Overview (4)

Mini Bio (1)

Spouse (3)

Trade Mark (32)

His films often tell about the dark side of human nature, especially dehumanization.



[Three-way] Constructs three-way conflicts



[Faces] Extreme close-ups of intensely emotional faces



[Bathroom] All of Kubrick's films feature a pivotal scene that takes place in a bathroom.





Known for his exorbitant shooting ratio and endless takes, he reportedly exposed an incredible 1.3 million feet of film while shooting The Shining (1980), the release print of which runs for 142 minutes. Thus, he used less than 1% of the exposed film stock, making his shooting ratio an indulgent 102:1 when a ratio of 5 or 10:1 is considered the norm.



In his last seven films almost always used previously composed music (such as The Blue Danube andThus Spake Zarathustra in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968))



Preferred to shoot his films in the Academy ratio (1.37:1). The exceptions were: Spartacus (1960), in Panavision, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in Cinerama. Much of his films consist of wide-angle shots that give the impression of a wide-screen movie, wide up-and-down as well as wide sideways. From The Killing (1956) onward, his films looked increasingly odder, bigger, and more properly viewed from the rows closer to the screen.

[First-person] Uses the first person viewpoint (the character's perspective) at least once in each film.





Credits are always a slide show. He never used rolling credits except for the opening of The Shining (1980).

In almost every movie he made, there is a tracking shot of a character (the camera following the character).



All of his films end with "The End", when this became out of style in later years because of the need to run end credits, he moved "The End" to the end of the credits.



[Dark humor] All of Kubrick's films, especially "Dr. Strangelove", have elements of black humor in them.





[Duality] Kubrick's last five films, minus The Shining (1980), are structurally split into two distinct halves, most likely to mimic the nature of duality in the characters of his films. For example, A Clockwork Orange (1971) shows Alex ( Malcolm McDowell ) as a sadistic rapist and murderer in the first half of the film and a mind-controlled guinea pig in the second half. In Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Bill ( Tom Cruise ) travels amidst sexual temptation in New York at night in the first half of the film and rude awakenings during the day in the second half.

Almost all of his films involve a plan that goes horribly wrong



Frequently uses strong primary colors in his cinematography and sharp contrast between black and white.



Often features mellow, emotionally distant characters



More often than not sports a long beard



His films often tackle controversial social themes



Very strong visual style with heavy emphasis on symbolism



Slow-paced dialogue; often had actors pause several beats between line delivery. Also, rarely (if ever) did his dialogue overlap.



Slow, methodical tracking shots



Often cast 'Peter Sellers', 'Kirk Douglas', and 'Philip Stone'



Trivia (83)

Died 66 days into the year 1999, also 666 days before 1 January 2001.





He wanted to make a film based on Umberto Eco 's novel "Foucault's Pendulum" which appeared in 1988. Unfortunately, Eco refused, as he was dissatisfied with the filming of his earlier novel The Name of the Rose (1986) and also because Kubrick wasn't willing to let him write the screenplay himself.



Planned to direct a film called "I Stole 16 Million Dollars" based on notorious 1930s bank robber Willie Sutton. It was to be made by Kirk Douglas ' Bryna production company, but Douglas thought the script was poorly written. Kubrick tried to get Cary Grant interested, which must have proved to be a failure as well, since the film was never made.



Rarely gave interviews. He did, however, appear in a documentary made by his daughter Vivian Kubrick shot during the making of The Shining (1980). According to Vivian, he was planning on doing a few formal TV interviews once Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was released, but died before he could.



He had a well-known fear of flying, but he had to fly quite often early in his career. Because of his hysteria on planes, he simply tried to lessen the amount of times he flew. According to Malcolm McDowell , Kubrick listened to air traffic controllers at Heathrow Airport for long stretches of time, and he advised McDowell never to fly.

Refused to talk about his movies on set as he was directing them and never watched them when they were completed.



One of the founders of the Directors Guild of Great Britain.





The controversy around A Clockwork Orange (1971)'s UK release was so strong that Kubrick was flooded with angry letters and protesters were showing up at his home, demanding that the film never be shown in England again. He personally petitioned the studio to pull it from theaters, despite his legal inability to control a film after production. The studio, out of respect for Kubrick, eventually decided to pull the film out of theaters prematurely.



His dislike of his early film Fear and Desire (1953) is well known. He went out of his way to buy all the prints of it so no one else could see it.



In addition to The Seafarers (1953) (shot for the Seafarers International Union), he may have directed another commissioned project in the early fifties, "World Assembly of Youth," for the United Nations, documenting a UN-sponsored gathering in New York City of young people from throughout the world. No copy of the film has been found and it has never been conclusively proven that it even existed in the first place (as with "The Seafarers," Kubrick never publicly acknowledged it).



The only author that Kubrick worked with personally was Arthur C. Clarke for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Was voted the 23rd Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly. He was the least prolific director on this list, having made only 16 films over the course of a 48 year career.



Kubrick's favorite pastime was chess and he was said to be a master at it. Many crew members and actors found themselves on the losing end of chess matches with him.



People would come to his door looking for him, and as few people knew what he looked like, he would tell them that "Stanley Kubrick wasn't home."





Had an extensive and rich friendship with Malcolm McDowell during the filming of A Clockwork Orange (1971). After filming ended, Kubrick never contacted him again.



Often read about psychology, and knew how to manipulate his cast quite well. A fine example of this is with Shelley Duvall in The Shining (1980).

He reportedly briefly considered leaving England for either Vancouver, Canada or Sydney, Australia.



He was so reclusive that the press would make up wild stories about him. One such story was that he shot a fan on his property, and then shot him again for bleeding on the grass.





He was a big fan of American sitcoms Seinfeld (1989), Roseanne (1988) and The Simpsons (1989). He was also a fan of American football and would have his friends in America tape games and send them to him. In addition to being a sports fan, he was fascinated by the craft of television commercials. He was particularly impressed by how they could effectively tell a story in 30 seconds.



According to his close friend Michael Herr , he watched The Godfather (1972) over ten times and said it was probably the greatest film ever made.



Daniel Waters wrote the original 180 page screenplay for Heathers (1988) intending for Kubrick to direct it, as he believed Kubrick was the only director who could get away with making a three-hour high school film. Kubrick wasn't interested, and when the film was made the screenplay was cut nearly in half, resulting in a 102-minute film.

Was a lackadaisical student with grades near the bottom of his class.



According to a biography, Kubrick's wife finally convinced him once to take what she considered a long-overdue vacation. While vacationing, she noticed he was taking copious notes about something. When asked what he was writing, she discovered he was jotting some ideas down about a film project!





He was considered to be a well-read man with an extreme attention to detail. For his aborted film project on Napoléon Bonaparte , he had one of his assistants go to various bookstores to acquire every book he could find on the French emperor, and he returned with well in excess of 100. Kubrick read them all and astonished his associates with his level of retention. When working on a battlefield scene, he even examined an historical painting of the battle so he could note exactly what the weather was in the painting and make sure to film the battle on a day with similar weather patterns.

Due to his poor grades in high school (67% average) he was not accepted to a university. Although he never enrolled, he would sit in during classes at Columbia University.



He was a huge fan of the New York Yankees.



Ranked #4 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Greatest directors ever!" [2005]



Was an avid feline lover, once having 16 of them at one point. He would often let his cats lay around his editing room after filming completed as his way of making up for time he lost with them while he was working.



By the age of thirteen, he had become passionate about photography, chess and jazz drumming.





At the age of 16, he snapped a photograph of a news vendor in New York the day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. He sold the photograph to Look magazine, which printed it. The magazine eventually hired him as an apprentice photographer while he was still in high school.



Starting with Lolita (1962), he independently produced all his films from his adopted home of England, UK.



In 1950, after creating and publishing a photo essay for Look magazine on boxing, he used the proceeds from the sale to the magazine to make his first film, a 16-minute documentary on the same subject entitled Day of the Fight (1951).



Abigail Rosen , who co-starred with Viva in Andy Warhol 's Tub Girls (1967), was the first door lady at Max's Kansas City, a nightclub in New York City. She claims she had the honor of throwing Kubrick out of the club. "At first Mickey [Ruskin] hired me as the coat-check girl, but it was on the second floor and we were schlepping coats from downstairs to upstairs, and taking them back down where the people wanted to leave. It was not a good plan, besides which people would go up and steal coats. So we abandoned the whole idea and I became the door lady with Bob Russell. The embarrassing times were when Mickey asked us to kick somebody out. The philosophy behind it was that no one would beat on or abuse a woman. I was asked one night to kick Stanley Kubrick out. He was drunk and obnoxious and neither Mickey or I knew who he was. I said, 'Sir, I think it's time for you to leave now, you're not going to be happy here.' And he left. Then Mickey found out the next day who we had kicked out, and he yelled at me for not recognizing him. 'That's why I have you here,' he said, 'you're supposed to know who these people are.'".



Carlo Fiore , who was credited as an assistant to the producer on One-Eyed Jacks (1961) and helped develop the picture, wrote that the firing of Kubrick by Marlon Brando (who went on to direct the film) was perhaps inevitable, as there was only room for one "genius" on the picture. Brando had originally intended to direct the film himself, but Paramount Pictures pressured him to hire a director. Both Kubrick and Brando, at the time, were represented by Music Corp. of America (MCA).



In his 1974 memoir "Bud: The Brando I Knew," 'Carlo Fiore' (I)-- writing of his experience developing and working on the movie One-Eyed Jacks (1961) with his friend Marlon Brando - said that Kubrick had wanted to hire Spencer Tracy to play the character of Dad Longworth in the film. The part had already been cast with Karl Malden , and Brando countered that Malden was a fine actor. Kubrick agreed, but said that Malden played "losers" and the part needed a heavyweight to balance Brando's character of Rio. Brando immediately vetoed the idea of Tracy and forbade any more discussion on the topic.



He once called Ken Russell in the early 1970s but ended the conversation abruptly because, according to Russell, he had been frightened by a bee. He then called several days later to ask Russell where he had found the lovely English locations for his period films. Russell told him and Kubrick used the locations in his next film, Barry Lyndon (1975). Russell said, "I felt quite chuffed.".



In interviews upon with the release of his highly controversial A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick cited The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) as the kind of movie he did NOT want to make when defending the use of an "evil" protagonist (Alex). Kubrick reasoned that The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) was bad art, as it took the stand that lynching was evil because innocent people might be lynched, not the stand that lynching (i.e, extra-judicial murder) was itself evil. He wanted Alex explicitly evil (thus, the jettisoning of the last chapter of the original novel, in which Alex is reformed; this chapter was not in the American edition that Terry Southern had given to Kubrick). Kubrick felt that an explicitly evil Alex underscores the point that the state's invasion of the prisoner's soul (turning him into a mechanical man, a "clockwork orange") was evil whatever the guilt or innocent, and the level thereof, of the prisoner.



According to "The London Standard" (29 June 1999 edition), Kubrick left £66,000 in cash and his house, Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, to his wife Christiane Kubrick in a 24-page will drawn up on 22 July 1974. He also left her £21,000 in personal property. Before his death, Kubrick established a minimum of two private trusts, the Stanley Kubrick Trust Number One and the Children's Trust, in which his wealth was collected. Proceeds from the trusts will be distributed among his two children and one stepchild.



Out of all of his feature films, Spartacus (1960) is the only one to which he hasn't contributed in writing the screenplay.

Grew up in the Bronx.



According to his daughter, Vivian Kubrick, the family name is pronounced like "Que-brick," rather than like "koo-brick".





In 1969, after the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick turned to one of his life-long obsessions into a motion picture screenplay - Napoleon. The script would have required an extremely large budget to be made into a film, and it was all on its way well into pre-production, when the studio suddenly decided to pull the plug after another big-budget biopic on the life of Napoleon, Waterloo (1970), failed financially. Kubrick, angry and depressed that his film was canceled, would later in his career (and even in the production of other films) attempt to get the project back on its feet with different companies over the years. The requirements needed would have been to write a completely new screenplay, and Kubrick, feeling he couldn't match the masterpiece that was his original draft, dropped the project.



A few days before his abrupt death, he revealed his least and most favorite personal films. He labeled Fear and Desire (1953) as his least favorite personal film, and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) as his most favorite personal film.



Shared a love of photography and home movie making with Peter Sellers and they would often photograph each other at work.

Claimed that his IQ was below average. It was rumored, however, that his IQ was around 200.



First grew his famous beard during the making of "2001:A Space Odyssey". He kept the beard for the rest of his life and kept his hair long.



Legendary director Billy Wilder was a great admirer of Kubrick, and claimed that Kubrick "never made a bad picture." Wilder also once told Cameron Crowe that the first half of Full Metal Jacket was "the best picture I've ever seen.".



Used to skip school to take in double-features at the cinema.



His father was born in New York, to an Austrian Jewish father, Elias Kubrick, and a Romanian Jewish mother, Rosa Spiegelblatt. His mother was also born in New York, to an Austrian Jewish father, Samuel Perveler, and a Russian Jewish mother, Celia Siegel.





While working for, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), in Brando's home, Brando asked visitors to remove their shoes so as not to scratch the wooden floor. Kubrick often removed his pants as well, choosing to work in nothing but his shirt and underwear.

A heavy chain smoker in his youth, he mostly quit smoking in the 1970s (his forties), but would still smoke occasionally under the pressure of his shoots. On the other hand, he was said to rarely ever drink alcohol.





One of his favorite films was Eraserhead (1977) directed by David Lynch

Wore a suit and tie every day while directing until the 1970s, when he began to dress in casual work clothes. His wife claimed he didn't like choosing what to wear, and had a wardrobe full of identical shirts and pants.



When Kubrick bought Simon Cowell's childhood home, he turned the entire ground floor into a private cinema.



Was a close friend of Steven Spielberg.



Resisted conceptual analysis of his films, stating that he didn't want to have to explain what his films meant, and that he wanted each film to be judged on its own and not in his body of work. He further claimed that his method consisted simply of finding stories that interested him and trying to not repeat himself.



He was known for being a perfectionist, although he denied this. He'd kept doing takes because he felt that his actors, even though they got the right idea, he thought they weren't happy. When the Shining came out, there was a scene in the ending with Wendy and Danny in the hospital but Kubrick hated it and asked it to be removed just after a week after its release. Dorian Harewood, who played Eightball From Full Metal Jacket, said in an interview that Kubrick was a perfectionist. Kubrick called Harewood a few days later denying that he was a perfectionist.



Among his eccentricities was calling people multiple times a day whenever he had an idea about something, even if it was in the middle of the night. Kubrick himself was a night owl who rarely slept more than a few hours.



Shares his birthday with famed psychologist Carl Jung whose work is cited in "Full Metal Jacket".



Kubrick loved animals. When he died, he had a Highland Terrier. seven Golden Retrievers. one Scotch Terrier, eight cats, and four Fern Donkeys.



Kubrick's wife and Jan Harlan, founders of the Stanley Kubrick Estate feel that Michael Herr's book on the director is the most accurate personal account and Alison Castle's book by Taschen is the most comprehensive.



It's long been rumored that Kubrick repeatedly failed to destroy the negative but was unsuccessful because he had lost the rights to the film.



Personal Quotes (61)

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.



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



I would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself.



Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.



Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.



I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.



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



If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.



How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo ['Leonardo Da Vinci'] had written at the bottom of the canvas, 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover'? This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.



The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.



{on the complaint that his films were emotionally cold] I ought not to be regarded as a once happy man who has been bitten in the jugular and compelled to assume the misanthropy of a vampire.



Call it enlightened cowardice, if you like. Actually, over the years I discovered that I just didn't enjoy flying, and I became aware of compromised safety margins in commercial aviation that are never mentioned in airline advertising. So I decided I'd rather travel by sea, and take my chances with the icebergs [...] I am afraid of aeroplanes. I've been able to avoid flying for some time but, I suppose, if I had to I would. Perhaps it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. At one time, I had a pilot's licence and 160 hours of solo time on single-engine light aircraft. Unfortunately, all that seemed to do was make me mistrust large aeroplanes.





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.

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker - in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.



I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists, neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.



The criminal and the soldier at least have the virtue of being against something or for something in a world where many people have learned to accept a kind of grey nothingness, to strike an unreal series of poses in order to be considered normal.... It's difficult to say who is engaged in the greater conspiracy - the criminal, the soldier, or us.



I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.



Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.



A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.



The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.



I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.



I believe that drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist. I think that the illusion of oneness with the universe, and absorption with the significance of every object in your environment, and the pervasive aura of peace and contentment is not the ideal state for an artist. It tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas. The artist's transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and the mainspring of his subconscious. One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear to be so in the state of universal bliss that the drug induces on a "good" trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life. Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.





I don't mistrust sentiment and emotion, no. The question becomes, 'Are you giving them something to make them a little happier, or are you putting in something that is inherently true to the material?' Are people behaving the way we all really behave, or are they behaving the way we would like them to behave? I mean, the world is not as it's presented in Frank Capra films. People love those films - which are beautifully made - but I wouldn't describe them as a true picture of life. The questions are always, is it true? Is it interesting? To worry about those mandatory scenes that some people think make a picture is often just pandering to some conception of an audience. Some films try to outguess an audience. They try to ingratiate themselves, and it's not something you really have to do. Certainly audiences have flocked to see films that are not essentially true, but I don't think this prevents them from responding to the truth.



[on An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)] I think Louis Gossett Jr. 's performance was wonderful, but he had to do what he was given in the story. The film clearly wants to ingratiate itself with the audience. So many films do that. You show the drill instructor really has a heart of gold - the mandatory scene where he sits in his office, eyes swimming with pride about the boys and so forth. I suppose he actually is proud, but there's a danger of falling into what amounts to so much sentimental bullshit.



I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka , sitting alone and suffering.

To make a film entirely by yourself, which initially I did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography.



Sanitized violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.





[on Charles Chaplin ] Chaplin is all content and little form. Nobody could have shot a film in a more pedestrian way than Chaplin.

[Why he shoots so many takes] Because actors don't know their lines.



I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.



Observancy is a dying art.



The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.



Eisenstein does it with cuts, Max Ophuls does it with fluid movement. Chaplin does it with nothing. Eisenstein seems to be all form and no content, Chaplin is all content and little form. Nobody could have shot a film in a more pedestrian way than Chaplin. Nobody could have paid less attention to story than Eisenstein. Alexander Nevsky is, after all, a pretty dopey story. Potemkin is built around a heavy propaganda story. But both are great filmmakers.



There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly. Also, ghost stories appeal to our craving for immortality. If you can be afraid of a ghost, then you have to believe that a ghost may exist. And if a ghost exists, then oblivion might not be the end.





[on why he chose Shelley Duvall for The Shining (1980)] I had seen all of her films and greatly admired her work. I think she brought an instantly believable characterization to her part. The wonderful thing about Shelley is her eccentric quality. The way she talks, the way she moves, the way her nervous system is put together. Shelley seemed to be exactly the kind of woman who would marry someone like Jack and be stuck with him.

There are very few directors, about whom you'd say you automatically have to see everything they do. I'd put Fellini, Bergman and David Lean at the head of my first list, and Truffaut at the head of the next level.



Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it's completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it. For instance, I've read that I wear a football helmet in the car.



One of the things that gave me the most confidence in trying to make a film was seeing all the lousy films that I saw. Because I sat there and thought, Well, I don't know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that.





[on Jack Nicholson ] I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney . I should think that he is on almost everyone's first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining (1980), you believe he's a writer, failed or otherwise.

[on why he decided to make 'Dr. Strangelove' as a comedy] As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: 'I can't do this. People will laugh.'



The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.



I can't honestly say what led me to make any of my films. The best I can do is to say I just fell in love with the stories. Going beyond that is a bit like trying to explain why you fell in love with your wife: she's intelligent, has brown eyes, a good figure. Have you really said anything? Since I am currently going through the process of trying to decide what film to make next, I realize just how uncontrollable is the business of finding a story, and how much it depends on chance and spontaneous reaction. You can say a lot of "architectural" things about what a film story should have: a strong plot, interesting characters, possibilities for cinematic development, good opportunities for the actors to display emotion, and the presentation of its thematic ideas truthfully and intelligently. But of course, that still doesn't really explain why you chose something, nor does it lead you to a story. You can only say that you probably wouldn't choose a story that doesn't have most of those qualities.



From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. In one instance, the same critic who originally rapped the film has several years later put it on an all-time best list. But of course, the lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.





[on Barry Lyndon (1975)] Ryan O'Neal was the best actor for the part. He looked right and I was confident that he possessed much greater acting ability than he had been allowed to show in many of the films he had previously done. In retrospect, I think my confidence in him was fully justified by his performance, and I still can't think of anyone who would have been better for the part. The personal qualities of an actor, as they relate to the role, are almost as important as his ability, and other actors, say like Al Pacino Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman , just to name a few who are great actors, would nevertheless have been wrong to play Barry Lyndon. I liked Ryan and we got along very well together.



[on The Shining (1980)] I've always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I'm sure we've all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we're looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But The Shining didn't originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: "Jack must be imagining these things because he's crazy." This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters.

I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, 'don't try to fly too high', or whether it might also be thought of as 'forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings'.



I think aesthetically recording spontaneous action, rather than carefully posing a picture, is the most valid and expressive use of photography.





One of the things that I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, "Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?" And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T.S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him - I believe it was about The Waste Land - what he meant by the poem. He replied, "I meant what it said." If I could have said it any differently, I would have.

Music is one of the most effective ways of preparing an audience and reinforcing points that you wish to impose on it. The correct use of music, and this includes the non-use of music, is one of the great weapons that the filmmaker has at his disposal.



A director can't get anything out of an actor that he doesn't already have. You can't start an acting school in the middle of making a film.



[explaining his hatred of interviews] There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.



A great story is kind of a miracle. I've never written a story myself, which is probably why I have so much respect for it. I started out, before I became a film director, always thinking, you know, if I couldn't play on the Yankees I'd like to be a novelist. The people I first admired were not film directors but novelists. Like Conrad.



[on film critics] I find a lot of critics misunderstand my films; probably everybody's films. Very few of them spend enough time thinking about them. They look at the film once, they don't really remember what they saw, and they write the review in an hour. I mean, one spent more time on a book report in school.



2001 would give a little insight into my metaphysical interests. I'd be very surprised if the universe wasn't full of an intelligence of an order that to us would seem God-like. I find it very exciting to have a semi-logical belief that there's a great deal to the universe we don't understand, and that there is an intelligence of an incredible magnitude outside the Earth. It's something I've become more and more interested in. I find it a very exciting and satisfying hope.





[on Schindler's List (1993)] Think that's about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don't.

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved- that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.



[on what advantages film has over other media] Well, for one thing I think it is fairly obvious that the events and situations that are most meaningful to people are those in which they are actually involved- and I'm convinced that this sense of personal involvement derives in large part from visual perception. I once saw a woman hit by a car, for example, or right after she had been hit, and she was lying in the middle of the road. I knew that at that moment I would have risked my life if necessary to help her... whereas if I had merely read about the accident or heard about it, it could not have meant too much. Of all the creative media I think that film is most nearly able to convey this sense of meaningfulness; to create an emotional involvement and a feeling of participation in the person seeing it.





[on his early career- starting with Fear and Desire (1953)] A pretentious, inept and boring film- a youthful mistake costing about 50,000 dollars- but it was distributed by Joseph Burstyn, in the art houses and caused a little ripple of publicity and attention... I mean there were people around who found some good things in it, and on the strength of that I was able to raise private financing to make a second feature-length film, Killer's Kiss. And that was a silly story too, but my concern was still in getting experience and simply functioning in the medium, so the content of a story seemed secondary to me. I just took the line of least resistance, whatever story came to hand. And for another thing I had no money to live on at the time, much less to buy good story material with- nor did I have the time to work it into shape- and I didn't want to take a job, and get off the track, so I had to keep moving.

What I like about not writing original material- which I'm not even certain I could do- is that you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time. You never have this experience again with the story. You have a reaction to it: it's a kind of falling-in-love reaction. That's the first thing. Then it becomes almost a matter of code breaking, of breaking the work down into a structure that is truthful, that doesn't lose the ideas or the content or the feeling of the book. And fitting it all into the much more limited time frame of a movie. And as long as you possibly can, you retain your emotional attitude, whatever it was that made you fall in love in the first place. You judge a scene by asking yourself, "Am I still responding to what's there?" The process is both analytical and emotional. You're trying to balance calculating analysis against feeling. And it's almost never a question "What does this scene mean?" It's "Is this truthful, or does something about it feel false?" It's "Is this scene interesting? Will it make me feel the way I felt when I first fell in love with the material?" It's an intuitive process, the way I imagine writing music is intuitive. It's not a matter of structuring an argument.



In making a film, I start with an emotion, a feeling, a sense of a subject or a person or a situation. The theme and technique come as a result of the material passing, as it were, through myself and coming out of the projector lens. It seems to me that simply striving for a genuinely personal approach, whatever it may be, is the goal- Bergman and Fellini, for example, although perhaps as different in their outlook as possible, have achieved this, and I'm sure it is what gives their films an emotional involvement lacking in most work.



One of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallize and come out into the open. Conflict is natural, when it would in a less critical situation have to be introduced almost as a contrivance, and would thus appear forced, or- even worse- false.



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