscious beyond superficial socialization. However, Rice has been alleged to misrepresent the work of prior Kubrick film scholars, particularly with reference to just how pessimistic or misanthropic they actually think Kubrick's films are.

Spielberg, himself a noted cinematic optimist and close personal friend of Kubrick, expressed a similar view of Kubrick. Going against the grain of the view that Kubrick's films are misanthropic and pessimistic, Spielberg in a tribute to Kubrick at the 71st Academy awards said: "He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we're transported directly to his world, and we're inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy." Kubrick himself denied that he was a pessimist, and summarized his views in a 1968 interview with Playboy: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

Frequent and memorable collaborators

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

Photographer Dmitri Kasterine, himself regarded as "one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Britain from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s", began a long association with Kubrick in 1964 when he began shooting stills during filming of Dr Strangelove and later for 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kasterine was commissioned to take portraits of Kubrick for publications including the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Harpers & Queen and a variety of his work was published in The Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and The New York Times. Though Kubrick was noted for keeping his production sets extremely private by banning uninvited visitors, Kasterine was allowed onto the sets of numerous Kubrick films to shoot both candid and posed photos. In 2010 and 2011, many of his Kubrick photos were on display for the first time in the United Kingdom at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Four writers who co-authored screenplays with Kubrick subsequently wrote memoirs of their experience working with him. Arthur C. Clarke's The Lost Worlds of 2001 traces all the intermediate versions of the story from first draft to final project. Diane Johnson published an essay about her experience collaborating with Kubrick and has discussed it frequently in both lectures and interviews. Michael Herr, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Full Metal Jacket wrote a book simply titled Kubrick which covers not only his collaboration on the film, but also his friendship with the director over the last 20 years of his life. Kubrick's co-screenwriter on Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael, wrote a notoriously unflattering memoir of Kubrick entitled Eyes Wide Open which has been denounced by Kubrick's family, notably on Christianne Kubrick's website. Similarly, Diane Johnson has stated

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

Two authors of studies of Kubrick's films, Alexander Walker and Michel Ciment, worked closely with Kubrick on their books, with Kubrick personally providing the authors with many production photos and film stills and crucial information about the production of his films. Walker's book Stanley Kubrick, Director saw both a 1972 (entitled Stanley Kubrick Directs) and a 2000 edition, and Michel Ciment's book Stanley Kubrick saw both a 1980 and 2003 edition (the latter called Stanley Kubrick- The Definitive Edition)

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

Influence on film and television

Kubrick made only thirteen feature films in his life, comparatively low in number compared to contemporaries, due to his meticulous dedication to every aspect of film production. A number of his films are recognized as seminal classics within their genre.

Cinematography techniques

Among Kubrick's notable innovations in filmmaking technique are his use of special effects in cinematography. For 2001: A Space Odyssey, he made innovative uses of both slit-scan photography and front-screen projection. Previously used to create image distortions or blurriness, slit-scan was used by Kubrick to create sophisticated animation for the StarGate sequence. This earned Kubrick his only personal Oscar, awarded for special effects. Although front projection had been used earlier, Space Odyssey was its first use on a large scale, and Kubrick employed a specially built 8x10 projector for the Dawn of Man sequence, as he did not believe that matting or rear-projection would create a sufficiently realistic effect.

Kubrick also made innovative use of Zeiss camera lenses for photographing scenes lit only by actual candlelight in Barry Lyndon. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick relates how he felt that most films containing candle-lit scenes look phony, due to the artificial light flickering off-camera. Kubrick wanted the more authentic look of 19th-century paintings.

Kubrick was also among the first to use the then-revolutionary Steadicam in The Shining to allow smooth stabilized tracking with the camera in motion, without the use of a dolly limiting the camera's point of view. The inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown, became heavily involved with the production, as he believed The Shining was the first film to fully realize the Steadicam's full potential, going well beyond "stunt shots and staircases".

After Kubrick, the use of slit-scan to create animation effects was employed in the credits sequence to Doctor Who. Front-screen projection has been used in James Bond and Superman films, and the Steadicam has been employed in Star Wars films.

Influence on film industry

Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott, and George A. Romero, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. On the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, Steven Spielberg, in an interview, comments on Kubrick that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history" but the way that Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese notes that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released. Then came a dawning recognition that they were masterful works unlike any other films. Perhaps most notably, Orson Welles, one of Kubrick's greatest personal influences and all-time favorite directors, famously said that: "Among those whom I would call 'younger generation' Kubrick appears to me to be a giant." The directors Richard Linklater, Sam Mendes, Joel Schumacher, Taylor Hackford, and Darren Aronofsky have all mentioned Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films.

Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noé. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick. The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent, contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The storytelling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Dr. Strangelove. Director Tim Burton has included a few visual homages to Kubrick in his work, notably using actual footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and modeling the look of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in his version of Alice in Wonderland on the Grady girls in The Shining. Film critic Roger Ebert also noted that Burton's Mars Attacks! was partially inspired by Dr. Strangelove. The video for The Killers song Bones (2006), Burton's only music video, includes clips from Kubrick's Lolita, as well as other films from the general era.

Paul Thomas Anderson (who was fond of Kubrick as a teenager) in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, stated "it's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It can all seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with." Reviewer William Arnold described Anderson's There Will Be Blood as being stylistically an homage to Kubrick "particularly "2001: A Space Odyssey" – opening with a similar prologue that jumps in stages over the years and using a soundtrack throughout that employs anachronistic music."

Although Michael Moore specializes in documentary filmmaking, at the beginning of shooting his only non-documentary feature film Canadian Bacon, he sat his cast and crew down to watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. He told them "What this movie was in the '60s, is what we should aspire to with this film." Moore had previously written Kubrick a letter telling him how much Bacon was inspired by Strangelove.

Film director Frank Darabont has been inspired by Kubrick's use of music. In an interview with The Telegraph, he states that 2001 took "the use of music in film" to absolute perfection, and one shot employing classical music in The Shawshank Redemption follows Kubrick's lead. On the other hand, while Darabont has followed Kubrick in directing two Stephen King adaptations, Darabont shares Stephen King's negative view of Kubrick's adaption of The Shining. In the same interview, Darabont said

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

Critics occasionally detect a Kubrickian influence when the actual filmmaker acknowledges none. Critics have noticed the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Danish independent director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jim Pappas suggests this comes from Refn's employment of Kubrick's cinematographer for The Shining and Barry Lyndon in his film Fear X, suggesting "it is the Kubrick influence that leaves us asking ourselves what we believe we should know is true". The apparent influence of Kubrick on his film Bronson was noted by the Los Angeles Times and the French publication Evene However, when asked by Twitch about the very frequent comparisons by critics of the film Bronson to A Clockwork Orange, Refn denied the influence. Refn stated

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

Homages

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

In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia life-time achievement award the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award. Kubrick is among filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Laurence Olivier, Cecil B. DeMille, and Irving Thalberg, all of whom have had annual awards named after them. Kubrick won this award in 1999, one year prior to its being renamed in his honor.

Analysts of the TV series The Simpsons argue it contains more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound not only to 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining but also to Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket. It has been noted that while references to "fantastic fiction" in The Simpsons are copious, "there are two masters of the genre whose impact on The Simpsons supersedes that of all others: Stanley Kubrick and Edgar Allan Poe." Similarly, it has been observed that "...the show's almost obsessive references to the films of Stanley Kubrick...[make it] as if the show's admittance of these films into the show's pantheon of intertextual allusions finally marked their entry into the deepest subconscious level of the global pop cultural mind." When the Director's Guild of Great Britain gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a cut-together sequence of all the homages from the show.

In 2009 there was an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films in Dublin, Ireland, entitled 'Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light'. The exhibit was initiated by John Maguire, film critic with Ireland's Sunday Business Post and he invited both well-known and new artists to contribute to it. The same year, online toymaker "quartertofour" released a version of Rubik's Cube with prints of photos from six of Kubrick's films on the side of the cube. (This is not to be confused with the online game Kubrick with computer images of Rubik's Cube which has no connection with Stanley Kubrick.) In 2010, painter (and film storyboard artist) Carlos Ramos held an exhibition entitled "Kubrick" at the Copro gallery in Los Angeles, featuring paintings in a variety of styles based on scenes from Stanley Kubrick films. Promotional material for the exhibit stated "The emptiness and humanity of Stanley Kubrick’s subjects and characters and unique spacial design come to life thru Ramos’ unique eye."

The video for pop singer Lady Gaga's song Bad Romance was found by Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone magazine to be "simultaneously paying homage visually to Kubrick and lyrically to Hitchcock." Gotham Magazine writer Meghan Blalock has stated of the same video "the influence of one film director in particular was obvious to me: Stanley Kubrick." Gaga biographer Maureen Callahan has noted that Gaga has sourced dialogue, costumes, and music from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, often opening her shows with a hip-hop remix of Wendy Carlos' electronic adaptation of Purcell's Funeral for Queen Mary from the film's opening, listed on the program as A Clockwork Orange Intro. Finally, Gaga's early hit song Dance in the Dark has the lines "Find your Jesus, Find your Kubrick". Gaga made her directorial debut in the 2011 music video for "Marry the Night" in which MTV news and Broadway World found Kubrick allusions, although the latter felt the dominant influence on her direction was filmmaker David Lynch.

Films about elements of Kubrick's life

Main articles: Alan Conway, Colour Me Kubrick, and Dark Side of the Moon (mockumentary)

See also: Moon landing hoax § Stanley Kubrick involvement, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) § Mock hoaxes and Conspiracy Theory

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

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

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

Filmography

Documentary short films

As director, writer, cinematographer, and sound

• Day of the Fight (1951, RKO Radio Pictures)
  (also producer and uncredited editor)
• Flying Padre (1951, RKO Radio Pictures)
  (also writer)
• The Seafarers (1953, Seafarers International Pictures)
  (also editor)

Day of the Fight was part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series. The Flying Padre was an RKO-Pathe Screenliner. The Seafarers and Spartacus were Kubrick's only color films prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Feature films

Year	Film	Director	Producer	Screenplay (in part or whole)	Editor	Cinematographer	Special effects designer and director
1953	Fear and Desire	N	N		N	N
1955	Killer's Kiss	N	N	N	N	N
1956	The Killing	N		N
1957	Paths of Glory	N	N1	N		N1
1960	Spartacus	N
1962	Lolita	N		N1
1964	Dr. Strangelove	N	N	N
1968	2001: A Space Odyssey	N	N	N			N
1971	A Clockwork Orange	N	N	N
1975	Barry Lyndon	N	N	N
1980	The Shining	N	N	N
1987	Full Metal Jacket	N	N	N
1999	Eyes Wide Shut	N	N	N		N1
2001	A.I. Artificial Intelligence	Underlying concept and "dedicated to"2

¹ Uncredited

²Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the underlying concept of Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence which was produced after his death, by his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan. Kubrick is thanked in the credits, but is not credited as writer. A new screenplay was written by Steven Spielberg based on a 90-page story treatment done in 1990 by Ian Watson which in turn had closely followed Kubrick's stated directives. The film is based on a short story by Brian Aldiss.

In 1976, production designer Ken Adam, who had worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, asked Kubrick to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built and prepared for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement. The agreement was honored until after Kubrick's death in 1999, when in 2000 it was revealed by Adam in the 2000 documentary Inside 'The Spy Who Loved Me'.

Awards and nominations

All of Stanley Kubrick's later films, except for The Shining, were nominated for Oscars or Golden Globes, in various categories. 2001: A Space Odyssey received numerous technical awards, including a BAFTA award for cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and an Academy Award for best visual effects, which Kubrick (as director of special effects on the film) received. This was Kubrick's only personal Oscar win among 13 nominations. Nominations for his films were mostly in the areas of cinematography, art design, screenwriting, and music. Only four of his films were nominated by either an Oscar or Golden Globe for their acting performances, Spartacus, Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, and A Clockwork Orange.

Personal awards for Kubrick:

Year	Title	Awards (limited to Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Saturns and Razzies)
1953	Fear and Desire
1955	Killer's Kiss
1956	The Killing	Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source
1957	Paths of Glory
1960	Spartacus	Won Golden Globe: Best Drama Picture, Nominated Golden Globe: Best Director Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source
1962	Lolita	Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay (Kubrick's extensive work on this was uncredited- the nominee was Vladimir Nabokov) Nominated for Golden Globes: Best Director
1964	Dr. Strangelove	Nominated for Oscars: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay Won BAFTA Awards: Best British Film, Best Film from any Source, Nominated BAFTA: Best British Screenplay (nomination shared with Peter George and Terry Southern)
1968	2001: A Space Odyssey	Won Oscar : Best Special Effects Nominated for Oscars: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (nomination shared with Arthur C. Clarke) Nominated for BAFTA: Best Film
1971	A Clockwork Orange	Nominated for Oscars: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay Nominated for Golden Globes: Best Director, Best Drama Picture Nominated for BAFTA Awards: Best Direction, Best Film, Best Screenplay Won 2 recognitions by The New York Film Critics: Best Director, Best Picture
1975	Barry Lyndon	Nominated for Oscars : Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay Nominated for 2 Golden Globes: Best Director, Best Drama Picture Won BAFTA Award: Best Direction Nominated: Best Film
1980	The Shining	Nominated for Razzie: Worst Director Nominated for Saturn: Best Direction
1987	Full Metal Jacket	Nominated for Oscar: Best Adapted Screenplay (nomination shared with Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford)
1999	Eyes Wide Shut

Kubrick received two awards from major film festivals: "Best Director" from the Locarno International Film Festival in 1959 for Killer's Kiss, and "Filmcritica Bastone Bianco Award" at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 for Eyes Wide Shut. He also was nominated for the "Golden Lion" of the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for Lolita. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the "Career Golden Lion" in 1997. He received the D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America, and another life-achievement award from the Director's Guild of Great Britain, and the Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival. Posthumously, the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" for life achievement in 2008. He also received the coveted Hugo Award three time for his work in science fiction.

See also

• Hawk Films
• Stanley Kubrick Archive
• Stanley Kubrick's Boxes
• Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
• List of famous amateur chess players

References

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• McGregor, Craig (January 30, 1972). "Nice Boy from the Bronx?". New York Times. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
• Morgan, Stephanie (September 30, 2002). "Stanley Kubrick: An Indoor-Plumbing Luddite". Columbus Wired Columnist. Columbus Wired. Retrieved October 25, 2008.
• Myers, Jason (no date). "A.I." Revolution Science Fiction. Retrieved January 10, 2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Naperstak, Ben (December 15, 2007). "The Armani of Literature". The Age. Melbourne. Retrieved January 17, 2010.
• Nelson, Thomas Allen (1982). Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21390-7.
• Nelson, Thomas Allen (2000). Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze. New and Expanded Edition. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21390-7.
• Nielsen Wire (blog) (December 11, 2008). "In U.S., Hi-Def TV Household Penetration Tops 23%". nielsen.com. Retrieved January 17, 2010.
• Nordern, Eric (September 1968). "The Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick". Playboy. Reprinted in: Philips 2001; extract in The ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK FAQ
• Paul, Duncan (2003). Stanley Kubrick: Visual Poet 1928–1999. Taschen America. ISBN 978-3-8228-1592-2.
• Philips, Gene D. (1999). Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema. Lehigh University Press. ISBN 978-0-934223-59-1.
• Philips, Gene D., ed. (2001). Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-297-3.
• "Regarding Full Metal Jacket: A Discussion". The Kubrick Site. no date. Retrieved January 10, 2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Rhodes, Gary D., ed. (2006). Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-3297-4.
• Rice, Julian (2008). Kubrick's hope: discovering optimism from 2001 to Eyes wide shut. The Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8108-6206-7.
• Rose, Lloyd (June 28, 1987). "Stanley Kubrick, at a Distance". Washington Post. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
• Roud, Richard (1980). Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The Major Film-makers, Volume 2. Viking Adult. ISBN 978-0-670-22257-5.
• Schwam, Stephanie, ed. (2000). The Making of 2001, A Space Odyssey. Random House, Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-375-75528-6.
• Sleeper, Mick (March 1997). "la Fiction du Pulp: Tarantino's trail of bread crumbs leads to the French New Wave". Images. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
• Southern, Terry (2002). Southern, Nile; Friedman, Josh Alan (eds.). Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-3894-1.
• Sperb, Jason (2006). The Kubrick Facade: Faces and Voices in the Films of Stanley Kubrick. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5855-8.
• "Stanley Kubrick (American director)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved January 12, 2010.
• "Stanley Kubrick". New York Times. no date. Retrieved January 14, 2010. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Strick, Philip; Houston, Penelope (1972). "Interview with Stanley Kubrick regarding A Clockwork Orange". Sight & Sound. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Stuart, Jamie (May 29, 2007). "A Hell of an Experience". The Reeler. Retrieved January 10, 2010.
• Tatara, Paul (July 15, 1999). "Review: 'Eyes Wide Shut' – All undressed with no place to go". CNN. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
• Thuss, Holger (2002). Students on the Right Way: European Democrat Students, 1961–2001. Books on Demand GmbH. ISBN 978-3-8311-4129-6.
• Watson, Ian (May 2000). "Plumbing Stanley Kubrick". The New York Review of Science Fiction (141). ISSN 1052-9438.
• Westfahl, Gary, ed. (2005). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-32950-0.
• Youngblood, Gene (2008). "Lolita". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved May 24, 2009.
• Walker, Alexander (2000). Stanley Kubrick, director. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 376. ISBN 0393321193, 9780393321197. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Further reading

• Crone, Rainer (text) and Stanley Kubrick (photographs) (2005). Stanley Kubrick. Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945–1950. Phaidon Press. ISBN 978-0-7148-4438-1.
• Fischer, Ralf Michael (2009). Raum und Zeit im filmischen Oeuvre von Stanley Kubrick. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag. ISBN 978-3-7861-2598-3.
• David Hughes (2000). The Complete Kubrick. London: Virgin. ISBN 978-0-7535-0452-9. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |unused_data= ignored (help)
• Jacke, Andreas (2009). Stanley Kubrick: Eine Deutung der Konzepte seiner Filme. Psychosozial-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89806-856-7, ISBN 3-89806-856-0. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Lyons, V and Fitzgerald, M. (2005) ‘’Asperger syndrome : a gift or a curse?’’ New York : Nova Science Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59454-387-6
• Rasmussen, Randy (2005). Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed. McFarland. ISBN 0786421525, 9780786421527. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick ; Kinematograph Nr. 14, Frankfurt/Main, 2004. ISBN 978-3-88799-069-5 (English edition)

Documentary

• Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. Documentary film. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Home Video, 2001. 142 min.

External links

• The Authorized Stanley Kubrick Web Site by Warner Bros.
• Video: Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures Introduction, 2.5 minutes
• Stanley Kubrick Interviews, by Stanley Kubrick, Gene D. Phillips
• Stanley Kubrick at IMDb
• Stanley Kubrick at the TCM Movie Database
• Template:Ymovies name
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication
• The Kubrick Site
• Detailed analysis about Stanley Kubrick (French language)
• Stanley Kubrick biography and credits at the BFI's Screenonline
• Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide
• Kubrick on Senses of Cinema (In Depth Biography)
• Multi-media Kubrick archive
• The Guardian: Citizen Kubrick
• List of interviews and Look photographs
• List of all the published Look photographs
• Photo gallery: Kubrick on set