He would say: ''I know how to do virtually every job on a movie. I can light, I can record sound, I know where mikes go.'' He could come into a room and say, ''We're two stops off in this light.'' They'd say, ''No, we just checked the camera.'' He'd say, ''We're two stops off,'' and they'd be two stops off. But he would say: ''I don't know how to act. But I'll tell you this, we will get the best shot.''

What Stanley really didn't like is if you wasted his time. And what he considered to be time-wasting was if you didn't know your lines. One day we had to do this thing called the Rifleman's Creed where we laid on the bed and recited this speech, and we had to do it with a tiny speaker in your ear and do it to playback, which was very disorienting for me. We got to take 16 and he said to me, ''You're not prepared.'' And I said, ''No, I know the thing -- I'm just having trouble with this thing in my ear.'' And he said, ''You don't know it if you don't know how to be able to do it with that in your ear.'' We got into an argument about how well I knew it, but I finally realized that he was absolutely right.

Much later, he related a story to me about ''Spartacus,'' that all the English actors were muttering, and he was sure they were talking about him and he was very paranoid. It was Olivier and Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton -- they were always muttering. And he discovered when he snuck up behind them one time that they were doing lines from their work. And he said: ''This is something American actors don't do at all. They do not learn text.'' He blamed Lee Strasberg.

MATTHEW MODINE: I once asked him why he so often did a lot of takes. He said it was because actors didn't know their lines. And he talked about Jack Nicholson: ''Jack would come in during the blocking and he kind of fumbled through the lines. He'd be learning them while he was there. And then you'd start shooting and after take 3 or take 4 or take 5 you'd get the Jack Nicholson that everybody knows and most directors would be happy with. And then you'd go up to 10 or 15 and he'd be really awful and then he'd start to understand what the lines were, what the lines meant, and then he'd become unconscious about what he was saying. So by take 30 or take 40 the lines became something else.'' Stanley'd say: ''I don't know how to do it. People don't do their homework, the only thing I can do is spend time doing multiple takes while the people are learning what their job is supposed to be.''

ADAM BALDWIN: One of the things we did to kill time was play chess, play hearts, smoke cigarettes. We would lay out the board and he would kind of waddle over and wipe you out in 15 moves. One time I actually got him to blunder and I won the game -- big deal, 1 out of 50. But I said: ''Hah, I got ya, I got ya. You have to resign now.'' And he said to me: ''The only reason you won, Adam, is because I have so little respect for your game that I made a blunder. Now get back to work.'' He had that little wry grin of his and walked away.

LEE ERMEY: He didn't seem to be too concerned if the people got hurt, but if an animal got hurt, that's serious stuff there. He wouldn't kill a mouse in his house. One afternoon on location, we needed to use an area where there was a big stack of rubbish -- lumber and junk. And Stanley asked construction to move that pile of rubbish somewhere else and in the process they killed a wild rabbit, and it broke Stanley's heart. He actually wrapped for the rest of the day, shut it down.

STEVE SOUTHGATE: We have a lady in France who supervises all the dubbing for Stanley, and she was heavily pregnant at the time and she'd got everything virtually finished, the dubbing was all done, the mixing was all done, and she went into labor. And she was in labor for 10 or 12 hours and Kubrick called her in the middle of the labor. And she was screaming the answers back.