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Stanley Kubrick(From Wikipedia) |
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| Stanley Kubrick | |||||||||||||||||||
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 Self-Portrait of Kubrick with a Leica III camera, when he worked for Look (from the book "Drama and Shadows"). |
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| Born | July 26, 1928 New York City, New York, U.S. |
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| Died | March 7, 1999 (aged 70) Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England |
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| Occupation | Film Director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer & editor | ||||||||||||||||||
| Years active | 1951 — 1999 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Spouse(s) | Toba Metz (1948–1951) (divorced) Ruth Sobotka (1954–1957) (divorced) Christiane Harlan (1958-1999) |
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Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an influential American film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres in his movies and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life.
Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, the first of two children born to Jacques Leonard Kubrick (1901–1985) and his wife Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–1985); his sister, Barbara, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents were of Jewish Austrian origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx.[citation needed]
Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve; the game remained a life-long obsession.[citation needed] When Stanley was thirteen years old, Jacques Kubrick bought him a Graflex camera, triggering Kubrick's fascination with still photography. He was also interested in jazz, briefly attempting a career as a drummer.[citation needed]
Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School 1941–1945. He was a poor student with a meager 67 grade average.[citation needed] On graduation from high school in 1945, when soldiers returning from the Second World War crowded colleges, his poor grades eliminated hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that nothing about school interested him.[citation needed]
In high school, he was chosen official school photographer for a year. Eventually, he sought jobs on his own, and by graduation time had sold a photographic series to Look magazine in NYC. Kubrick supplemented his income playing "chess for quarters" in Washington Square Park and in various Manhattan chess clubs.[citation needed] He registered for night school at the City College to improve his grade-point average. He worked as a freelance photographer for Look, becoming an apprentice photographer in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer.
During his Look magazine years, on May 29, 1948, Kubrick married Toba Metz (b. 1930) and they lived in Greenwich Village, divorcing in 1951. It was then that Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and in the cinemas of New York City. He was particularly inspired by the complex, fluid camera movement of Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style.
Many early-period (1945–1950) photographs by Kubrick were published in the book "Drama and Shadows" (2005, Phaidon Press).
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 independently financed Day of the Fight (1951). Although the distributor went out of business that year, Kubrick sold Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for a profit of one hundred dollars.[citation needed] Kubrick quit his job at Look magazine and began working on his second short documentary, Flying Padre (1951), funded by RKO. A third film, The Seafarers (1953), Kubrick's first color film, was a 30-minute promotional short film for the Seafarers' International Union. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre, however it is believed he was involved in other similar shorts which have been lost, most notably World Assembly of Youth.[citation needed] He also was second unit director on an episode of the Omnibus television program about the life of Abraham Lincoln. The Seafarers was announced to be released on an official DVD, but never was; none of these shorts has ever been officially released, though they are widely bootlegged, and clips are used in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. In addition, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre have been shown on TCM as part of a festival of shorts.
Kubrick's focus on narrative feature films began with Fear and Desire (1953). Fear and Desire is about a team of soldiers behind enemy lines in a fictional war. Kubrick and wife Toba Metz were the only crew on the film, which was written by Kubrick's friend Howard Sackler, later a successful playwright. Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews, but failed commercially. In later life, Kubrick was embarrassed by the film, dismissing it as amateur, refusing Fear and Desire's projection in retrospectives and public screenings on establishing himself as a major filmmaker.[citation needed] Although the film's copyright lapsed into the public domain, it is often said that Kubrick bought every print of the film which he could, to keep people from seeing it.[citation needed] At least one copy remained in the hands of a private collector, and the film subsequently surfaced on VHS and later on DVD.
Kubrick's marriage to high school sweetheart Toba ended during the making of Fear and Desire. He met his second wife, Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer, Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in the East Village from 1952–1955 until their marriage on January 15, 1955; the couple later moved to Hollywood during the summer of 1955. Sobotka, who made a cameo appearance in Kubrick's next film, Killer's Kiss (1954), also served as art director on The Killing (1956). Like Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss is a short feature film, with a running time of slightly more than an hour, of limited commercial and critical success. The film is about a young, heavyweight boxer at the end of his career who is involved with organized crime. Both Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss were privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends.[citation needed]
Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a producer named James B. Harris, and the two became lifelong friends.[citation needed] Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, financed Kubrick's next three films. They bought the rights to the Lionel White novel Clean Break, which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson turned into a story about a race track robbery gone wrong. Starring Sterling Hayden, The Killing was Kubrick's first film with a professional cast and crew. The film made impressive use of non-linear time, unusual in 1950s cinema, and, though financially unsuccessful, was Kubrick's first critically successful film.[citation needed] The widespread admiration for The Killing brought Harris-Kubrick Productions to the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.[citation needed] The studio offered them its massive collection of copyrighted stories from which to choose their next project. Eventually, they chose The Burning Secret by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Kubrick wrote a screenplay with Calder Willingham, but the deal collapsed before the film got properly underway.[citation needed]
The World War I story, based on Humphrey Cobb's anti-war novel Paths of Glory (1935), is about three innocent French soldiers charged with cowardice by their superior officers as an example to the other soldiers. Kirk Douglas was cast as Colonel Dax, a humanitarian officer trying to prevent the soldiers' execution. Paths of Glory (1957) was Stanley Kubrick's first significant commercial and critical success, establishing him as an up-and-coming cineaste. Critics praised the unvarnished combat scenes, and Kubrick's cinematography: Colonel Dax's march through his soldiers' trench in a single, unbroken reverse-tracking shot has become a classic cinematic trope cited in film classes.[citation needed] Steven Spielberg named this his favorite Kubrick film.[citation needed]
Paths of Glory was filmed in Munich. During its production, Kubrick met and romanced the young German actress Christiane Harlan (credited by her stage name "Susanne Christian"), who played the only woman speaking part in the film. Kubrick divorced his second wife Ruth Sobotka in 1957. Christiane Susanne Harlan (b. 1932 in Germany) belonged to a theatrical family, and had trained as an actress. She and Kubrick married in 1958 and remained together until his death in 1999. During her marriage to Kubrick, Christiane concentrated on a career as a painter. In addition to raising Christiane's young daughter Katharina (b. 1953) from her first marriage to the late German actor, Werner Bruhns (d. 1977), the couple had two daughters: Anya (b. 1958) and Vivian (b. 1960). Christiane's brother Jan Harlan was Kubrick's executive producer from 1975 onward.
On returning to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months on the Marlon Brando vehicle One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Later, Kubrick claimed Brando forced him from the film, because Brando wanted to direct it himself.[citation needed] Kubrick languished working on unproduced screenplays (including Jim Thompson's treatment, Lunatic at Large)[citation needed] until Kirk Douglas asked him to assume direction of Spartacus (1960) from Anthony Mann who, two weeks into shooting, was fired by the studio because he lacked leadership (or, as has been speculated, more likely for disagreeing with producer-star Kirk Douglas).
Based upon the true story of a doomed uprising of Roman slaves, Spartacus established Stanley Kubrick as a major director. The production, however, was difficult; creative differences arose between Kubrick and Douglas, the star and producer of the film. Frustrated by lack of creative control, Kubrick later largely disowned its authorship.[citation needed] The Douglas-Kubrick creative control battles destroyed their work relationship from Paths of Glory. Years later, Kirk Douglas referred to Stanley Kubrick as "a talented shit".[citation needed] Spartacus was a major critical and commercial success, but its embattled production convinced Kubrick to find ways of working with Hollywood financing while remaining independent of its production system. Kubrick referred to Hollywood production as "film by fiat, film by frenzy", and this reasoning was behind Kubrick's moving to England in 1962.[citation needed]
In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film Lolita, and resided there for the rest of his life. Unsurprisingly, Lolita was Kubrick's first major controversy.[citation needed] The book by Vladimir Nabokov, dealing with an affair between a middle-aged man and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, already was notorious when Kubrick embarked on the project. However, it was also steadily achieving popularity in the United States; eventually, the difficult subject matter was mocked in the film's tagline, perhaps to gain attention: "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?" Nabokov wrote a three-hundred page screenplay for Kubrick, which the director abandoned; a second draft by Nabokov, roughly half the length of its first, was revamped by Kubrick into the final screenplay.Nabokov estimated that 20% of his material made it into the film.[citation needed]
Despite changing Lolita's age from twelve years to fourteen years, which was a more acceptable age for commercial appeal at the time, several scenes in the final film had to be re-edited to allow the film's release.[citation needed] The resulting film toned down what were considered the novel's more perverse aspects, leaving much to the viewer's imagination, some viewers have even wondered whether Humbert and Lolita actually embarked on a sexual affair, as most of their relationship, sexually, is implied and suggested.[citation needed] Later, Kubrick commented that, had he known the severity of the censorship, he probably would not have made the film.[citation needed] However, Kubrick always spoke highly of James Mason, who portrayed Humbert Humbert in the film, identifying him as one of the actors with whom he most enjoyed working.[citation needed] Lolita also was the first time Kubrick worked with British comic Peter Sellers, a collaboration which proved one of the most successful of his early career, most notable for Dr. Strangelove (1964). Oswald Morris was the director of photography.
Lolita's release in 1962 was surrounded by immense hype;[citation needed] it was also given an "Adults Only" rating, since ratings for film and literature were not applicable at the time of Lolita's release, limiting all screenings of the film to those over the age of 18. Critical reception for the film was mixed, many praising it for its tackling of an extremely daring and high-risk subject, others surprised by the lack of intimacy between Lolita and Humbert. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing of an Adapted Screenplay, and Sue Lyon, who played the title role, won a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer Actress.
Kubrick's next film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), became a cult film. The screenplay—based upon the novel Red Alert, by ex-RAF flight lieutenant Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant)—was co-written by Kubrick and George, with contributions by American satirist Terry Southern.
Dr. Strangelove is often considered a masterpiece of black humor.[citation needed] While Red Alert is a serious, cautionary tale of accidental atomic war for Cold War-era readers, Dr. Strangelove accidentally evolved into what Kubrick called a "nightmare comedy." Originally intended as a thriller, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear war so absurd that the story became dark and funny rather than thrilling;[citation needed] Kubrick reconceived it as comedy, recruiting Terry Southern for the required anarchic irony.
Peter Sellers, who had previously played 'Clare Quilty' in Lolita, was hired to simultaneously play four roles in Dr. Strangelove. Eventually, Sellers played three, due to an injured leg and difficulty in mastering the Texan accent of bomber pilot Major "King" Kong.[citation needed] Later, Kubrick called Sellers "amazing", but lamented that his energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. To capture the actor's limited energy, Kubrick set up two cameras to film Sellers's improvisation.[citation needed]
Kubrick's decision to film a Cold War thriller as a black comedy was a daring artistic risk that paid off for him and Columbia Pictures.[citation needed] Coincidentally, that same year, Columbia Studios released the dramatic nuclear war thriller Fail-Safe. Its close similarity with Dr Strangelove prompted Kubrick to consider suing the makers of that film, but he decided against it.[citation needed] However, Fail-Safe was based on a novel published in 1962.
Dr. Strangelove portrays a deliberate American nuclear attack launched against the Soviet Union, by renegade U.S.A.F. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden). In real time, the film's duration, the story intercuts among three locales: (i) Burpleson Air Force Base, where RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) tries to stop the mad Gen. Ripper; (ii) the Pentagon War Room, where the U.S. President (Sellers), U.S.A.F. General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), and (officially ex-) Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (Sellers) try to stop (or not) General Ripper's B-52 bombers enroute to dropping nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union; and (iii) Major Kong's (Slim Pickens) B-52 bomber where he and his crew of ordinary airmen, never knowing their orders are false, doggedly try to complete their mission. Production designer Ken Adam's sets for the film—especially the War Room in the Pentagon—are considered classic film production design.
In belittling the sacrosanct norms of the political culture of mutually assured destruction (MAD) as the squabbling of intellectual children, Dr. Strangelove foreshadowed the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s and was enormously successful with the nascent American counter-culture[citation needed]. Dr. Strangelove earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award. Kubrick's successful Dr. Strangelove persuaded the studios that he was an auteur who could be trusted to deliver popular films despite his unusual ideas.[citation needed]
Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was photographed in Super Panavision 70. Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". The screenplay and the novel were written simultaneously.[citation needed] The screenplay is credited to Kubrick and Clarke, while the novel, published in tandem with the film's release, is credited only to Clarke. The novel and the film deviate substantially from each other, with the novel explaining a great deal of what the film leaves deliberately ambiguous. Clarke and Kubrick later spoke highly of one another.[citation needed] Incidentally, Clarke's follow up, 2010: Odyssey Two, follows the events of the movie version of 2001, as opposed to the novel version. This is likely due to the cultural impact of Kubrick's film.
The film's special effects, overseen by Kubrick and engineered by a team that included special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (Silent Running, Blade Runner), proved ground-breaking and inspired many of the special effects-driven films which were to follow the success of 2001.[citation needed] Manufacturing companies were consulted as to what the design of both special-purpose and everyday objects would look like in the future. At the time of the movie's release, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that a generation of engineers would design real spacecraft based upon 2001 "even if it isn't the best way to do it".[citation needed] Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award Kubrick ever received was for supervising the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The film used existing works of classical music in place of an original score, and as a result Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz have become indelibly associated with the film.[citation needed] Kubrick also used music by contemporary, avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti, although some of the pieces were altered without Ligeti's consent. The appearance of Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem on the 2001 soundtrack was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. This use of 'program' music was not originally planned -- Kubrick had commissioned composer Alex North to write a full-length score for the film, and he originally only used the pre-recorded pieces as guides during editing, but Kubrick became so attached to them that he eventually decided to dispense with North's music in favour of the temporary tracks he had used during editing.[citation needed] About three-quarters of the way through production, Kubrick asked North to stop work on the score, and North assumed that this meant Kubrick had as much music as he needed; Kubrick never told North that he had decided not to use his score, and North reportedly only discovered this when he attended the film's premiere.[1]
Artistically, 2001: A Space Odyssey was a radical departure from Kubrick's previous films. It contains only 45 minutes of dialogue, over a running time of over two and a half hours. The dialogue is largely superfluous to the images and music. Nevertheless it outlines the 'story' while presenting mankind as dissociated from itself and its surroundings. Clarke's characters function either as extensions of the story or else as anthropological archetypes. The story and plot are obscure for most of the film's duration and its ambiguous, perplexing ending continues to fascinate contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form, but the calculated ambiguity of his films remained a trademark for the rest of his career.[citation needed]
Despite being an unorthodox science fiction film, 2001 was an enormous commercial success and became a pop culture phenomenon. However, the film was not an immediate hit. Were it not for a six-week exhibition contract, the film might not have had enough time in cinemas to have benefited from building word-of-mouth popularity.[citation needed] The film's ticket sales were low during the first two weeks of its release, and it was nearly withdrawn from theaters.[citation needed] Actor Jack Nicholson claims that Kubrick told him that 241 people walked out of the exhibitor's screening, including the studio head.[citation needed] Arthur C. Clarke has said that an MGM executive commented on the screening by saying: "Well, that's the end of Stanley Kubrick."[citation needed]
Initial critical reaction was also extremely hostile, with critics attacking the film's lack of dialogue, its slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. The film's only initial defender was Penelope Gilliatt,[citation needed] who called it "some kind of a great film". Following the film's success, however, many critics later revised their opinions.
Audiences slowly embraced the film, especially the 1960s counterculture audience, who loved the movie's "Star Gate" sequence, a seemingly psychedelic journey to the infinite reaches of the cosmos. Younger moviegoers often saw the film many times over, resulting in a cult following of repeat viewers.[citation needed] Supposedly, if one were to ingest LSD at the beginning of the movie, the "Star Gate" sequence would start at roughly the same time that the drug was in full effect.[citation needed] This phenomenon prompted the film's distributors to add an LSD-allusive tagline ("The Ultimate Trip") to the movie's advertising poster.[citation needed] Paradoxically, Kubrick won total creative control from Hollywood by succeeding with one of the most thematically "difficult" films ever to win wide commercial release.[citation needed]
Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey are widespread. Despite having been released in 1968, it still prompts debate today. When critic Joseph Gelmis asked Kubrick about the meaning of the film, Kubrick replied:[2]
They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.
2001: A Space Odyssey is likely Kubrick's most famous and influential film. Steven Spielberg called it his generation's big bang,[citation needed] focusing its attention upon the Soviet-American space race. The special effects techniques Kubrick pioneered were later developed by Ridley Scott and George Lucas for films such as Alien and Star Wars.[citation needed] 2001 is particularly notable as one of the few films realistically presenting travel in outer space: the scenes in outer space are silent; weightlessness is constant, with characters strapped in place; when characters wear pressure suits, only their breathing is audible.
The film is highly ambiguous, despite being filmed in a relatively photorealistic and straightforward way. Entire books have been written about interpretations of the film.[citation needed] Fans of the film continue to have heated debates on what the film "means", the most heated being between those that see the film as profoundly spiritual and religious and those that see it as atheistic and materialistic.[citation needed] Some see it as optimistic and humanistic while some see it as pessimistic and cold, and some say it is an affirmation of the philosophy of Nietzsche while others say it is far and away from his philosophy, perhaps consciously against it. Even Arthur C. Clarke is on record as being ignorant of what Stanley Kubrick really had in mind when making the film, going so far as to say that 2001: A Space Odyssey is ninety per cent Stanley Kubrick's vision.[citation needed] The film's striking cinematography was the work of legendary British director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth who would later photograph classic films such as Cabaret and Superman.
After 2001, Kubrick sought a project which he could quickly film with a small budget. He found it in A Clockwork Orange (1971). His film version is a dark, shocking exploration of violence in human society. It was released with an 'X' rating in the United States, though in 1973 it was edited in order that it could be re-classified with an 'R' rating and was re-released. Some of the early 1980s VHS releases carry this R-rated version, although all other releases past that, including the Stanley Kubrick Collection editions, have the original X-rated version.
Based on the Anthony Burgess novel, the film is the story of a teenage hooligan, Alex, (Malcolm McDowell), who gleefully torments, beats, robs, tortures and rapes without conscience or remorse. Finally imprisoned, Alex undergoes psychiatric aversion treatment to be cured of his instinctively reflexive violence. This conditions him physically unable to act violently, yet also renders him helpless and incapable of moral choice, resulting in a consequently brutal comeuppance at the hands of his victims.
Kubrick photographed A Clockwork Orange quickly and almost entirely on location in and around London. Despite the low-tech nature of the film, when compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick was highly innovative, e.g. throwing a camera from a rooftop to achieve the desired viewer disorientation. For the score, Kubrick had electronic music composer Wendy Carlos, at the time known as Walter Carlos, (Switched-On Bach), adapt famous classical works such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the Moog synthesizer.
The film was extremely controversial because of its explicitly depicted teenage gang-rape and violence. Released the same year as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, the three films sparked ferocious debate in the media about the social effects of cinematic violence. The controversy was exacerbated when copycat violence was committed in England, by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in A Clockwork Orange. The story is narrated in Nadsat, a slang language comprising many anglicized Soviet words: the gang refer to each other as "droogie", from the Russian word for "friend."
When Kubrick and family were threatened with death, resulting from the social controversy, he took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain. The film was not released again in the United Kingdom until its re-release in 2000, a year after Stanley Kubrick's death. In banning his film in Britain, he showed the unprecedented power he held over his distributor, Warner Brothers. For the remainder of his career he held total control of every aspect of his films, including the marketing and the advertising; such was Warner Brothers' faith in his projects.
Kubrick's next film, released in 1975, was an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, also known as Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel about an 18th century gambler and social climber who slowly insinuates himself to English high society. It would be Kubrick's least-appreciated post-Strangelove film, despite strong acting (by Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, and Irish actress Marie Kean) and Kubrick's innovative cinematography and attention to period detail.
Some critics, especially Pauline Kael, one of Kubrick's greatest detractors, found Barry Lyndon a cold, slow-moving, and lifeless film. Its measured pace and length—more than three hours—put off many American critics and audiences, although the film was well-reviewed in the U.S. by noted critics Rex Reed and Richard Schickel. Time magazine published a cover story about the film, and Kubrick was nominated for three Academy Awards. As with most of his films, Barry Lyndon's reputation has grown through the years, particularly among other filmmakers. Director Martin Scorsese cited it as his favorite Kubrick film. Steven Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique", though, when younger, he famously described it "like going through the Prado without lunch".[citation needed]
As in his other films, Kubrick's cinematography and lighting techniques were innovative. Most famously, interior scenes were shot with a specially-adapted, high-speed Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. This allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century painting. Kubrick's blending of music, mise en scene, costume and action set standards for period drama that few other films have matched. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, more than any other Kubrick film. Despite this, Barry Lyndon was not a box office success in the US, although the film found a great audience in Europe, particularly in France.
Barry Lyndon has a remarkable score. Irish traditional songs (performed by The Chieftains), are combined with works by Antonio Vivaldi's Cello Concerto in B, a Johann Sebastian Bach Double Concerto, George Frideric Handel's Sarabande, and Franz Schubert's German Dance No. 1 in C Major, Piano Trio in E flat, and Impromtu Op. 90, No.1, in C minor.
The pace of Kubrick's work slowed considerably after Barry Lyndon, and he did not make another film for five years. The Shining, released in 1980, was adapted from the novel of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King. The film starred Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a failed writer who takes a job as an off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a high-class resort deep in the Colorado mountains. The job demands spending the winter in the isolated hotel with his wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, and their young son, Danny, who is gifted with a form of telepathy--the "shining" of the film's title.
As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awake. The hotel displays increasingly horrible, phantasmagoric images to Danny, especially the apparition of two girls murdered years before by their father, the hotel's previous caretaker. Meanwhile, Jack is slowly being driven mad by the haunted surroundings until he finally collapses into homicidal psychosis and attempts to murder his family with an axe.
The film was shot entirely on London soundstages, with the exception of second-unit exterior footage filmed in Colorado, Montana and Oregon. In order 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 camera movement in enclosed spaces.
More than any other of his films, The Shining gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a megalomanic perfectionist. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (ca. 1.3 million film ft. were exposed). This process was particularly difficult for actress Shelley Duvall, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman. Kubrick's daughter, Vivian , shot a short documentary film of the production. It is available in the DVD release of the film, and is one of few documents of Kubrick in action in the latter half of his career.
The film opened to mostly negative reviews, but proved a commercial success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction has treated the film more favorably. Stephen King was dissatisfied with the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." In 1997, King collaborated with Mick Garris to create a television mini-series version of the novel more faithful to King's original. Since then, King has spoken with less hostility toward Kubrick and his film (it was said at the time of the mini-series initial release that King agreed to not speak publicly about Kubrick's version if he were given the rights to do the miniseries). However, in a later interview on the Bravo channel King admitted that the first time he watched Kubrick's adaptation he found it "dreadfully upsetting."
Among horror movie fans, The Shining is a cult classic, often appearing at the top of best horror film lists alongside Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973) and Halloween (1978). Some of its images, such as an antique elevator disgorging a tidal wave of blood, are among the most recognizable and widely-known images from any Stanley Kubrick film. 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 of Barry Lyndon in the United States. As a pop culture phenomenon, the film has been the object of countless parodies, from The Simpsons and MAD Magazine to recent films such as Seed Of Chucky.
It was seven years until Kubrick's next film, Full Metal Jacket (1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel, The Short-Timers, starring Matthew Modine as Joker, Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence.
The film begins at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, U.S.A., where Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman relentlessly pushes his recruits through basic training to transform them from worthless "maggots" to Marine killers. Private Lawrence, an overweight, slow-witted recruit whom Hartman nicknamed "Gomer Pyle", is unable to cope with the program and slowly cracks under the strain, resulting, on the eve of graduation, in his murdering Gunnery Sergeant Hartman before killing himself. The scene ends the boot-camp portion of the story.
The second half of the film follows Joker, since promoted to sergeant, as he tries to stay sane in Vietnam. As a reporter for the United States Military's newspaper the Stars and Stripes, Joker occupies war's middle ground, using wit and sarcasm to detach himself from the war. Though an American and a member of the United States Marine Corps, he also is a reporter and so is compelled to abide the ethics of the profession. The film then follows an infantry platoon's advance on and through Hue City, decimated by the street fighting of the Tet Offensive. The film climaxes in a battle between Joker's platoon and a sniper hiding in the rubble; she almost kills Joker until his reporter partner shoots and severely injures her. Joker then kills her to put her out of her misery.
Filming a Vietnam War film in England was a considerable challenge for Stanley Kubrick and his production team. Much filming was in the Docklands area of London, with the ruined-city set created by production designer Anton Furst. This helped make the film visually very different from the other, contemporary Vietnam War films Platoon and Hamburger Hill. Instead of being set in the tropical, Southeast-Asian jungle, the second half of the story unfolds in a city, illuminating the urban warfare aspect of a war otherwise perceived as fought exclusively in a jungle. Kubrick said to film critic Gene Siskel that his attraction to Gustav Hasford's book was because it was "neither anti-war or pro-war", held "no moral or political position", and was primarily concerned with "the way things are."
Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews, but gained acclaim over time. It also found a reasonably large audience, despite being over-shadowed by Oliver Stone's Platoon. This was one reason for Kubrick not making Aryan Papers, in fear that its publicity would be stolen by Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.
Stanley Kubrick was a mute presence in Hollywood in the ten-odd years after the release of Full Metal Jacket (1987); many believed that he had retired from film-making. Occasionally, rumours surfaced about possible, new Kubrick projects, including Aryan Papers and A.I. (eventually produced after Kubrick's death, directed by Steven Spielberg). Stanley Kubrick's final film would be Eyes Wide Shut, starring then-married actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as an upper middle class Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey.
The story of Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler's novella Traumnovelle (in English a.k.a. Dream Story), and follows Dr. William Harford's journey to the sexual underworld of New York City, after his wife, Alice, shatters his faith in her fidelity when she confesses to nearly giving him, and their daughter, up for one night with another man.
After trespassing upon the rituals of a sinister, mysterious sexual cult, Dr. Harford thinks twice before seeking sexual revenge against his wife, and learns he and his family might be in sexual danger.
The film was in production for more than two years, and two of the main members of the cast, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, were replaced in the course of the filming. Although set in New York City, the film was mostly shot in London soundstages, with little location shooting. Shots of Manhattan itself were pick-up shots filmed in New York City by a second-unit crew. Because of Kubrick's secrecy about the film, mostly inaccurate rumors abounded about its plot and content. Most especially, the story's sexual content provoked much exaggerated speculation; some journalists writing that it would be "the sexiest film ever made." The casting of the celebrity-actor couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman increased the magnitude of pre-release journalistic hyperbole.
In 2006, actor R. Lee Ermey went on record as saying Kubrick told him in a telephone talk, shortly before his death, that Eyes Wide Shut was "a piece of shit" and that the critics would "have him for lunch".[3] Yet, the writer and director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children) who acted in Eyes Wide Shut refutes Ermey's statements, "Stanley was absolutely thrilled with the film. He was still working on the film when he died, and he probably died because he finally relaxed. It was one of the happiest weekends of his life, he had just shown the first cut to Terry, Tom, and Nicole. He would have kept working on it, like he did on all of his films, but I know he was over the moon about the film, as I was told this from people who were with him daily throughout post-production. My production partner was Stanley's assistant for thirty years." Field stated that Kubrick advised him to stay away from Ermey: " I’d originally thought about R. Lee Ermey for In the Bedroom, and I talked to Stanley a lot about that film, and, all I can say, is Stanley was adamant that I not work with Ermey, for all kinds of reasons that I won't get into, because there is no reason to do that to anyone, even if that person is saying slanderous things about Stanley, that I know, for a fact, are completely untrue.[4]
Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. In the United States and Canada, digitally manufactured silhouette figures were strategically placed to mask explicit copulation scenes. It was done to secure an "R" rating from the MPAA. To Europe, and the rest of the world, the film has been released uncut, in its original form. The October 2007 DVD reissue contains the uncut version, making it available to North American audiences for the first time.
In 1999, four days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family, the lead actor and actress, and Warner Brothers executives, the seventy-year-old director died of a heart attack in his sleep. He was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England, U.K.[5]
An exacting perfectionist who often worked for years on pre-production planning and research, Kubrick had a number of unrealised projects during his career.
After the success of 2001 Kubrick planned a large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. He did much research, read books about the French Emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay. With assistants, he meticulously created a card-catalogue of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the story in the historical places where Napoleon's life occurred.
In notes to his financial backers, preserved in The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick told them he was unsure how his Napoleon film would turn out, but that he expected to create 'the best movie ever made.' Ultimately, the project was canceled for three reasons: (i) the prohibitive costliness of location filming; (ii) the release, in the West, of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1968), and (iii) the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). Stanley Kubrick's screenplay for this film has been published on the Internet. Much of his historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), set in the late eighteenth century, just before Napoleon's wars.
The film was originally to star Jack Nicholson as Napoleon after Kubrick saw him in Easy Rider. Kubrick and Nicholson eventually worked together on The Shining. After years of preproduction, the movie was set aside indefinitely in favor of more economically feasible projects. As late as 1987, Kubrick stated that he had not given up on the project, mentioning that he had read almost 500 books on the historical figure. He was convinced that a film worthy of the subject had not yet appeared.
In the early 1990s, Kubrick almost went into production on a film of Louis Begley's Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his mother in hiding during the Holocaust. The first draft screenplay, titled "Aryan Papers", had been penned by Kubrick himself. Kubrick chose not to make the film due to the release of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust-themed Schindler's List in 1993. In addition, according to Kubrick's wife, Christiane, the subject itself had become too depressing and difficult for the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate film about the Holocaust was beyond the capacity of cinema.[citation needed]
Kubrick is also reported to have been fascinated by the career of Nazi film maker Veit Harlan, an uncle of his wife, and to have contemplated a film on the circle around Joseph Goebbels.[6]
One Kubrick project was eventually completed by another director, Steven Spielberg. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, Kubrick collaborated with various writers (including Brian Aldiss, Sara Maitland and Ian Watson) on a project called by various names, including "Pinocchio" and "Artificial Intelligence."
The film was developed expanding on Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", which Kubrick and his writers turned into a feature-length film in three acts. It was a futuristic fairy tale about a robot which resembles and behaves as a child, who is sold as a temporary surrogate to a family whose only son is in a coma. The robot, however, learns of this, and out of sympathy is left abandoned in the woods by his owners instead of being returned to the factory for destruction. The rest of the story concerns the robot's attempts in becoming a real boy by seeking “Blue Fairy” (a reference to Pinocchio), in order to regain his mother's love and acceptance once more, as his love was hard-wired into him, and hence everlasting. The journey would take the boy-robot (referred to as a "Mecha" ) thousands of years.
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 2001, 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, starring Haley Joel Osment, Frances O'Connor, and William Hurt.
The film contains a posthumous producing credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning, and the brief dedication "For Stanley" 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 Freudian psychology.
On November 1, 2006, Philip Hobbs, Kubrick's son-in-law, announced that he will be shepherding a film treatment of Lunatic at Large, which was commissioned by Kubrick for treatment from noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but had become lost until Kubrick's death in 1999.[7]
A screenplay attributed to Kubrick and one Richard Adams called The German Lieutenant can be found online.[8] It is about a German group of soldiers sent on a mission during the final days of World War II, despite odds being against Nazi-Germany at the time.
In 1976 Kubrick agreed to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built for and was being prepped 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. This was honored until 2000, when the fact was mentioned in the documentary on the making of The Spy Who Loved Me on the special edition DVD of the 007 movie.
Compared to directors like John Ford, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa, Kubrick was not known for his reuse of actors. However, Kubrick did on several occasions work with the same actor more than once. In lead roles, there was Sterling Hayden in both The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers in Lolita and Dr Strangelove, and Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory and Spartacus. In supporting roles, Joe Turkel appears in The Killing, Paths of Glory and The Shining, Philip Stone appears in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, Patrick Magee appears in A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, Timothy Carey in both The Killing and Paths of Glory. A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon saw the largest crossover with six actors having roles of various lengths in each film.
Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian has cameos in 2001: A Space Odyssey (as Heywood Floyd's daughter), Barry Lyndon (as a girl at the birthday party for young Bryan Lyndon), The Shining (as a party ghost), and Full Metal Jacket (as a TV reporter). His stepdaughter Katherina has cameos in A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, and her character's son in the latter is played by her real son. Kubrick's wife Christiane Kubrick appeared prior to her marriage to Kubrick in Paths of Glory billed as Susanne Christian (her birth-name is Christiane Susanne Harlan), and as a cafe guest in Eyes Wide Shut.
Three of Stanley Kubrick's films have had their source material re-adapted in some fashion, in two cases with the source's author writing the new version hoping it will stand as the authorized adaptation in contrast to the Kubrick version. In the third case, the source author's son gave a blessing to the new version.
Anthony Burgess did a subsequent stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in 1990 which he hoped would be considered a more definitive adaptation than Kubrick's film.[9] Stephen King wrote and produced a television mini-series of The Shining broadcast over 3 nights in 1997 that was motivated largely by King's desire to see a more faithful adaptation of the book than that made by Kubrick. Finally, Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri, gave his blessing to the Adrian Lyne film of Lolita, while echoing his father's moderate misgivings about the Kubrick version. [10] [11] Both Burgess and King overtly stated that they were annoyed by Kubrick denying their lead character (Alex DeLarge and Jack Torrance respectively) a final redemption that was present in the source material but absent from Kubrick's adaptation. This is arguably also a difference between the Kubrick's version of Lolita on the one hand and both the novel and Lyne film on the other, though this was never mentioned by Dmitri Nabokov
It must be noted that among other Kubrick film adaptations of the work of living authors, both Arthur C. Clarke and Gustav Hasford (author of the source novel for Full Metal Jacket) were entirely satisfied with how Kubrick adapted their work.
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Kubrick made only thirteen feature films in his life. His oeuvre was comparatively low in number, considering the output of his contemporaries such as John Ford or Federico Fellini, due to his methodical dedication to every aspect of film production. As a result, his craft was exceedingly impeccable and a number of his films are recognized as classics in terms of both form and content. 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. Five of his films were nominated for Academy Awards in various categories, including Best Picture for Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Best Director for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. Such notable, contemporary directors as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing has often been repeated by other film directors, for instance Jonathan Glazer, who also employed several of Kubrick's veteran actors in his film Birth.
For Kubrick, written dialogue is one filmic element to be put in balance with mise-en-scene (sets and acting and lighting), 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 reshooting of scenes--not because actors necessarily failed to hit certain thespian marks, but because Kubrick wanted to investigate all the possible variations of a scene. This exhaustive approach enabled him to walk into the editing room with a copia of options. For Kubrick, editing was an intellectual as well as an intuitive process.
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