Stanley Kubrick - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that July 26 is the anniversary of the birth of American film director, screenwriter, and producer Stanley Kubrick who was a wonderful film director and screen writer who capably adapted novels or short stories to the screen.

Kubrick Remembered Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK8q6l2dCEA

Images:
1. Stanley and Christiane Kubrick with Anya, Katharina and Vivian in 1960
2. Christiane and Stanley Kubrick with Kirk Douglas (right) on location for Paths of Glory (1957)
3. Stanley Kubrick, Kelvin Pike and Christiane Kubrick on the set of Dr. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963)
4. Stanley Kubrick with producer Jan Harlan, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman during production of Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Biographies
1. imdb.com/name/nm0000040/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
2. bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/stanley-kubrick-family-christiane-anya-katharina-man-mythology

1. Background from [https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000040/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm]
"Stanley Kubrick Biography
Overview | Mini Bio | Spouse (3) | Trade Mark (32) | Trivia (99) | Personal Quotes (62) | Salary (1)
Overview
Born July 26, 1928 in New York City, New York, USA
Died March 7, 1999 in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, UK (natural causes)
Nickname SK
Height 5' 6½" (1.69 m)

Mini Bio
Stanley Kubrick was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Sadie Gertrude (Perveler) and Jacob Leonard Kubrick, a physician. His family were Jewish immigrants (from Austria, Romania, and Russia). Stanley was considered intelligent, despite poor grades at school. Hoping that a change of scenery would produce better academic performance, Kubrick's father sent him in 1940 to Pasadena, California, to stay with his uncle, Martin Perveler. Returning to the Bronx in 1941 for his last year of grammar school, there seemed to be little change in his attitude or his results. Hoping to find something to interest his son, Jack introduced Stanley to chess, with the desired result. Kubrick took to the game passionately, and quickly became a skilled player. Chess would become an important device for Kubrick in later years, often as a tool for dealing with recalcitrant actors, but also as an artistic motif in his films.
Jack Kubrick's decision to give his son a camera for his thirteenth birthday would be an even wiser move: Kubrick became an avid photographer, and would often make trips around New York taking photographs which he would develop in a friend's darkroom. After selling an unsolicited photograph to Look Magazine, Kubrick began to associate with their staff photographers, and at the age of seventeen was offered a job as an apprentice photographer.
In the next few years, Kubrick had regular assignments for "Look", and would become a voracious movie-goer. Together with friend Alexander Singer, Kubrick planned a move into film, and in 1950 sank his savings into making the documentary Day of the Fight (1951). This was followed by several short commissioned documentaries (Flying Padre (1951), and (The Seafarers (1953), but by attracting investors and hustling chess games in Central Park, Kubrick was able to make Fear and Desire (1953) in California.
Filming this movie was not a happy experience; Kubrick's marriage to high school sweetheart Toba Metz did not survive the shooting. Despite mixed reviews for the film itself, Kubrick received good notices for his obvious directorial talents. Kubrick's next two films Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956) brought him to the attention of Hollywood, and in 1957 he directed Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory (1957). Douglas later called upon Kubrick to take over the production of Spartacus (1960), by some accounts hoping that Kubrick would be daunted by the scale of the project and would thus be accommodating. This was not the case, however: Kubrick took charge of the project, imposing his ideas and standards on the film. Many crew members were upset by his style: cinematographer Russell Metty complained to producers that Kubrick was taking over his job. Kubrick's response was to tell him to sit there and do nothing. Metty complied, and ironically was awarded the Academy Award for his cinematography.
Kubrick's next project was to direct Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), but negotiations broke down and Brando himself ended up directing the film himself. Disenchanted with Hollywood and after another failed marriage, Kubrick moved permanently to England, from where he would make all of his subsequent films. Despite having obtained a pilot's license, Kubrick was rumored to be afraid of flying.
Kubrick's first UK film was Lolita (1962), which was carefully constructed and guided so as to not offend the censorship boards which at the time had the power to severely damage the commercial success of a film. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a big risk for Kubrick; before this, "nuclear" was not considered a subject for comedy. Originally written as a drama, Kubrick decided that too many of the ideas he had written were just too funny to be taken seriously. The film's critical and commercial success allowed Kubrick the financial and artistic freedom to work on any project he desired. Around this time, Kubrick's focus diversified and he would always have several projects in various stages of development: "Blue Moon" (a story about Hollywood's first pornographic feature film), "Napoleon" (an epic historical biography, abandoned after studio losses on similar projects), "Wartime Lies" (based on the novel by Louis Begley), and "Rhapsody" (a psycho-sexual thriller).
The next film he completed was a collaboration with sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is hailed by many as the best ever made; an instant cult favorite, it has set the standard and tone for many science fiction films that followed. Kubrick followed this with A Clockwork Orange (1971), which rivaled Lolita (1962) for the controversy it generated - this time not only for its portrayal of sex, but also of violence. Barry Lyndon (1975) would prove a turning point in both his professional and private lives. His unrelenting demands of commitment and perfection of cast and crew had by now become legendary. Actors would be required to perform dozens of takes with no breaks. Filming a story in Ireland involving military, Kubrick received reports that the IRA had declared him a possible target. Production was promptly moved out of the country, and Kubrick's desire for privacy and security resulted in him being considered a recluse ever since.
Having turned down directing a sequel to The Exorcist (1973), Kubrick made his own horror film: The Shining (1980). Again, rumors circulated of demands made upon actors and crew. Stephen King (whose novel the film was based upon) reportedly didn't like Kubrick's adaptation (indeed, he would later write his own screenplay which was filmed as The Shining (1997).)
Kubrick's subsequent work has been well spaced: it was seven years before Full Metal Jacket (1987) was released. By this time, Kubrick was married with children and had extensively remodeled his house. Seen by one critic as the dark side to the humanist story of Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) continued Kubrick's legacy of solid critical acclaim, and profit at the box office.
In the 1990s, Kubrick began an on-again/off-again collaboration with Brian Aldiss on a new science fiction film called "Artificial Intelligence (AI)", but progress was very slow, and was backgrounded until special effects technology was up to the standard the Kubrick wanted.
Kubrick returned to his in-development projects, but encountered a number of problems: "Napoleon" was completely dead, and "Wartime Lies" (now called "The Aryan Papers") was abandoned when Steven Spielberg announced he would direct Schindler's List (1993), which covered much of the same material.
While pre-production work on "AI" crawled along, Kubrick combined "Rhapsody" and "Blue Movie" and officially announced his next project as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring the then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. After two years of production under unprecedented security and privacy, the film was released to a typically polarized critical and public reception; Kubrick claimed it was his best film to date.

Special effects technology had matured rapidly in the meantime, and Kubrick immediately began active work on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), but tragically suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep on March 7th, 1999.

After Kubrick's death, Spielberg revealed that the two of them were friends that frequently communicated discretely about the art of filmmaking; both had a large degree of mutual respect for each other's work. "AI" was frequently discussed; Kubrick even suggested that Spielberg should direct it as it was more his type of project. Based on this relationship, Spielberg took over as the film's director and completed the last Kubrick project.

How much of Kubrick's vision remains in the finished project -- and what he would think of the film as eventually released -- will be the final great unanswerable mysteries in the life of this talented and private filmmaker.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Murray Chapman < [login to see] >

Spouse (3)
Christiane Kubrick (14 April 1958 - 7 March 1999) ( his death) ( 2 children)
Ruth Sobotka (15 January 1955 - 1957) ( divorced)
Toba Kubrick (28 May 1948 - 1951) ( divorced)

Trade Mark (32)
1. [Narration] Nearly all of his films contain a narration at some point (2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)) contains narration in the screenplay, as does the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and The Shining (1980) has some sparse title cards.
2. Adapted every film he made from a novel, excluding his first two films: Killer's Kiss (1955) and Fear and Desire (1953) (both from original source material), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
3. His films often tell about the dark side of human nature, especially dehumanization.
4. [Symmetry] Symmetric image composition. Often features shots down the length of tall, parallel walls, e.g. the head in Full Metal Jacket (1987), the maze and hotel coridors in The Shining (1980) and the computer room in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
5. [Three-way] Constructs three-way conflicts
6. [Faces] Extreme close-ups of intensely emotional faces
7. [CRM 114] He often uses the sequence CRM114 in serial numbers. CRM-114 is the name of the decoder in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), the Jupiter explorer's "licence plate number" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is CRM114, and in A Clockwork Orange (1971) Alex is given "Serum 114" when he undergoes the Ludovico treatment.
8. [Bathroom] All of Kubrick's films feature a pivotal scene that takes place in a bathroom.
9. 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.
10. [Beginning Voice-over] Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) all begin with a voice over, and The Killing (1956) features narration.
11. Involves his wives in his movies. His first wife, Toba Etta Metz Kubrick, was the dialogue director for Stanley's first feature film Fear and Desire (1953). His second wife, Ruth Sobotka Kubrick, was in Killer's Kiss (1955) as a ballet dancer named Iris in a short sequence for which she also did the choreography. Kubrick's third, and final, wife, Christiane Harlan Kubrick, appeared (as Susanne Christian) in Paths of Glory (1957) before she married him as the only female character (a German singing girl) in the movie. She also did some of the now-infamous paintings for A Clockwork Orange (1971) and some more for Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In addition, her brother, Jan, was Stanley's assistant for A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the executive producer for all of Kubrick's films starting with Barry Lyndon (1975) and going through The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Also, his daughter, Vivian Kubrick, is the little girl who asks for a Bush Baby for her birthday in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
12. 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))
13. 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.
14. One of his signature shots was "The Glare" - a character's emotional meltdown is depicted by a close-up shot of the actor with his head tilted slightly down, but with his eyes looking up - usually directly into the camera. Examples are the opening shot of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Jack slowly losing his mind in The Shining (1980), Pvt. Pyle going mad in Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Tom Cruise's paranoid thoughts inside the taxicab in Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Even HAL-9000 has "The Glare" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
15. [First-person] Uses the first person viewpoint (the character's perspective) at least once in each film.
16. Credits are always a slide show. He never used rolling credits except for the opening of The Shining (1980).
17. Varies aspect ratios in a single film. Apparent in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1971).
18. In almost every movie he made, there is a tracking shot of a character (the camera following the character).
19. 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.
20. Often uses music to work against on-screen images to create a sense of irony. In A Clockwork Orange (1971), Alex sings "Singin' in the Rain" while raping Mrs. Alexander. In Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), images of nuclear holocaust are accompanied by the song "We'll Meet Again". The final scene in Full Metal Jacket (1987) has the battle hardened Marines singing the theme to "The Mickey Mouse Club".
21. [Dark humor] All of Kubrick's films, especially "Dr. Strangelove", have elements of black humor in them.
22. Preferred mono sound over stereo. Only three of his movies - Spartacus (1960), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) - were originally done in stereo sound.
23. [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.
24. Almost all of his films involve a plan that goes horribly wrong
25. Frequently uses strong primary colors in his cinematography and sharp contrast between black and white.
26. Often features mellow, emotionally distant characters
27. More often than not sports a long beard
28. His films often tackle controversial social themes
29. Very strong visual style with heavy emphasis on symbolism
30. Slow-paced dialogue; often had actors pause several beats between line delivery. Also, rarely (if ever) did his dialogue overlap.
31. Slow, methodical tracking shots
32. Often cast 'Peter Sellers', 'Kirk Douglas', and 'Philip Stone'

Trivia (99)
1. Father-in-law of Philip Hobbs, stepfather of Katharina Kubrick, & brother-in-law of Jan Harlan.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Refused to talk about his movies on set as he was directing them and never watched them when they were completed.
7. One of the founders of the Directors Guild of Great Britain.
8. 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.
9. His next project after Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was to be A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), which was taken over by Steven Spielberg. It is dedicated to Kubrick's memory.
10. 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.
11. 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).
12. The only author that Kubrick worked with personally was Arthur C. Clarke for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
13. Loved the work of Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Carlos Saura, Max Ophüls, Woody Allenand Edgar Reitz (esp. Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984)), among many others.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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."
17. 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.
18. 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).
19. He reportedly briefly considered leaving England for either Vancouver, Canada or Sydney, Australia.
20. 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.
21. According to his wife Christiane Kubrick, he would screen every movie he could get ahold of. One of his favorites was The Jerk (1979). He considered making Eyes Wide Shut(1999) a dark sex comedy with Steve Martin in the lead. He even met with Martin to discuss the project.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. He considered Elia Kazan the best American director of all time. His list of favorite directors included at various times Federico Fellini, David Lean, Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, François Truffaut, and Max Ophüls.
25. 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.
26. Was a lackadaisical student with grades near the bottom of his class.
27. 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!
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. He was a huge fan of the New York Yankees.
31. According to biographer Michael Herr, Kubrick was often noted for wanting to stick to each word of dialogue without changing it or an actor adding lines of his own. The two exceptions were Peter Sellers (with whom he worked on Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)) and R. Lee Ermey (from Full Metal Jacket (1987)).
32. Seven of his last nine films were nominated for Oscars. He was nominated for Best Director four consecutive times, for his pictures starting with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and ending with Barry Lyndon(1975).
33. Ranked #4 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Greatest directors ever!" [2005]
34. 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.
35. By the age of thirteen, he had become passionate about photography, chess and jazz drumming.
36. 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.
37. Starting with Lolita (1962), he independently produced all his films from his adopted home of England, UK.
38. 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).
39. 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.'".
40. 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).
41. 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.
42. Kubrick and his partner James B. Harris, during the development of Lolita (1962), hired Marlon Brando's friend Carlo Fiore -- whom Kubrick had worked with on the development of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) -- to write a screenplay of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Kamera obskura," which Fiore had optioned himself. Written in Russian in 1932, "Kamera obskura" was first translated into English around 1938 as "Camera Obscura" and again circa 1960 as "Laughter in the Dark.") The book had elements in common with "Lolita," and Kubrick -- who was worried he was being hustled when Fiore approached him with the rights to the novel -- tied up the production of a potential rival film by hiring Fiore. Nothing came of Fiore's foray into film development, although Tony Richardson later made a movie of the novel with Nicol Williamson starring.
43. "I want you to be big -- Lon Chaney big," Kubrick instructed Vincent D'Onofrio during the filming of Full Metal Jacket (1987).
44. Used his favorite piece of music "Thus spoke Zaratustra" by Richard Strauss, recorded by Herbert von Karajan as the music score in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
45. Kubrick had started pre-production on Full Metal Jacket (1987) in 1980, a full seven years before it was theatrically released. The success of similar films during that time (particularly Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987)) left him a bit jaded, feeling like he had been beaten at his own game. This sentiment stayed with him in the early 1990s when he decided to shelve Aryan Papers, his adaptation of the Louis Begley novel Wartime Lies. Kubrick had completed the script and had done a large amount of pre-production work on Aryan Papers; Johanna ter Steege and Joseph Mazzellohad been cast in the lead roles and locations had been scouted in Denmark, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Warners officially announced the project as Kubrick's next film in April 1993 and it was scheduled for a December 1994 release. Around the same time Steven Spielberg was shooting Schindler's List (1993), and Kubrick thought the Holocaust-based subject matter of the two projects was too similar. The shelving of this project helps to explain the 12-year gap between Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
46. He directed four of the American Film Institute's 100 Most Greatest Movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at #15, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) at #39, A Clockwork Orange (1971) at #70, and Spartacus (1960) at #81.
47. 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.".
48. 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.
49. He had no intention of having Anthony Burgess' write the screenplay for A Clockwork Orange (1971), intending to do it himself. In fact, there is little that Kubrick added to Burgess' work except for editorial decisions such as eliminating the second murder Alex commits in prison and replacing Billy Boy with Georgie as police constable Dim's partner (the entire last chapter of the novel was jettisoned, but it had been in the American edition of the novel that Kubrick had first read. Americans, as Burgess reasoned, did not like to see their criminals reformed). The dialog was considered by many critics and cineastes as being lifted almost straight from the book (though there are enough differences to dismiss that as a valid criticism of Kubrick the screenwriter). This is the first of the two movies in which Kubrick has sole credit as screenwriter (Barry Lyndon (1975), which immediately followed A Clockwork Orange (1971) is the other). Kubrick was one of the first director-writers to actually take credit on a film. Going back to the beginnings of the film industry, directors had often participated in the writing of their films, but most did not take credit. It might have been the fact that Kubrick used less of Vladimir Nabokov's credited screenplay and more of his own writing (and the improvisations of Peter Sellers) for Lolita (1962) that influenced him to become a credited screenwriter. Lolita (1962) was shot at the time that the "auteur" theory (which held the director was the main author of a film) was gaining prominence, and from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) onward Kubrick took credit as a screenwriter. Earlier, he had worked uncredited on the screenplays of Paths of Glory (1957) and One-Eyed Jacks (1961), which he had originally been hired by Marlon Brando to direct. As he was one of the greatest masters the cinema has ever had and truly was the author of his films, Kubrick likely was encouraged to go it alone on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975) (which allegedly he shot in an improvisatory manner after reading sections of the novel, which he carried with him during shooting).
50. 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.
51. Out of all of his feature films, Spartacus (1960) is the only one to which he hasn't contributed in writing the screenplay.
52. He joined with directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack and George Lucas in forming the Film Foundation (promotes restoration and preservation of film - May 1990).
53. According to Kirk Douglas, Kubrick allegedly wanted to take credit for the Spartacus(1960) screenplay that was primarily written by Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time, originally was going to use the alias Sam Jackson. During the production of the film, Otto Preminger announced he had hired Trumbo to write the screenplay for Exodus (1960). Douglas, in turn, announced that he had been the first to hire Trumbo, who would be credited on his film. Preminger's film was released six months earlier than "Spartacus," which was released in October 1960. Douglas later said he decided to give Trumbo credit because he was appalled at Kubrick's attempt to hog the credit. This "recollection" likely was colored by the fact that Kubrick went on to become a great director, and the film was seen as a Kubrick film rather than as the product of Kirk Douglas, who produced it. Douglas viewed the film as a fulfillment of his personal vision. It is highly unlikely that Kubrick would try to take the credit, as Trumbo served as one of the members of the film's executive committee - screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, executive producer Kirk Douglas and producer Edward Lewis," according to Duncan L. Cooper's 1996 article "Who Killed 'Spartacus'?" Trumbo was a friend of Edward Muhl, the boss of Universal Pictures. which was financing the film. According to Cooper, Howard Fast, a former Communist Party member who wrote the novel the film is based on, worked on the screenplay but received no credit. Walter Winchell had already revealed that Trumbo was working on the film, and it was widely known that Trumbo had won an Oscar using the pseudonym Robert Rich on The Brave One (1956), and that his "front", Ian McLellan Hunter, had won an Oscar for the story of Roman Holiday (1953) that Trumbo had, in fact, written. In other words, the blacklist was a sham. There were rumors that the House Un-American Activities Committee was going to investigate the movie industry again, and right-wingers began attacking the film. Douglas gave into studio boss Muhl's idea that the class conflict at the heart of Spartacus (1960) be muted, thus betraying both Trumbo's screenplay and Fast's novel. A major battle scene showing the triumph of Spartacus' slave army over the Romans was deleted lest it seem too provocative, and medium and closeup shots of Laurence Olivier that showed his character - Roman dictator Crassus - experiencing fear over the slave rebellion were replaced with wide shots. Scenes where the slave army was crushed, of course, remain, though their length was cut back to minimize the carnage of the original 197-minute cut. Part of what remains - Olivier's Crassus looking for Spartacus' body among the living and the dead slaves - is shot indifferently on a sound stage and seems mismatched with the rest of the scene. Trumbo himself realized the necessity of muting his own passions in order to make the screenplay moderate so the film would be a success at the box office. He told an interviewer, "If the film had failed, neither I nor any other blacklisted writer would ever have been able to work again." The actions of Preminger and Douglas to give Trumbo credit effectively ended the blacklist, though many blacklisted screenwriters continued to write under pseudonyms until the early 1970s.
54. His favorite cartoon character was Woody Woodpecker. Kubrick reportedly loved Woody Woodpecker so much that he wanted to feature him in every film he ever made (similar to what George Pal did) but Walter Lantz creator of Woody Woodpecker refused. In the final interview Lantz did he stated that he didn't regret his decision when he saw films like The Shining (1980) or A Clockwork Orange (1971), but he did regret the decision when he saw films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
55. Has directed two actors in Oscar-nominated roles: Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)) and Peter Ustinov (Spartacus(1960)). Ustinov won his Oscar.
56. Grew up in the Bronx.
57. According to his daughter, Vivian Kubrick, the family name is pronounced like "Que-brick," rather than like "koo-brick".
58. In 1963 he was asked by the US publication Cinema to compile a list of his favorite films. They were: I Vitelloni (1953) (Federico Fellini, 1953), Wild Strawberries (1957) ("Wild Strawberries" USA title, Ingmar Bergman, 1958), Citizen Kane (1941) (Orson Welles, 1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) (John Huston, 1948), City Lights (1931) (Charles Chaplin, 1931), Henry V (1944) ("Henry V" USA title, Laurence Olivier, 1945), La Notte (1961) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), The Bank Dick (1940) (W.C. Fields, 1940), Roxie Hart (1942) (William Wellman, 1942), Hell's Angels (1930) (Howard Hughes, 1930).
59. 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.
60. 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.
61. In the 5th edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (edited by Steven Jay Schneider), 9 of Kubrick's films are listed. He is the director with the greatest percentage of films listed, since Kubrick made only 13 feature films. His listed films are Paths of Glory(1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).
62. Shared a love of photography and home movie making with Peter Sellers and they would often photograph each other at work.
63. Claimed that his IQ was below average. It was rumored, however, that his IQ was around 200.
64. Shares his birthday with 'Peter Hyams', who directed 2010 (1984), sequel of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is directed by Kubrick.
65. 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.
66. 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.".
67. Used to skip school to take in double-features at the cinema.
68. 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.
69. 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.
70. 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.
71. One of his favorite films was Eraserhead (1977) directed by David Lynch.
72. 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.
73. When Kubrick bought Simon Cowell's childhood home, he turned the entire ground floor into a private cinema.
74. Despite being known for his meticulous methods of filming, he was quite prolific in his earlier years. Beginning with Fear and Desire (1953) and ending with Barry Lyndon(1975), the average time between his films was two years. His last three films took much longer to complete. It took him five years to complete and release The Shining (1980), seven years to complete Full Metal Jacket (1987), and a whopping 12 years to complete Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
75. Was a close friend of Steven Spielberg.
76. 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.
77. 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.
78. 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.
79. Shares his birthday with famed psychologist Carl Jung whose work is cited in "Full Metal Jacket".
80. Kubrick loved animals. When he died, he had a Highland Terrier. seven Golden Retrievers. one Scotch Terrier, eight cats, and four Fern Donkeys.
81. 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.
82. Kubrick considered adapting Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, which he had enjoyed; however, the idea was never acted upon. The novel was later adapted for the screen by Tom Tykwer, as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006).
83. In a March 2013, Tony Frewin, Kubrick's assistant for many years, wrote in an article in The Atlantic: "He [Kubrick] was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and desperately wanted to make a film on the subject." The article included information on another Kubrick World War II film that was never realized, based on the life story of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a Nazi officer who used the pen name "Dr. Jazz" to write reviews of German music scenes during the Nazi era. Kubrick had been given a copy of the Mike Zwerin book Swing Under the Nazis (the front cover of which featured a photograph of Schulz-Koehn) after he had finished production on Full Metal Jacket (1987). However, a screenplay was never completed and Kubrick's film adaptation plan was never initiated (the unfinished Aryan Papers was a factor in the abandonment of the project).
84. Following J.R.R. Tolkien's sale of the film rights for The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969, The Beatles considered a corresponding film project and approached Kubrick as a potential director; however, Kubrick turned down the offer, explaining to John Lennon that he thought the novel could not be adapted into a film due to its immensity. The eventual director of the film adaptation Peter Jackson further explained that a major hindrance to the project's progression was Tolkien's opposition to the involvement of the Beatles.
85. In 2016, longtime assistant of Kubrick's, Emilio D'Alessandro addressed that prior to his death, Kubrick was considering making a movie of Pinocchio. D'Alessandro said that Kubrick sent him to buy Italian about the subject. "He wanted to make it in his own because so many Pinocchios have been made. He wasted to do something really big... He said; 'It would [be] very nice if I could make children laugh and feel happy making this Pinocchio.'" (Kubrick eventually used the project based on Brian Aldiss short story as his "Pinocchio film.") D'Alessandro also stated that Kubrick's lifelong fascination in World War II led to an interest in The Battle of Monte Cassino. D'Alessandro said, "Stanley said that would be an interesting film to make. He asked me to get hold of things ... like newspaper cuttings and find out the distance from the airport, train stations. He had a friend who actually bombarded Monte Cassino during the war ... It is horrible to remember those days. Everything was completely destroyed.".
86. Following a 2010 announcement about the development of the Lunatic at Large project, plans for the prospective production of two other unrealized Kubrick projects were also announced. As of August 2012, Downslope and God Fearing Man were in development by Philip Hobbs and producer Steve Lanning, in partnership with independent company Entertainment One (eOne). A press release described Downslope as an "epic Civil War drama", while God Fearing Man is the "true story of Canadian minister Herbert Emerson Wilson.".
87. In 1956, after MGM turned down a request from Kubrick and his producer partner James B. Harris to film Paths of Glory (1957), MGM then invited Kubrick to review the studio's other properties. Harris and Kubrick discovered Stefan Zweig's novel The Burning Secret, in which a young baron attempts to seduce a young Jewish woman by first befriending her twelve-year-old son, who eventually realizes the actual motives of the baron. Kubrick was enthusiastic about the novel and hired novelist Calder Willingham to write a screenplay; however, Production Code restrictions hindered the realization of the project. Kubrick had previously expressed interest in adapting a Willingham novel Natural Child, but was also prevented by the Production Code on that occasion.
88. A number of screenplays that were written by Kubrick, who was either hired on a commission basis or was writing for his own projects, remain unreleased. One such screenplay is The German Lieutenant (co-written with Richard Adams), in which a group of German soldiers embark upon a mission during the final days of World War II. Other examples of unreleased Kubrick screenplays are I Stole 16 Million Dollars, a fictional account of early 20th century Baptist minister turned safecracker Herbert Emmerson Wilson (the film was to be produced by Kirk Douglas' company "Bryna", despite Douglas' belief that the script was poorly written, and Cary Grant was approached for the lead role); and a first draft of a script about the Mosby Rangers, a Confederate guerrilla force that was active during the American Civil War. Kubrick was also interested in adapting to the screen Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews, but it was cancelled due for the explicit incestuous relationship between the two main characters.
89. In between Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Kubrick was interested in making a film, for children and young adults, based on the viking epic novel, Eric Brighteyes.
90. After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick planned a large-scale biographical film about Napoleon Bonaparte. He conducted research, read books about the French emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay which has since become available on the internet. With the help of assistants, he meticulously created a card catalog of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the film on location in France, in addition to the use of United Kingdom studios. The director was also going to film the battle scenes in Romania and had enlisted the support of the Romanian army; senior army officers had committed 40,000 soldiers and 10,000 cavalrymen to Kubrick's film for the paper costume battle scenes.

In a conversation with the British Film Institute, Kubrick's brother-in-law Jan Harlan stated that, at the time, the film was ready to enter the production stage and David Hemmings was Kubrick's favored choice to play the character of Napoleon, while Audrey Hepburn was his preference for the role of Josephine. Although Jack Nicholson was cast in the role. In notes that Kubrick wrote to his financial backers, preserved in the book The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick expresses uncertainty in regard to the progress of the Napoleon film and the final product; however, he also states that he expected to create "the best movie ever made."

Napoleon was eventually cancelled due to the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of War and Peace (1966), and the commercial failure of Waterloo (1970). A significant portion of Kubrick's historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), the storyline of which ends in 1789, approximately fifteen years prior to the commencement of the Napoleonic Wars.

In March 2013, Steven Spielberg announced his intention to create, in conjunction with Kubrick's family, a television miniseries based on Kubrick's screenplay.
91. In the early 1960s, Kubrick, a keen listener of BBC Radio, heard the radio serial drama Shadow on the Sun; written by Gavin Blakeney, Shadow on the Sun is a work of science fiction in which a virus is introduced to earth through a meteorite landing. At a time when Kubrick was looking for a new project, the director became reacquainted with Shadow on the Sun. Kubrick purchased screen rights from Blakeney in 1988 for £1,500. Thereon, Kubrick read and annotated a script before moving onto A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). The tone of the unrealized project, as described by Anthony Frewin in The Kubrick Archives, is a cross between War of the Worlds and Mars Attacks! (1996).
92. In 1976, Kubrick sought out a film idea that concerned the Holocaust and tried to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to contribute an original screenplay. Kubrick requested a "dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell." However, Singer declined, explaining to Kubrick, "I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust."
In the early 1990s, Kubrick nearly entered the production stage of a film adaptation of Louis Begley's Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his aunt as they are in-hiding from the Nazi regime during the Holocaust-the first-draft screenplay, entitled Aryan Papers, was penned by Kubrick himself. Full Metal Jacket (1987) co-screenwriter Michael Herr reports that Kubrick had considered casting Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman as the aunt; eventually, Johanna ter Steege was cast as the aunt and Joseph Mazzello as the young boy. Kubrick traveled to the Czech city of Brno, as it was envisaged as a possible filming location for the scenes of Warsaw during wartime, and cinematographer Elemér Ragályiwas selected by Kubrick to be the director of photography.
Kubrick's work on Aryan Papers eventually ceased in 1995, as the director was influenced by Schindler's List (1993). According to Kubrick's wife Christiane an additional factor in Kubrick's decision was the increasingly depressing nature of the subject as experienced by the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate Holocaust film was beyond the capacity of cinema and returned his attention to A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
93. Kubrick was fascinated by the career of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, his wife's uncle, and contemplated creating a film of the social circle that surrounded Joseph Goebbels. Although Kubrick worked on this project for several years, the director was unable to progress beyond a rough story outline.
94. Kubrick once deliberated on adapting Robert Marshall's novel All the King's Men, a dramatic account of a British intelligence service operation during World War II.
95. On November 1, 2006, Kubrick's son-in-law Philip Hobbs announced that he would be shepherding a film treatment of Lunatic at Large. Kubrick had commissioned the project for treatment from noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but it had been lost until Hobbs uncovered a manuscript following Kubrick's death. As of August 2011, this project is in development for future release, with the involvement of Scarlett Johanssonand Sam Rockwell, and U.K. screenwriter Stephen Clarke.
96. While working with Ian Watson on the story for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Kubrick asked Watson for a pre-print copy of his Warhammer 40,000 tie-in novel Inquisitor. Watson quotes Kubrick as saying, "Who knows, Ian? Maybe this is my next movie?".
97. Was nominated for Producing, Directing and Writing three Oscar Best Picture nominees: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975).
98. Directed Spartacus after Kirk Douglas had Anthony Mann fired.
99. His 1956 screenplay, Burning Secret, co written with Calder Willingham and based on Stefan Zweig 's work, was discovered in 2018.


Personal Quotes (62)
1. I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.
6. 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.
7. The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
8. If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. {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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
20. The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. [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.
25. I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering.
26. 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.
27. Sanitized violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.
28. [on Charles Chaplin] Chaplin is all content and little form. Nobody could have shot a film in a more pedestrian way than Chaplin.
29. [Why he shoots so many takes] Because actors don't know their lines.
30. I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.
31. Observancy is a dying art.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. [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.
36. 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.
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. [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.
40. [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.'
41. The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. [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.
45. [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.
46. 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'.
47. I think aesthetically recording spontaneous action, rather than carefully posing a picture, is the most valid and expressive use of photography.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. 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.
51. [explaining his hatred of interviews] There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.
52. 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.
53. [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.
54. 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.
55. [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.
56. 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.
57. [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.
58. [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.
59. 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.
60. 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.
61. 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.
62. [on adaptation] When you read it for the first time, I mean that's your only really pure experience. That's one of the things I like about not writing original material. I am not even certain I could. But you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time, which is an experience you never have again with the story. And the first time is something which you can never ever guess about, you know? So... That's the first thing. Then you have a reaction to it. And... subsequent readings, you know, are more analytical. But you know... You have to start with a kind of you know like "falling in love" reaction with the material. So then it just becomes a matter of... almost like a code breaking... breaking the thing down into a structure that seems to be, you know, still truthful. Not loosing the idea of the content, a feeling of the book. And try to get it into a... the much more limited time frame of a movie. And the criteria really always is: "is it truthful?" And "is it interesting?" And for as long as you possibly can do you still retain any sort of emotional attitude about it? You know, are you responding to what's there? So the process is sort of semi-analytical. Well very analytical but at the same time semi just emotional, while you are trying to balance calculating analysis against feeling.

Salary (1)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) $10,000,000"

2. Background from [https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/stanley-kubrick-family-christiane-anya-katharina-man-mythology]
"At home with the Kubricks: “Stanley was amazingly tolerant in taking the most extraordinary abuse”
So what was Stanley Kubrick really like? Three of the people closest to him – his wife Christiane and daughters Anya and Katharina – set the record straight about the difference between the man and the mythology in this extended conversation with Nick James, from our September 1999 issue.
☞ “When you hold a mirror to society it rebels”: Katharina Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut
Nick James
22 November 2019

If you’ve read any accounts of a trip to the home of the late Stanley Kubrick, you will know that tone usually adopted by the writer is a mixture of trepidation, excitement and paranoia. As an introduction to meeting the supposed ‘recluse’ of legend, it is deemed essential there should be a touch of Kafka about the descriptive build-up – don’t leave out the sleeping policemen or the series of electronic gates.
Arriving under more sombre circumstances, invited just a few months after Kubrick’s death to interview his wife Christiane and two of his three daughters, Anya and Katharina, I gained a contrary impression. The house in brilliant sunshine seemed a freewheeling sort of place, suddenly afflicted with sadness. In the Kubricks’ company, sitting in a large, airy study room decorated at one end with Eyes Wide Shut poster artwork, open debate seemed the norm. Though I was determined not to try to play chess with a ghost, the challenging spirit of enquiry Stanley Kubrick was known for seemed ever-present.
This made it a little easier for me to put many of the unpleasant things that have been said about Kubrick before his kith and kin. Christiane is a painter, as is Katharina (examples of both their work are used as decoration in Eyes Wide Shut), who is married to film location manager Philip Hobbs and has three sons. Anya runs her own opera company, Palace Opera, is married to conductor and opera singer Jonathan Finney and has one son. The Kubricks agreed to talk to Sight and Sound because it is a journal of record. Much of what has been said about Kubrick over the years and in the aftermath of his death has angered them. In particular they believe that some of the literature on Kubrick – such as Stanley Kubrick: a Biography by John Baxter and Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick by Frederic Raphael – gives a mistaken impression of him.
Nick James: How was Stanley Kubrick as a father and family man?
Katharina: He could easily have sent us off to boarding school, but instead we had tutors and goodness knows who else travelling with us. We had an incredibly interesting childhood and he was interested in almost every aspect of our lives. He was a bit strict with his oldest daughter (me) about parties, but it was the 60s. I now have a 14-year-old boy who’s scaring the life out of me, so not only do I understand why he was strict – although I resented it bitterly at the time – I also think he probably wasn’t strict enough. It was obviously a very artistic milieu.
How much was he involved in passing on his sense of culture to you?
Anya: He always worked at home as much as he could and my mother, who is a painter, was also working at home. So there were basic visual and musical languages around. The result is we’re all visually well trained. Each of us is a reasonable photographer, and even I can sort of draw.
Katharina: We saw an awful lot of movies, probably more than most people because there were regular screenings. I was a great movie buff when I was at art college. Music, art and film were the predominant themes of our lives.
☞ Stanley Kubrick, cinephile
How did he respond to your curiosity about his work?
Anya: We didn’t need to be curious because it was always there. He was really happy for us to go on the set, though it would depend on what he was shooting. If we arrived at 3am and they were doing something deemed unsuitable for children, it would be an intrusion. But otherwise I always felt I could go and see him.
Katharina: He was very open. He would often ask us into his office when he was listening to a piece of music and he’d say, “What do you think, do you like it by this conductor?”, and then he’d put on another conductor’s version. And he would be interested in what we thought of the movies. Films like A Clockwork Orange we weren’t allowed to see until we were of age. I didn’t see Lolita until I was 16. So he was very correct in that way. We’d have movies at weekends – we saw every Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard movie, and then Mum and Dad and friends would watch something grown-up. Occasionally I would sneak into the projection room and look through the window and be scared to death and run out again.
How did he compare to other people’s fathers?
Anya: He wasn’t a remarkable father. He was a remarkable filmmaker. He was a very nice, good, rather Jewish father – probably over-protective but no more so than many. He would always be there for us and he was fantastic in a crisis. He could be impatient with you if he thought you weren’t dealing with things properly, but if you fell, he was there. Even if he was in the middle of God-knows-what work schedule, if you phoned and said, “I have to speak to you, I’ve really got a problem”, he would do it.
Katharina: He was a bottom-line kind of guy. Between the two of them, my mother and father covered just about everything – there wasn’t an emotional crisis or a career decision or a legal thing that was done alone. We would always sit down at the dinner table and hack things out.
A debate?
Katharina: Absolutely. And what Daddy didn’t know about female workings was not worth knowing. Yet people say he was a misogynist and he didn’t know about women… Another thing that really got me was when someone criticised the order in which Stanley ate his food – you know sometimes when you get a lot of delicious food and you sample a bit before you begin? There was some guy on the television criticising him for it.
Christiane: Malcolm McDowell, actually.
Katharina: I wasn’t going to say that.
Christiane: I don’t care.
Katharina: I was very upset about that because it’s so small-minded and trivial.
Anya: It’s very easy to make any body’s behaviour sound odd. You take anyone doing anything out of context and it sounds peculiar.
It’s reckoned to be a hard thing for two creative artists to live together. What made it possible for you?
Christiane: We were suited in that I could paint at home and he could do most of the preparation and editing at home – the filming part would take relatively little time. And painters are sitting ducks for conversation, so I was a good sounding board. I could be found very easily.
Were you found often?
Christiane: It depends. Had he been alive and around now when all this publicity and coverage are going on, we would have done this together. I’ve had death in the family, my parents. I had a mother with Alzheimer’s, which is the ultimate catastrophe.
Did she move in with you?
Christiane: For short periods. In the end she was in an institution in Germany. During the almost 14 years that she was ill, I really needed Stanley. It’s the ultimate test and he was spectacular with that. He was endlessly on the phone to get another test and another doctor. We were very practical people.
Anya: You could always interrupt him. He wouldn’t want you to interrupt him for any old thing, but if you had a reason you could go in, especially when we were young. He could just multi-task – deal with what you needed and what the firm wanted and what the thing in front of him needed and then another person came in… He was very good at switching topics without going, “What’s this?”
Katharina: He would say, “What do you want?” And you knew that he was paying attention. But you also knew that the moment the door was closed he was straight back on line dealing with whatever he was dealing with.
Christiane: You’d get the occasional, “Get to the point.”
Katharina: Our lives as children were certainly like: “Dinner’s ready, no Daddy’s on the phone, he’ll be down in a minute.” But that was because most dinner times he was talking to LA. He needed to talk to the world. Somebody said that before there was an internet he was the internet.
Is it true that he slept at odd times to be able to work US office hours?
Christiane: According to his parents, he was always a night owl because he didn’t need much sleep. He would work an ordinary day and then he could add the Californian office hours, so California had the impression he never slept. When he was young he got by on four to five hours’ sleep; when he got older it was a little more than five, but still less than most people.
What about his reputation as a recluse, that he didn’t leave the house?
Anya: It’s exaggerated.
Christiane: He didn’t leave a lot. He did far fewer restaurants and parties than other people, that’s true. We gave a lot of parties when we were young, and then when we were old, not so many. But I look at other couples and it’s the same. Since we’re lucky to have this big house, we didn’t need to go anywhere. Everybody came to him. Those who didn’t come, he could phone. And he liked it here.
Katharina: He had the best of being famous in that his work was famous, his name was famous, but his face was not. So he could go into St Albans, go into M&S and Waitrose or go into bookshops, do what he wanted and nobody would pay him any mind.
He did do that?
Katharina: Absolutely. Because there are people who think he never went anywhere.
Anya: People think he never left his bedroom.
Katharina: One day he came back from M&S and said, “Someone recognised me. I didn’t know what to do and they asked me for my autograph.” He was very surprised.
Anya: But it didn’t happen very often.
Katharina: No. So that was great. Very famous people can’t leave their homes.
Christiane: Tom Cruise is literally a prisoner of the Midas touch. He can’t go anywhere.
Is that true even in the UK?
Katharina: There’s a scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Tom had to walk into a hospital – this was in London. Word got round, and within half an hour the police were having to put up cordons and people kept ruining the shot by shouting, “Tom, I love you.”
Christiane: Stanley watched it from the car and said it was just terrifying.
Anya: Presumably Tom Cruise is used to it, but you must feel you’re under attack.
Christiane: As to being accused of a peculiar and demonic household, everyone who comes here from Hollywood says, “This is it. I want to live like this instead of travelling everywhere.” Stanley had the great luxury of not having to be a performer and he earned that by the very thing he’s also accused of – that he didn’t make very many films. He thought very long and hard and really worried and looked at billions of stories and rejected many and was quite sad that he couldn’t make more. But the reason he didn’t make more is that he was so very careful, which earned him the freedom from Warner Bros. It was hard-worked-for, but they left him alone and they never interfered because they didn’t have to. They knew he wasn’t going to be childish about anything.
I had assumed that the dark myth of Stanley Kubrick would have had a big impact on your lives.
Christiane: Only now. He was a big umbrella. I’m just sticking my nose into all this for the first time.
Katharina: Occasionally I would say, “Why don’t you say something? You can’t let people say that.” He’d say, “What am I gonna do? I start doing that and then every time somebody says something I’ll have to go out there, and it’s so time consuming.” He wasn’t going to lower himself to that level: “No, I don’t do that. No, I don’t shoot people from my garden.”
Christiane: “I don’t drive at 30 miles an hour and I’m not a nerd.” You find yourself saying all these things.
Was there one particular event that cemented this sinister image?
Christiane: It was an accumulation of made-up stories. It’s the press cuttings – everyone who’s given a piece to write goes there and repeats the last thing written, like the eternally really stupid photo of Stanley sucking on a cigar. Once he hurt his back and couldn’t move so he drove at 30 miles an hour because he should have been in bed. Also, his parents lived in New Jersey where every window has a bug screen. So he arrives in England and says, ‘‘Aren’t there any screens on the windows?” The next thing you hear is he sprays his garden with a helicopter.
Let’s recount some of the things said about Stanley Kubrick – that he never took vacations!
Christiane: “From what?”, he asked. He didn’t go on an official holiday because he had his own timetable. For him the thought of sitting somewhere on a beach without all his books and gadgets was a total nightmare. He really didn’t understand why people did that. Most people want a vacation because they can’t stand what they’re doing another week.
Katharina: When I was 19 and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life he told me, “The luckiest people in the world get to do for a living what they would do as a hobby.”
What about holidays when you were children?
Christiane: I took them to Cornwall and Norfolk, though not for very long or very often. And we did of course have one year in Ireland, which was one big camping trip.
Katharina: And we went backwards and forwards to America all the time by ship. We went on the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the SS United States and the SS France, a week of ice-cream and lying on the deck. It was glorious.
Christiane: He enjoyed that – pretending to be living in 1930. Once you reach the time of life when you don’t have financial worries so much – which wasn’t always the case – then you can decide whichever kind of life you like better. That’s why he didn’t read those books about him. He had the discipline to know it would bother him.
So he didn’t read any of the biographies?
Christiane: No. We didn’t help by saying, “You ought to read this. This is really nasty, you’ll love this one.” In the end, he minded about that.
The IRA threatened to kill him during the filming of Barry Lyndon!
Christiane: They did. Two men arrived with ladders and house-painting gear at our house, which was rented, and the woman who cooked for us said, “I know these lads. They’re not painters.” A day later they came to the studio and told Stanley and Ryan O’Neal they wanted us out of the country immediately. You couldn’t see us for dust – I don’t think that’s paranoia!
He downplayed his Jewishness!
Katharina: He wasn’t religious, but he absolutely did not do that.
He was a passive-aggressive manipulator!
Anya: He certainly wasn’t passive-aggressive, and he was not a manipulator. He was a negotiator of the first order. He argued his point and often won. He knew what he wanted and he knew how to express it. As a conversational experience he enjoyed provoking people and he would deliberately figure out what someone’s opinions were – their politics, what was going to rile them – and then say something to get a reaction, to get a discussion going. He was a debater. Whether it was a negotiation about something he was trying to get done or he was trying to persuade us to change our minds, he argued hard. Manipulate has the idea that he was pulling strings, being sneaky. He was not sneaky; he was direct.
Christiane: You can’t make films if people hate you. There will always be one or two who like you less but…
Anya: The point was to get things right. So if he felt someone was in error, he would make his point. But people are often upset by being found out. He was a challenge – he thought you should know what you were doing, what you thought about something, why you thought it, why you were doing it, that you should have thought it through.
Christiane: Yet he was always the first – especially in artistic terms – to throw up his hands and say, ‘‘I’m talking crap.” He would stop himself in the middle and say, “Never have I said such rubbish!” and immediately redress everything.
He had no sense of humour!
Anya: He had the best jokes.
Christiane: He had a devastating dry wit, and it’s what I now miss the most. He was incredibly funny.
Katharina: If something struck him as very funny, he’d laugh very hard.
Christiane: That’s why the accusations hurt now. When he was alive, I really didn’t care, but now when I hear people say these totally idiotic things, I become angry.
He couldn’t talk to women! (This is from a quote by Adrienne Corri in John Baxter’s biography.)
Christiane: Couldn’t talk to Adrienne Corri, maybe.
Katharina: And you don’t know how she was expecting to be spoken to. You don’t know what her agenda was either.
Anya: Or whether she even said it.
Christiane: This is also true. We may be angry with people who never said those things.
Katharina: Anya said that the more she reads about Daddy the more she thinks that Howard Hughes was probably a perfectly normal person.
Which of the books is most unreliable?
Christiane: The Baxter and the Raphael.
Katharina: There are weird accuracies in Vincent LoBrutto’s biography Stanley Kubrick like the date I got married and how many children I have, and because those things are true the reader will then assume everything else is true.
Christiane: Stanley sued Punch and won and then they lied. When they said that they had won they were actually thrown out of court.
Katharina: In May, after Stanley died, Punch wrote that he went out into the garden and shot some picnickers and then gave the picnickers loads of money that he just happened to have around his person so they wouldn’t say anything. It must be said that no other newspaper anywhere picked it up – even they thought it was too much.
Anya: Not only is it more painful for us now, because he’s not here to say “Don’t worry about it”, but he was starting to worry about it, and minding the maliciousness and inaccuracy.
You promised to reveal the truth on your website.
Christiane: Shortly after the funeral a few things happened that made me think I ought to have a website so I could immediately write back, but then Warners and Rick Senat said, “Be very careful, you’ll reap the whirlwind if you do that”, and I said, “I haven’t said anything yet, but I will.” I would have been very stupid to blurt out any and every indignation I felt and they quite correctly warned me not to do it. So I’ve been telling nice stories about Stanley, which is the only way to counter the allegations. Also, I don’t want to join the mudslingers. Stanley was amazingly tolerant in taking the most extraordinary abuse. It takes strength to do that. A lot of the people who have said outrageous things have hurt themselves more than Stanley.
Is it worse being on the doorstep of the UK press?
Christiane: Finally, he thought so, because in America, France, Italy and all over Europe he was treated with much more respect. It’s only in England that there’s this envious, strange joy in knocking him off his pedestal – even if he himself never climbed on to one. Because A Clockwork Orange played with the background of England, they blamed every crime in history on Stanley’s film. That was a very sloppy conclusion; he felt very hurt and misunderstood. That only happened here, nowhere else.
Anya: He never answered back. After a while it became obvious you could say just about anything and he wasn’t going to retaliate.
So he wasn’t litigious?
Anya: Only when absolutely forced. They saw A Clockwork Orange and they didn’t get the point. So there was no point in saying anything.
Christiane: He thought he had explained what he meant thoroughly in the film.
Anya: I don’t believe the general public didn’t understand A Clockwork Orange. But there was a concentrated group of journalists who spotted a way to spin a story. Instead of “Thug Beats Up Old Lady”, it was “Clockwork Thug Beats Up Old Lady”. Thug was going to beat up old lady anyway, and you’re going to report it anyway, but now you get to call him a Clockwork Thug.
☞ The raucous perfection of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Did he try to use his image for his own purposes? After all, the making of cinema is about the making of myth. Supposing you’re saddled with this image and there’s a way you can turn it around for your own ends?
Christiane: He wished.
Katharina: He certainly knew that if he wanted to call the head of a company on the other side of the world, once they had established it was really him, then of course his name would get him through to talk to the boss.
Anya: But that’s a function of fame, not mythology. One of the useful tools of his success was that people wanted to help him. I’m sure Steven Spielberg gets anyone he wants on the phone.
Katharina: He loved the latest information technology. He was a big gadget fan. We were always playing with the latest gadgets. We’d sometimes get them for Christmas, all of us get the same thing, and we’d say, “Gee Dad, what do I do with this?” So he loved being able to call people and say, ‘‘What’s the latest? What’s the best? What’s the next thing coming through? What do you visualise happening in ten years’ time?” He knew an extraordinary amount of people and when we were children we had writers and scientists and actors and zoologists visiting Stanley. So we were exposed to all these interesting people.
Did Stanley Kubrick invent the iPad?
Your problem now is how to adjust the myth before it sets in concrete.
Anya: Possibly we’re not going to be able to adjust it all that much.
Christiane: It’s extremely difficult for us to get rid of it for the same reason that wives can’t be witnesses: they’re considered to be prejudiced.
Anya: But we can reinterpret certain things. It’s a kind of sloppiness to say that someone who was a perfectionist, which he certainly was, was also an obsessive. There’s a world of difference between those two. Obsessive is a medical condition.
Christiane: I mean, you don’t want a casual brain surgeon, do you?
Anya: There are certain themes – his being a recluse, being an obsessive – that are journalistic exaggerations of his characteristics. Recluse is a word that gets thrown at him in practically every article, and as far as I can work out, ‘recluse’ must be defined as someone who doesn’t talk to journalists. He didn’t speak to journalists but he spoke to everyone else. And those who knew him well and liked him and respected him and respected his wishes didn’t speak to the press about him. So the stories that exist come from people who are in some way disaffected or suffering from a lack of judgement. We figure: let’s get ourselves into the clippings file. For all the fact that people will think, “They would say that wouldn’t they”, at least it will be there, and we do have the advantage that we did know him rather well. If we say nothing, then our silence will be seen as confirmation.
Katharina: Or that we don’t care.
Did the mythology get worse with the internet?
Christiane: Worse and better. There are all of people who said very nice things on the internet, but did you know that Stanley had an imitator who pretended to be him?
How did he feel about that?
Christiane: Very unhappy, because he did get letters from people who said, ‘‘You promised my son a part in a film”, and this guy, Mr Conway – who’s now dead – was seducing little boys with the promise of a part. Nobody likes to get a letter saying: “You buggered my son for a part.” That was very unpleasant. They did a television programme about him. It was quite nauseating. That was one of the prices of your name being famous when your face isn’t known, something that otherwise seemed such an advantage.
Did he always get what he wanted?
Christiane: He got what he wanted because people respected him and because they were allowed to work in a certain way. Actors like to be given time on a film, it’s the one thing you never get, and because he had a small crew, it cost relatively little per day for shooting.
It seems very strange to do this huge preparation, to hire very expensive people and then to say when it comes to the shooting, “Oh well, I’ll do it as quickly as possible.”
How did he get the upper hand with the Hollywood studios?
Christiane: Because he was responsible. The studio knew he wasn’t going to waste their money. In fact they sometimes smiled at how careful he was.
What about rereleasing A Clockwork Orange?
Christiane: It’s up to Warner Bros. We don’t have any say in that.
Anya: It’s not exactly high on the list of things to worry about right now. I would say we haven’t thought about it.
Why do you think he was so interested in war as a subject?
Christiane: Stanley was very interested in history. He was a boys’ magazine person. He loved knowing in enormous detail about military things, and I find the news very boring without his comment on everything. This is true of more than just war stories. He would love to have made a film about Napoleon. He wanted to make a film about Nazi Germany. He loved to see any dumb film with a fight between aeroplanes. On one of his last evenings, there was one of these on television. He didn’t want the plot, he just wanted to see if there was a good fight between planes.
Anya: I feel almost embarrassed to say it, but war brings situations that expose the essence of someone’s personality. What the driving forces are.
Christiane: He would cringe if he could hear us talking about this. He considered us unsuitable, because we knew so little about it. While my opinions were sensible and I was of course boringly correct as to the moral end of war – and he agreed with me – it was still no fun talking to me about it.
Anya: He liked talking war and politics with my husband, provoking Jonathan as a dinner-table sport!
Christiane, in Time magazine you are quoted as being “allergic to psychological conversations”.
Christiane: Clearly I’ve talked too much. What I meant is that when Stanley first read Dream Story, I was familiar with Schnitzler’s plays. There was in the 50s a reaction in Europe against the American preoccupation with psychoanalysis. I shared this reaction, and when I came to America I was astonished that so many people were in analysis and spoke so freely about things that Europeans crossed their legs about. I met a great many Americans then, and I thought that this glorious, guilt-free, self-loving new person who would walk out of the analyst’s office could have done with a bit more guilt. I thought, “Use your conscience to good purpose, don’t whinge over everything.” So with this very old-fashioned attitude I said, “I don’t want to read Schnitzler. That’s moisture-seeking stuff. Forget it.”
So at the time we talked about this book Stanley was very interested and I didn’t want him to be. Then Terry Southern gave him A Clockwork Orange, and I read it and I said, “Forget Schnitzler, read this.” He jumped to that one immediately and Schnitzler was forgotten for a while. But he kept coming back to it.
By the time he was an old man he was in a far better position to make a film about the ultimate topic. It’s good that it took so long. It was wrong of me to discourage anyone in artistic matters, but we were married and you do say these things. I just went with the fashion in thinking Schnitzler was dull Viennese stuff. But in the nature of this story is contained all that goes on between men and women, so if l didn’t like it, why didn’t I like it? It became a joke when I said, “Now, I don’t mind.” “Why don’t you mind now?” I’m very sad I didn’t see the finished film before he died, because he was really looking forward to showing it to me.
It was finished, then?
Christiane: Absolutely finished. There was a piece of music which he had chosen – and we had talked a great deal about what music it was going to be – and I said, “I want to see it now”, and he said, “No, let me put the music in so you can see it with, because I want you to tell me whether it should be in there.” So it was a question of timing. And then he died.
☞ ‘When you hold a mirror to society it rebels’: Katharina Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut
How was his health in the last days?
Christiane: Fine, but he was very tired. But anybody would be who had worked such long hours. He was 70, so to see him pale and tired seemed understandable. And he was looking forward to taking a rest. Nobody could have known: the heart attack was so massive, nobody could have done anything.
Do you think he had any idea that this might be his last movie?
Christiane: No, quite the opposite.
Katharina: He was looking forward to doing AI. He was very excited about it. There was a lot of stuff already finished and ready to go.
Christiane: He had also become really interested in all the new computer stuff. He had a lot of conversations with Steven Spielberg about what he could do.
The biographies describe him as a fatalist. What were his views about death?
Christiane: We often talked about what a fatalist is, since you can’t escape being one. He didn’t want to die at all, though he wasn’t any more afraid than anyone else. But he wasn’t religious. Like most of us, he would have liked to believe in something. He thought about it a lot.
He was very careless with his health, though. As a doctor’s son, he assumed that he knew about medicine and I often disagreed with his medical ideas. He was afraid of doctors – that comes from being a doctor’s son. He dosed himself and he never really rested when he should have done. He wasn’t feeling ill, just very tired.
Many heart-attack victims are just like that. Such people don’t think, “I’m pushing myself.” It comes naturally with that character. He was very much an optimist. He always thought a job that took two days could be done in two hours if only he put his mind to it. He would start the longest and most difficult jobs with this optimism and say, “Oh, it won’t take long.” He never learned the lesson that it does."



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Excellent bio share sir, thank you.