▲ 130 points
back
97 comments
Born in the great depression. little to no interest in education.
Picks photography, gets a job as a photographer for a magazine.
Starts a movie company at 21 and makes shit movies.But importantly, develops a knack for persuading people to work for little or no money convincing them that the "experience" was was worth more than money
Young Kubrick is ruthlessness and ego centric, hard to like... mature Kubrik is intriguing and softer. Then he makes some great movies, gets a family going, has money and goes nuts.
This allows him to get obsessive, neurotic, totally fixated on his work, horrifyingly oblivious to the feelings of colleagues and employees driving some to breakdown. Outraged designers, writers all persuaded for the experience and the glory of the final result. All swearing never to work with him again.
persuading people to work for little or no money for the experience and the greatness of the purpose and the final result seems like the common pattern between Kubrik and others like Jobs.
It doesn't have to be like this though. Actors and others who work on sets with David Lynch always talk about how wonderful he is to work with and how well he treats everyone. And he is also a man with singularity of vision who does things his way.
Maggie Mae Fish did a very interesting long form video on this exact comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr65ZIWoD6c
(Skip the first minute if you don't care for framing devices, it switches into a conventional video essay format for most of the video after that.)
Lynch gave silent treatment to Patrick Stewart on the set of Dune, making him very aware that he didn't agree with him being cast.
According to Patrick, that is part of the reason he's unhappy with the performance he delivered for that movie.
Lynch is good. But comparing him to Kubrick is like chalk and cheese
David Lynch's oeuvre, while unquestionably idiosyncratic, is also characterized and widely criticized for its obvious compromises. Kubrick puts the art above the artists, it's the only way
Who is David Lynch? I don’t have to ask myself the same question about Stanley Kubrick.
> persuading people to work for little or no money for the experience and the greatness of the purpose and the final result seems like the common pattern between Kubrik and others like Jobs.
Peter Jackson got started the same way, making ultra low budget horror flicks like Bad Taste with friends and family as extras. Critically, like Kubrick and Jobs, those early attempts were actually good, good enough to kick start their respective careers.
> those early attempts were actually good
I loved "Brain Dead"! One of the most hilarious movies I've ever seen.
I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on early SV folklore, but I never heard that Jobs asked people to work for free or even at below market really.
What have I missed?
Jobs conspired with Google to suppress wages of employees with no-poaching agreements. He even stole from his founding partner, and avoided paying child support.
> persuading people to work for little or no money for the experience and the greatness of the purpose and the final result seems like the common pattern between Kubrik and others like Jobs.
Well if you don't have many resources, you need to persuade them somehow. Many people would pay to work with an all-time genius in their field. Wouldn't you?
> (abusive stuff)
There's no evidence or reason to think it's necessary. Power corrupts. Why look for rationalizations for assholes?
Perhaps by sharing the fruits of the result, even if only afterwards?
Shit movies?
Even his very first ones are already good.
People at Apple didn’t earn much money? Jonny Ive?
Kubrick was remarkable in his singularity as a filmmaker.
There is a fantastic 1 hr BBC documentary from the mid 2000's called 'Stanley Kubrick's Boxes' in which the documentary crew is given access to Kubrick's estate and warehouses after his passing. They examine the contents of the boxes of research and pre-production material that Kubrick accrued over several decades when crafting his films. The lengths he went to flesh them out are stunning.
The takeaway is of someone with a singular ambition and extreme thoroughness when planning their films. It's been immensely inspiring to witness just how intently a creator can focus on crafting their work. I strongly recommend it.
Thanks for sharing! Looks like the documentary is available on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/322890808
Kubrick famously read "every book about Napoleon that he could obtain".
https://www.reddit.com/r/StanleyKubrick/comments/vuzygq/kubr...
Sounds about right. I recall reading a book about Kubrick 15 years ago in which the author/interviewer visited his house and was left alone in Stanley's study for a few minutes. As he walked around the room and examined the (fully stocked) bookcases he realized that every single book in the room was about Napoleon.
> Cinema is a collaborative art, and auteurist accounts that centre the director’s vision often seem at odds with the actual process of film-making. But Stanley Kubrick was a special case; a director who won an astonishing degree of autonomy from the Hollywood studios that financed his films and used it to control almost every aspect of those films: the scripts, the performances, the lighting and camerawork, the mise en scène down to the smallest details of sets and props, the gradations of colour in the prints, how the films were promoted and, later, even the typefaces on the boxes of VHS and DVD releases
I wonder at directors: It's hard enough to find artists with the insight, vision, expressiveness, and mastery of their craft to create great art.
But before film, artists worked mostly alone. I suppose architects and composers have had to be mindful of the performance of a bunch of humans, but didn't necessarily have to manage that process. Stage directors obviously have similar jobs, but necessarily at a much smaller scale, with fewer technical demands, and by my limited understanding, stage directors lean toward overseeing and facilitating the art, which is more a product of the playwright and actors.
But film directors - as artists they must be all those things an artist is; and also they must master more domains than most artists - film, audio, script, story, costumes, sets, lighting, etc.; and on top of that they must be top-notch managers: hire and manage hundreds or thousands of highly talented people (just look at the credits), and then coordinate them all to finish on time and also manage a budget in the 10s or 100s of millions, and then also sell their vision to funders.
Where are these 'directors' found? Can they really do all that or is it handled otherwise? How are they developed? It's hard to imagine there would be more than a couple of them.
I'd say that most of those things you list film directors needing to worry about are just as important to stage directors, but also, film directors have crew and other experts to fill a lot of those gaps. Directors aren't writing scripts, there are scriptwriter for that, just like playwrights, the director just gets some input, which happens in live theater right now. I know a director who is having to edit the script of Hamlet himself right now due to time constraints. A film director doesn't necessarily need to know everything they just need to be able to vocalize their wants and vision to other people who know more, and be able to receive feedback from that. Also, to my knowledge, directors aren't hiring everyone. They might pick a few key people, but that's why you have producers, and you let your key people pick their people under them.
What do you think of my comments on stage directors in the GP (rather than my pedantically repeating them). Also, more delegation requires substituting more management skill for artistic skill - and IME many highly talented people hate to delegate for that reason.
I am neither film nor stage director nor actor, but here is Lawrence Olivier, highly accomplished and respected in both mediums, on the differences:
"Now the sense of continuity in the film is provided by the director, who says that was too quiet, or that was too loud, or that was too much, or that was too slow.
Now an actor on the stage is supposed to conduct it much more for himself. The director in a stage play, he can do two things, I think, principally ...: He can give the play a point of view, which he can sell to the actors. His principle task is to make quite sure that the author is served to his best advantage, and the actors are served to their best advantage. And at the same time, he can describe, without setting, because this will vary according to performance, according to audience, but he can desribe what he thinks is the right tempo for each scene, or the comparative tempos between two scenes, three scenes, four scenes, five scenes, etc.
Whereas the director of the film is the absolute magician, who is in charge and knows the answer to every question right from the beginning of the film to the last. In directing a film, people say, 'would it be alright if she wore a red hat?' Well, simply means that you have to split your mind to every single shot that could possibly affect that situation, right to the beginning of the film, right to the end of the film, before you say, 'I don't care' or 'yes' or 'no'. It's a very precise arrangement, altogether, in a film."
From a 1973 interview: https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/laurence-olivier-and...
I've reviewed this book and agree with the Apollo Magazine writer: this book is very sloppily edited. There are better books about Kubrick; I recommend:
* Taschen books: 'The Stanley Kubrick Archives': https://www.taschen.com/en/books/film/45439/the-stanley-kubr...
* David Mikics - 'Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker': https://archive.ph/k98vP
My review of the Kolker/Abrams book: https://niklas.reviews/2024/03/22/robert-p-kolker-nathan-abr...
One of the cool facts about Kubrick I've always admired as a testament to his perfectionism is his typical "shooting ratio": The ratio of how much film was shot vs the run time of the final product. For The Shining he exposed 1.3 million feet of film for a movie that runs for 142 minutes, a ratio of over 100:1. The baseball bat scene alone took 127 takes to get right[1].
1: https://www.jimcarrollsblog.com/blog/2019/6/5/yt0trf17bh9ai4...
This could also mean that he's inept at getting composition right, and neurotically obsessive about things that don't really matter.
I do photography, and a ratio of 1000 discarded photos to one you keep would far more likely mean someone doesn't know how to select their shots more carefully and can't distinguish what's important, than it would mean that they're a perfectionist genius.
> he's inept at getting composition right
If you can suggest Kubrick is inept at composition, I can't respect you as a photographer.
Barry Lyndon is probably my favorite (or at least, the one I appreciate the most) of Kubric's films when it comes to his perfectionism, but perfectionism alone isn't a great metric for the resulting film:
> Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (400,000 metres; nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing the studio approximately $200,000 per day in salary (equivalent to $720,000 in 2022), locations and acting fees.Privately, it was joked that Cimino wished to surpass Francis Ford Coppola's mark of shooting one million feet of footage for Apocalypse Now (1979).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(film)#Product...
Heaven's Gate isn't even all that great to look at. There's still the matter of taste involved, and well, Cimino made some questionable decisions.
My favorite trivia on Barry Lyndon is the fact that he built a camera out of satellite lens to get the necessary aperture to shoot candle lit scenes with no artificial lighting. But with such a massive aperture, the actors had to stay absolutely still to remain in focus, which you can tell in the card playing scenes.
Though I love the film, the very slow rythme makes it hard to re-watch, and probably impenetrable to today's young audience.
Lost a lot of respect for this man after I found out how he treated Shelley Duvall.
Most of what you hear about that are exaggerations and rumors, mostly based on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o-n6vZvqjQ. People cite lines like "don't sympathize with Shelly" to jump to the conclusion that Kubrick "ordered the cast and crew to alienate her". Or they cite making her do 60 or however many takes, as if that constitutes abuse. I wonder if the abuse allegations are compounded by Wendy Torrance being so vulnerable and scared in the movie influencing perception of the actress, and also some kind of collective guilt for the initial uninterested to negative critical reaction to her performance.
Plus trying to extract a genuine reaction from your actors by surprising or manipulating them is a common occurence. A few examples from the top of my head: the alien bursting out of the chest in the first alien, jodie foster's nervousness confronting Hopkins as Hannibal the first time, Leone releasing a dog to spook Eli Wallach in the cemetery scene in the good bad ugly, etc.
> Most of what you hear about that are exaggerations and rumors…
Are they? Kubrick is known for being difficult and for his shallow portrayal of women. And whether it was due to misogyny or his personal view of Duvall, even Kubrick's daughter called her father "a different director" when referring to how he singled her out.
> People cite lines like "don't sympathize with Shelly" to jump to the conclusion that Kubrick "ordered the cast and crew to alienate her".
Except he literally did that in order to alienate her and extract a slightly more authentic performance, which is the same reason he spent three weeks on the baseball bat scene.
Stephen King referred to the movie as “misogynistic”.
And it was apparently 127 takes.
What? Even Jack Nicholson has implied in interviews that Kubrick was really harsh with her.
It’s all media bullshit. Shelley Duvall never said he abused her. In fact, she said the exact opposite: that she felt like The Shining was the moment she turned professional and Stanley taught her how to get more out of repetition.
The footage you see of Kubrick “abusing her” was cherry-picked by Kubrick himself in order to promote his film. He had a reputation as a “perfectionist” so he thought the footage would drive ticket sales.
I think it’s a form of sexism to assume that Shelley was somehow weak and not able to make her own decisions here. If we were talking about Leo DiCaprio or Daniel Day Lewis, we’d all be talking about how much of a dedicated actor he is that he would go through all that hardship just to get a great performance.
But gained a lot for Shelley... that she was able to direct her terrible emotional state into her acting and give one of her best performances speaks greatly of her.
So far ahead of his time.
He really wanted to make a film on Napoleon. Though not officially related to his work, one got made last year to mixed reviews. And he started production on the movie "AI - Artificial Intelligence" after a short story from 1969. He handed it off to Steven Spielberg.
///
Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9671018
The crazy thing is, we now have "Dr. Know" from AI, and nothing is really stopping us from building that bear. Nothing but battery life, I guess.
Lots of films have been made about Napoleon, many long before Kubrick (before he was born, even) and several while he was an active director, I don't how him wanting to do one and one recently being made makes him "ahead of his time".
You're right. He had a vision for not just a movie, but something of a massive scale. That wasn't really the norm for a historical epic like this anymore. You're right that there are a bunch of films about Napoleon (https://www.vulture.com/article/napoleon-movies-history.html) but nothing attempting the scale. The latest Napoleon was the first to attempt that scale ($200m).
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9671018
> Slated for production immediately following the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey , Kubrick’s "Napoleon" was to be at once a character study and a sweeping epic, replete with grandiose battle scenes featuring thousands of extras. To write his original screenplay, Kubrick embarked on two years of intensive research; with the help of dozens of assistants and an Oxford Napoleon specialist, he amassed an unparalleled trove of research and preproduction material , including approximately 15,000 location scouting photographs and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery. No stone was left unturned in Kubrick's nearly-obsessive quest to uncover every piece of information history had to offer about Napoleon. But alas, Kubrick’s movie was not destined to the film studios, first M.G.M. and then United Artists, decided such an undertaking was too risky at a time when historical epics were out of fashion.
He also backed off on AI because the scale/requirements.
In my opinion he had the vision, but the tech and audiences just weren't ready. But maybe the same things might have been said about 2001.
This being published by 'Apollo magazine' is bound to get some riled up considering his supposed involvement in the faked moon landings.
Here is a nice write up on how he apparently encoded his confession into his films.
The contention the moon landings were faked is ridiculous. The most obvious rebuttal is that the USSR would have asserted it if there was a modicum of truth to it.
A new movie staring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum features this is a subplot. Stay for the last line of the trailer.
Not nearly long enough, but I'll take what I can get.
The book they're reviewing is out, only $30 in hardback on Amazon. Ordered...
I'm sure it felt plenty long enough for the people he was directing.