Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick is one of the titans of modern cinema, a director who found his feet in the postwar studio system, yet soon grew into one of the definitive exemplars of the auteur: writing, directing and producing his films, even operating the camera – gaining renown for his control, exactitude and precision. In the opening flourish of the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Jan Harlan, 2001), we see a montage of newspaper articles on Kubrick, the same words popping up time and time again: ‘eccentric’, ‘reclusive’, ‘obsessive’, ‘meticulous’, ‘perfectionist’.
Born in 1928, Kubrick was raised in New York City, in the Bronx. He cut his teeth as a photographer, first for his school newspaper, then, from the moment he finished high school, working for Look magazine. While photographing boxing, he was inspired to switch to moving images; his first short film, Day of the Fight (1951), was a documentary. Moving into making narrative shorts on shoestring budgets, Kubrick would do everything – serving as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, sound tech – and, thus, grow used to having complete control. His first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), a film about a fictitious war, was a DIY concern, funded after Kubrick’s father cashed in his life insurance; his second, Killer’s Kiss (1955), a noir movie, was bankrolled by a local Bronx pharmacist.
From there, Kubrick’s star quickly ascended. The Killing (1956), a heist movie about a meticulously plotted racetrack robbery, is a striking work of intersecting timelines and thoughtful photography. Paths of Glory (1957), his first bigger-budget film, is a blazing antiwar movie balancing the horrors of the trenches with the politics of the military. Both of them show Kubrick’s photographic invention, his love of deep focus and his vivid use of tracking shots – something inspired by his favourite filmmaker, Max Ophüls. Kubrick was already carefully mapping shots and commanding his actors to do take after take, perfectionism at play from his cinematic salad days.
On Paths of Glory, Kubrick worked with Kirk Douglas, who would invite the thirty-year-old filmmaker – after a troubled beginning to the production – to helm his sword-and-sandal epic Spartacus (1960). With a huge budget, wild scope and a top-line cast (Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons, Tony Curtis), the flick found Kubrick thrust to the Hollywood front lines: the production won a Golden Globe and four Oscars; became a huge box-office hit; helped end the communist witch-hunt in Hollywood (the screenplay was written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo); and delivered the first ‘alltimer’ iconic scene in Kubrick’s filmography (‘I’m Spartacus!’).
But Kubrick bristled at just being a director-for-hire, subordinate to Douglas, who was the film’s star, executive producer and driving force (‘If I ever needed any convincing of the limits of persuasion a director can have on a film where someone else is the producer and he is merely the highest-paid member of the crew,’ Kubrick would offer, years on, with hindsight, ‘Spartacus provided proof to last a lifetime’ ). Without final say or final cut, he felt powerless; after that, he pledged to have complete control on future pictures.
He took the clout and power he’d amassed with Spartacus and embarked on a passion project, bringing to screen an adaptation of a book thought unadaptable: Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, a portrait of a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The tagline for Kubrick’s 1962 film riffed on this idea, its poster famously proclaiming: ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’
They made it by shifting the production to the United Kingdom, where Kubrick could exercise control over the project. Though it was hugely controversial in its day – it was condemned by the Catholic Church, and Kubrick had to cut some of its, in hindsight, marked a shifting point in Kubrick’s career. It found him moving away from genre, realism and earnestness and towards auteurism, surrealism and satire. The move to England, too, became permanent, Kubrick spending the rest of his life there, moving further away from the public eye. He was raising his family (and a gaggle of pets!) and protecting his privacy, but his reclusiveness gave rise to all manner of myth and gossip – especially towards the end of his life, when his films became fewer and farther between. In truth, he spent years working on projects that went nowhere – an epic biography on the life of Napoleon; the holocaust movie ; an adaptation of the short story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ (eventually brought to screen, by Steven Spielberg, as 2001’s ) – and only making those, of course, on which he’d have complete creative control.
