Stanley Kubrick on why artists function, the importance of ambiguity, how to present your ideas, and meaning and fulfilment.
A brief overview of Stanley Kubrick before delving into his own words:
| Who (Identity) | Stanley Kubrick, an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer, known for his influential and innovative contributions to cinema. |
| What (Contributions) | Kubrick is celebrated for directing iconic films such as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Shining,” “Full Metal Jacket,” and “Dr. Strangelove.” His work spans various genres, including science fiction, psychological horror, and war films, and is known for its meticulous attention to detail and exploration of human nature. |
| When (Period of Influence) | Kubrick’s influence on filmmaking began in the 1950s and continued until his death in 1999. His films have had a lasting impact on the art of cinema and continue to be studied and revered. |
| Where (Geographic Focus) | Born in New York City, USA, Kubrick’s films often reflect American culture and society, although he also worked on international productions. |
| Why (Artistic Philosophy) | Kubrick’s artistic philosophy involved a commitment to pushing the boundaries of cinematic storytelling and exploring profound and often controversial themes. He believed in the power of visuals and music to convey emotions and ideas. |
| How (Technique and Style) | Known for his meticulous planning, long takes, and precise framing, Kubrick’s filmmaking style is characterized by its visual storytelling, use of music, and the creation of immersive and thought-provoking atmospheres. He often employed unconventional narrative structures to engage the audience’s intellect and emotions. |
This post is a collection of selected quotes and excerpts from secondary sources used for educational purposes, with citations found at the end of the article.
The Director’s Role
A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it’s the director’s job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible.
Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man. It is a noisy, physical apparatus; it is difficult to concentrate – and you have to do it from eight-thirty to six-thirty, five days a week. It’s not an environment an artist would ever choose to work in. The only advantage it has is that you must do it, and you can’t procrastinate. 1
The Best Education In Film
The best education in film is to make one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I’m doing now as a director and producer.
There are a lot of noncreative aspects to filmmaking which have to be overcome, and you will experience them all when you make even the simplest film: business, organization, taxes, etc., etc. It is rare to be able to have an uncluttered, artistic environment when you make a film, and being able to accept this is essential.
The point to stress is that anyone seriously interested in making a film should find as much money as he can as quickly as he can and go out and do it. And this is no longer as difficult as it once was.
When I began making movies as an independent in the early 1950s I received a fair amount of publicity because I was something of a freak in an industry dominated by a handful of huge studios. Everyone was amazed that it could be done at all. But anyone can make a movie who has a little knowledge of cameras and tape recorders, a lot of ambition and – hopefully – talent. 1
His Goal As An Artist
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 out-look as possible, have achieved this, and I’m sure it is what gives their films an emotional involvement lacking in most work. 2
Subconscious Emotional Reaction To Film
2001: A Space Odyssey is basically a visual, nonverbal experience. It avoids intellectual verbalization and reaches the viewer’s subconscious in a way that is essentially poetic and philosophic. The film thus becomes a subjective experience which hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting.
Actually, film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words.
I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. In two hours and forty minutes of film there are only forty minutes of dialogue.
I think one of the areas where 2001 succeeds is in stimulating thoughts about man’s destiny and role in the universe in the minds of people who in the normal course of their lives would never have considered such matters.
Here again, you’ve got the resemblance to music; an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects.
The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication.
The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play. Too many people over thirty are still word-oriented rather than picture-oriented. 1
The Best Plot
I think that the best plot is no apparent plot. I like a slow start, the start that gets under the audiences skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don’t have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense hooks. 3
Ambiguity
How much would we appreciate La Gioconda (Mona Lisa) today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: “This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth”—or “because she’s hiding a secret from her lover”? It would shut off the viewer’s appreciation and shackle him to a “reality” other than his own. 4
It has always seemed to me that really artistic, truthful ambiguity – if we can use such a paradoxical phrase – is the most perfect form of expression. Nobody likes to be told anything. Take Dostoyevsky. It’s awfully difficult to say what he felt about any of his characters. I would say ambiguity is the end product of avoiding superficial, pat truths. 5
I think in a film like 2001, where each viewer brings his own emotions and perceptions to bear on the subject matter, a certain degree of ambiguity is valuable, because it allows the audience to “fill in” the visual experience themselves. In any case, once you’re dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable.
But it’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting – you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to “explain” them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial “”cultural” value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. Reactions to art are always different because they are always deeply personal.
The film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded. 1
The Best Preparation For Being A Film Director
Seeing movies. It’s true of any art form. The greatest preparation for a painter is to look at paintings. I mean, even seeing the current movies, you learn something. I know that one of the things that gave me the most confidence in trying to make a film was all the lousy films that I saw. Because I sat there and I thought, well, I don’t know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that. And I think that’s probably what started people like Truffaut. 5
Directing Should Be A Continuation Of Writing
You might wonder whether directing is anything more or less than a continuation of the writing. I think that is precisely what directing should be. It would follow, then, that a writer-director is really the perfect dramatic instrument; and the few examples we have where these two peculiar techniques have been properly mastered by one man have, I believe, produced the most consistently fine work. 6
How To Get Good Performances From Actors
Well, in the beginning I really didn’t get especially good performances, either in Fear and Desire or Killer’s Kiss. They were both amateurish films. But I did learn a great deal from making them, experience which helped me greatly in my subsequent films.
The best way to learn is to do – and this is something few people manage to get the opportunity to try. I was also helped a great deal by studying Stanislavski’s books, as well as an excellent book about him, Stanislavski Directs, which contains a great deal of highly illustrative material on how he worked with actors. Between those books and the painful lessons I learned from my own mistakes, I accumulated the basic experience needed to start to do good work.
The director’s job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance. By knowing the actor’s personality and gauging his strengths and weaknesses a director can help him to overcome specific problems and realize his potential. But I think this aspect of directing is generally overemphasized.
The director’s taste and imagination play a much more crucial role in the making of a film. Is it meaningful? Is it believable? Is it interesting? Those are the questions that have to be answered several hundred times a day. It’s rare for a bad performance to result from an actor ignoring everything a director tells him. In fact it’s very often just the opposite.
After all, the director is the actor’s sole audience for the months it takes to shoot a film, and an actor would have to possess supreme self-confidence and supreme contempt for the director to consistently defy his wishes. I think you’ll find that most disappointing performances are the mutual fault of both the actor and the director.
To establish a good working relationship I think all the actor has to know is that you respect his talent enough to want him in your film. He’s obviously aware of that as long as you’ve hired him and he hasn’t been foisted on you by the studio or the producer. 1
There’s a misconception, I think, about what directing actors means: it generally goes along the lines of the director imposing his will over difficult actors, or teaching people who don’t know how to act. I try to hire the best actors in the world. The problem is one a conductor might face. There’s little joy in trying to get a magnificent performance from a student orchestra.
It’s difficult enough to get one with all the subtleties and nuances you might want out of the greatest orchestra in the world. You want to have great virtuoso soloists, and so with actors. Then it’s not necessary to teach them how to act or to impose your will on them because usually there is no problem along those lines.
An actor will almost always do what you want him to do if he is able to do it; and, therefore, since great actors are able to do almost anything, you find you have few problems. You can then concentrate on what you want them to do, what is the psychology of the character, what is the purpose of the scene, what is the story about? These are the things that are often muddled up and require simplicity and exactitude.
The director’s job is to provide the actor with ideas, not to teach him how to act or to trick him into acting. There’s no way to give an actor what he hasn’t got in the form of talent. You can give him ideas, thoughts, attitudes. The actor’s job is to create emotion. Obviously, the actor may have some ideas too, but this is not what his primary responsibility is.
You can make a mediocre actor less mediocre, you can make a terrible actor mediocre, but you cannot go very far without the magic. Great performances come from the magical talent of the actor, plus the ideas of the director. The other part of the director’s job is to exercise taste: he must decide whether what he is seeing is interesting, whether it’s appropriate, whether it’s of sufficient weight, whether it’s credible. These are decisions no one else can make. 7
Why Artists Function
I don’t think that writers or painters or film makers 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 orientated by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was. 3
The Perfect Novel To Adapt
The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story.
And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book’s psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.
People have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov’s prose style. But to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is simply misunderstanding just what a great book is.
Of course, the quality of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this quality is a result of the quality of the writer’s obsession with his subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an understanding of character.
Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts. These are what have to be dramatised, not the style. The dramatising has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content. And in doing this it will bring out another side of that structure which has gone into the novel. It may or may not be as good as the novel; sometimes it may in certain ways be even better. 6
Editing
When you’re dealing with dialogue scenes, you have to look them over again and select portions of different takes and make the best use of them.
The greatest amount of time in editing is this process of studying the takes and making notes and struggling to decide which segments you want to use; this takes ten times more time and effort than the actual cutting, which is a very quick process.
Purely visual action scenes, of course, present far less of a problem; it’s generally the dialogue scenes, where you’ve got several long takes printed on each angle on different actors, that are the most time-consuming to cut.
Nothing is cut without me. I’m in there every second, and for all practical purposes I cut my own film; I mark every frame, select each segment, and have everything done exactly the way I want it. Writing, shooting, and editing are what you have to do to make a film. 1
Meaning
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality.
As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in faith and in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. 4
Arthur Schnitzler
His plays are, to me, masterpieces of dramatic writing. I think he’s one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century; probably because he didn’t deal with things that are obviously full of social significance, he has been ignored.
I know that, for my part, it’s difficult to find any writer who understood the human soul more truthfully, and who had a more profound insight into the way people think, act, and really are, and who also had a somewhat all-seeing point of view – sympathetic, if somewhat cynical. 5
How He Started In Filmmaking
I was around twenty-one. I’d had my job with LOOK since I was seventeen (as a staff photographer), and I’d always been interested in films, but it never actually occurred to me to make a film on my own until I had a talk with a friend from high school, Alex Singer, who wanted to be a director himself (and has subsequently become one) and had plans for a film version of the Iliad.
Alex was working as an office boy for “The March of Time” in those days, and he told me they spent forty thousand dollars making a one-reel documentary. A bit of simple calculation indicated that I could make a one-reel documentary for about fifteen hundred. That’s what gave me the financial confidence to make Day of the Fight.
I was rather optimistic about expenses; the film cost me thirty-nine hundred. I sold it to RKO-Pathe for four thousand dollars, a hundred-dollar profit. They told me that was the most they’d ever paid for a short. I then discovered that “The March of Time” itself was going out of business.
I made one more short for RKO, The Flying Padre, on which I just barely broke even. It was at this point that I formally quit my job at Look to work full time on filmmaking. I then managed to raise ten thousand dollars, and shot my first feature film, Fear and Desire.
I was cameraman, director, editor, assistant editor, sound effects man – you name it, I did it. And it was invaluable experience, because being forced to do everything myself I gained a sound and comprehensive grasp of all the technical aspects of filmmaking. 1
The Advantage of Adapting Literary Material
There’s one great advantage of making a film from literary material, and that is that you have the opportunity of reading the story for the first time. I’ve never written an original screenplay myself, so I’m only theorizing as to what I think the effect would be, but I suppose that if you had an idea yourself that you liked and you developed, your sense of whether or not the story was interesting would be almost gone by the time you wrote it. And then at that point, to try to make it into a film you’d have to trust only your own first interest and instincts.
The advantage of a story you can actually read is that you can remember what you felt about it the first time you read it; and that serves as a very useful yardstick on making the decisions that you have to make directing the film, because even with somebody else’s story you become so familiar with it after a while that you can never really tell what it is going to seem like to somebody seeing the film for the first time. So at least you have that first impression of the story and your first ideas, which are very important. 8
Film Theory Books
I read Eisenstein’s books at the time, and to this day I still don’t really understand them.
The most instructive book on film aesthetics I came across was Pudovkin’s Film Technique, which simply explained that editing was the aspect of film art form which was completely unique, and which separated it from all other art forms.
The ability to show a simple action like a man cutting wheat from a number of angles in a brief moment, to be able to see it in a special way not possible except through film – that this is what it was all about. This is obvious, of course, but it’s so important it cannot be too strongly stressed.
Pudovkin gives many clear examples of how good film editing enhances a scene, and I would recommend his book to anyone seriously interested in film technique. 1
Comparative Film Techniques
Anyone seriously interested in comparative film techniques should study the differences in approach of two directors, Eisenstein and Chaplin. Eisenstein is all form and no content, whereas Chaplin is content and no form. Of course, a director’s style is partly the result of the manner in which he imposes his mind on the semi-controllable conditions that exist on any given day – the responsiveness and talent of actors, the realism of the set, time factors, even weather. 1
Playing Music On The Film Set
Music was a device used by silent-film actors (on set) – they all had their own violinists, who would play for them during the takes, and even sort of direct them. And I think it’s probably the easiest way to produce an emotion… which is really the actor’s main problem – producing authentic emotion.
We play it before the take, and if the dialogue isn’t too important, during the take and then post-synchronize the dialogue – its amazing how quick this will work, and I mean making a movie is such a long, fragmented, dragging process, and you get into, say, about the ninth week, you’re getting up every morning at 6:30, not enough sleep, probably no breakfast, and then at 9:15 you have to do something you feel about as far from doing as you possibly can… So it’s a matter of getting in the right mood – and music I’ve found is the best for this, and practically everyone can respond to some piece or other. 2
The Advantage Film Has Over Other Media
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. 2
Favourite Books
In a feature piece for Vanity Fair 9, Michael Herr (his friend and co-writer of Full Metal Jacket) mentions many of Stanley’s literary favourites, with excerpts below:
Stanley wanted to meet me because he’d liked Dispatches, my book about Vietnam.
He called me a couple of nights later to ask me if I’d read any Jung. I had. Was I familiar with the concept of the Shadow, our hidden dark side?
And then there was this other book he was fascinated by—he was fairly sure I’d never heard of it—Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, which means “Dream Novel,” meaninglessly called Rhapsody in the only English edition available at that time. He’d read it more than 20 years before, and bought the rights to it in the early 70s (it’s the book that Eyes Wide Shut is based on), and the reason I’d probably never heard of it (he started to laugh) was that he’d bought up every single existing copy of it.
Maybe he’d send me one. I could read it and tell him what I thought. The next afternoon a copy of the Schnitzler book arrived, along with the paperback edition of Raul Hilberg’s enormous The Destruction of the European Jews. I read the Schnitzler right away, and that’s when I had my early inkling of how smart Stanley really was.
John Calley, who was probably Stanley’s closest friend, told me that when he was head of production at Warners in the 70s and first working with him, Stanley sent him a set of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, unabridged, and then bugged him every couple of weeks for a year about reading it. Finally Calley said, “Stanley, I’ve got a studio to run. I don’t have time to read mythology.” “It isn’t mythology, John,” Stanley said. “It’s your life.”
“Hey, Michael, didja ever read Herodotus? The Father of Lies?” or “Frankly, I’ve never understood why Schopenhauer is considered so pessimistic. I never thought he was pessimistic, did you, Michael?”
For the most part we talked about writers, usually dead and white and Euro-American, hardly the current curriculum. Stendhal (half an hour), Balzac (two hours), Conrad, Crane, Hemingway (hours and hours—“Do you think it was true that he was drunk all the time, even when he wrote? Yeah? Well, I’ll have to find out what he was drinking and send a case to all my writers”), Céline (“My favorite anti-Semite”), and Kafka, who he thought was the greatest writer of the century, and the most misread: People who used the word “Kafkaesque” had probably never read Kafka.
I’d read The Golden Bough and didn’t have to go through that again, but he urged me to check out Machiavelli, and The Art of War (years before Michael Ovitz slipped him a copy), and Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. He had a taste and a gift for the creative-subversive, and he dug Swift and Malaparte and William Burroughs, and was interested that Burroughs was a friend of mine. I got him to read Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; he thought it was incredibly beautiful.
In the beginning of January my wife and I received a gift from him, a book of photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
What Attracts Him To A Particular Book To Adapt
First of all just some indefinable personal response to the story. It sounds overtly simple but it has something to do with the fact that you just like the story.
Then, the next question is, does the story keep you excited and, if you think about it for two weeks, is it still exciting?
When it gets past that point, the next question is really: is the novel translatable into a film? Because most novels, really, if they are good, aren’t; it’s something inherent about a good novel, either the scale of the story or the fact that the best novels tend to concern themselves with the inner life of the characters rather than with the external action. So there’s always the risk of oversimplifying them when you try to crystallize the elements of the themes or the characters.
So, okay, some novels probably will never be able to be made into good movies. But ley’s say you now decide that it is possible to make a movie out of it; the next questions are: does it have cinematic possibilities? Will it be interesting to look at? Are there good parts for the actors? Will anybody else be interested in it when you’ve finished with it?
Those are the thoughts that cross my mind. But mostly, I would say, a sense of personal excitement about the thing; the fact that you just fell in love with the story. 8
How He Learned To Use A Camera
My experience in photography was very helpful. For my two documentaries I’d used a small 35-mm hand camera called an Eyemo, a daylight loading camera which was very simple to operate. The first time I used a Mitchell camera was on Fear and Desire.
I went to the Camera Equipment Company, at 1600 Broadway, and the owner, Bert Zucker, spent a Saturday morning showing me how to load and operate it. So that was the extent of my formal training in movie camera technique. 1
Rehearsals
There’s really a limit to what you can do with rehearsals. They’re very useful, of course, but I find that you can’t rehearse effectively unless you have the physical reality of the set to work with. Unfortunately, sets are practically never ready until the last moment before you start shooting, and this significantly cuts down on your rehearsal time.
Some actors, of course, need rehearsals more than others. Actors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try.
In Strangelove, for example, George Scott could do his scenes equally well take after take, whereas Peter Sellers was always incredibly good on one take, which was never equaled. 1
I find that no matter how carefully you write a scene, when you rehearse it for the first time there always seems to be something completely different, and you realize that there are interesting ideas in the scene which you never thought of, or that ideas that you thought were interesting aren’t.
Or that the weight of the idea is unbalanced; something is too obvious or not clear enough, so I very often rewrite the scene with the rehearsal. I feel it’s the way you can take the best advantage of both the abilities of the actors and even perhaps the weaknesses of the actors.
If there’s something they aren’t doing, or it’s pretty clear they can’t do (I must say that’s not true in The Shining because they were so great), you suddenly become aware of ideas and possibilities which just didn’t occur to you. 8
How To Present Your Ideas
I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection into the audience’s consciousness.
Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don’t yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful.
You use the audience’s thrill of surprise and discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to power them across. 6
What Must A Director Control?
He must control everything. I think you have to view the entire problem of putting the story you want to tell up there on that light square. It begins in the selection of the property; it continues through the creation of the right kind of financial and legal and contractual circumstances under which you make the film.
It continues through the casting, the creation of the story, the sets, the costumes, the photography, and the acting. And when the picture is shot, it’s only partially finished. I think the cutting is just a continuation of directing a movie.
I think the use of music effects, opticals, and finally main titles are all part of telling the story. And I think the fragmentation of these jobs, by different people, is a very bad thing. 5
How To Direct When You Are Not The Writer
When the director is not his own author, I think it is his duty to be one hundred per cent faithful to the author’s meaning and to sacrifice none of it for the sake of climax or effect.
This seems a fairly obvious notion, yet how many plays and films have you seen where the experience was exciting and arresting but when it was over you felt there was less there than met the eye?
And this is usually due to artificial stimulation of the senses by technique which disregards the inner design of the play. It is here that we see the cult of the director at its worst. 6
Cinema vs Theatre
I can tell you why I am disappointed in the theatre. I think realistic theatre is a bore. I think that to spend two and a half hours in the theatre, where the method of communication with the audience is through realism and through presenting words and deeds in a completely realistic way is somewhat tiresome. Movies can create realism and cover so much more ground in so much less time. 5
Collaboration
Nothing in making movies gives a greater sense of elation than participation in a process of allowing the work to grow, through vital collaboration between script, director and actors, as it goes along.
Any art form properly practised involves a to and fro between conception and execution, the original intention being constantly modified as one tries to give it objective realisation.
In painting a picture this goes on between the artist and his canvas; in making a movie it goes on between people. 6
Photography & Problem Solving
I had few intellectual interests as a child. I was a school misfit and I had one thing, I think, that perhaps helped me get over being a misfit, and that is that I became interested in photography about the same time, twelve or thirteen.
I think that if you get involved in any kind of problem solving in depth on almost anything, it is surprisingly similar to problem solving in anything. I started out by just getting a camera and learning how to take pictures and learning how to print pictures and learning how to build a darkroom and learning how to do all the technical things. Then finally trying to find out how you could sell pictures, you know, would it be possible to be a professional photographer?
It was a case of, over a period of, say, from the age of thirteen to seventeen, going through step by step by myself without anyone really helping me, the problem solving of becoming a photographer. And I found that, I think, in looking back, that this particular thing about problem solving is something that schools generally don’t teach you and that if you can develop a kind of generalised approach to problem solving, that it’s surprising how it helps you in anything.
Most of the deficiencies that you see around you in people that you don’t think are doing their job the right way, when you think about it, I generally find that it’s just that they don’t have a good generalised approach to problem solving. They’re not thorough. They don’t consider all the possibilities. They don’t prepare themselves with the right information and so forth.
So, I think that photography, though it seemed like a hobby, and ultimately led to a professional job, photography might have been more valuable than doing the proper things in school. 10
The Background of a Scene
You have to figure out what is going on in each scene and whats the most interesting way to play it. With Spartacus, whether a scene had hundreds of people in the background or whether it was against a wall, I thought of everything first as if there was nothing back there. Once it was rehearsed, we worked out the background. 3
Shooting In Films Studios vs Real Locations
I’ve often heard it asked whether it doesn’t affect the reality and the artistic quality of a picture not to make it in actual locations. Personally I have found that working out of doors or working in real locations is a very distracting experience and doesn’t have the almost classical simplicity of a film studio where everything is inky darkness and the lights are coming from an expected place and it is quiet and you can achieve concentration without worrying that there are 500 people standing behind a police line halfway down the block, or about a million other distractions.
I think that much too much has been made of making films on location. It does help when the atmosphere circumstances and locale are the chief thing supposed to come across in a scene. For a psychological story, where the characters and their inner emotions and feelings are the key thing, I think that a studio is the best place. Working on a set provides the actor with much better concentration and ability to use his full resources.
When Spartacus was being made, I discussed this point with Olivier and Ustinov and they both said that they felt that their powers were just drifting off into space when they were working out of doors. Their minds weren’t sharp and their concentration seemed to evaporate. They preferred that kind of focusing-in that happens in a studio with the lights pointing at them and the sets around them. Whereas outside everything fades away, inside there is a kind of inner focusing of physical energy. 3
Characters
People nowadays seem to have a great deal of difficulty deciding whether a character in a film is good or bad – especially the people who are making the film. It seems as if first they deal out twenty-five cents worth of good and then twenty-five cents worth of bad and at the very end of the story you have a perfect balance.
I think it essential if a man is good to know where he is bad and to show it, or if he is strong, to decide what the moments are in the story where he is weak and to show it. And I think that you must never try to explain how he got the way he is or why he did what he did. 3
Using Music In Film From Existing Sources
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you are editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene…Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary tracks can become the final score. 11
Film As An Art
There are elements in any good film that would increase the viewer’s interest and appreciation on a second viewing; the momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it’s seen.
The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art.
We don’t believe that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has until recent years been exempted from the category of art—a situation I’m glad is finally changing. 4
Drugs Tranquilise The Creative Personality
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 so in the state of universal bliss 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. 4
Your Films Should Speak For You
One of the things that I always find extremely difficult, when a picture’s finished, is when a writer or a film viewer 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 TS Eliot said to someone who had asked him – I believe it was about The Wasteland – what he meant by the poem. He said: “I meant what it said.” If I could have said it any differently, I would have. 5
The Struggle of Keeping The Audience Interested
There’s something I recall reading in one of Stanislavsky’s books. He made the point that, in addition to a performance being truthful and accurate and believable, that it also had to be interesting. There were many possibilities, in some scenes, of adjustment and ways to play it, but, finally, one had to choose the one that was the most interesting because the audience will not respond with a full emotional response if they’re sitting there bored and restless.
And there’s always this fine line between over-stimulating an audience and keeping them artificially excited and losing them. And I think this is why great films and great theatre are so rare. Because, in addition to everything else the author has to accomplish, you’re always treading that very narrow path of not artificially and falsely stimulating your audience, and, on the other hand, not losing them through boredom or indifference. 5
Favourite Films
When the American magazine Cinema asked him in 1963 to name his favorite films, Kubrick listed the following titles: 12
- 1. I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)
- 2. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)
- 3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- 4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
- 5. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
- 6. Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1945)
- 7. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)
- 8. The Bank Dick (W.C. Fields, 1940)
- 9. Roxie Hart (William Wellman, 1942)
- 10. Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930)
Stanley’s daughter Katharina Kubrick-Hobbs shared a list on a message-board of the movies she knows he happened to like:
- Closely Observed Trains (Menzel, 1966)
- An American Werewolf in London (Landis, 1981)
- The Fireman’s Ball (Forman, 1967)
- Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
- The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973)
- White Men Can’t Jump (Shelton, 1992)
- La Belle et la Bête (Cocteau, 1946)
- The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
- Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet, 1975)
- One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman, 1975)
- Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
- Abigail’s Party (Leigh, 1977)
- The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
Stanley in 1966 commenting on his favourite directors:
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.
On Spanish Influences:
I first encountered Carlos Saura’s work by chance and in a rather strange way one day I got home quite late and turned on the television; a film in Spanish with subtitles, that I knew absolutely nothing about and besides I’d missed the first half hour. It was hard for me to follow and understand but, at the same time, I was convinced it was the film of a great director.
I watched the rest of the film glued to the TV set and when it was over I picked up a newspaper and saw that it was Peppermint Frappè by Carlos Saura. Later I found a copy of the film, which of course I watched from the beginning and with great enthusiasm, and since then all of Saura’s films that I’ve seen have confirmed the really high quality of his work. He is an extremely brilliant director, and what strikes me in particular is the marvelous use he makes of his actors. 8
On Claudia Weill’s film Girlfriends:
I think one of the most interesting Hollywood films, well not Hollywood – American films – that I’ve seen in a long time is Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American’s films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe. It wasn’t a success, I don’t know why; it should have been. Certainly I thought it as a wonderful film. It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else. Really magnificent. 8
Michael Herr on Stanleys love for The Godfather:
He’d watched The Godfather again the night before and was reluctantly suggesting for the 10th time that it was possibly the greatest movie ever made, and certainly the best-cast. 9
On La Strada:
I know only La Strada [of Fellini’s films] but that is amply sufficient to see in him the most interesting poetic personality of the Italian cinema. 13
On The Battle of Algiers:
All films are, in a sense, false documentaries. One tries to approach reality as much as possible, only it’s not reality. There are people who do very clever things, which have completely fascinated and fooled me. For example, The Battle of Algiers. It’s very impressive.” ((Stanley Kubrick Interviewed by Renaud Walter in Positif)))
On Max Ophlus:
He did some brilliant work. I particularly admired his fluid camera techniques. I saw a great many films at that time at the Museum of Modern Art and in movie theaters, and I learned far more by seeing films than from reading heavy tomes on film aesthetics. 1
How To Move An Audience Emotionally
The most potent way to move an audience to your point of view is to reach their feelings, and not their brains. If you can emotionally make a point that may, in your own mind, be quite clear and philosophical, you will sway people, at least for the duration of your play or movie. And one of the most effective ways to move people is to allow them to discover what you mean for themselves.
It seems to me that works in which the meaning is all too clear are never as powerful and as evocative as works in which the meaning becomes clear and where you enjoy a thrill of discovery. Of course, it’s a more dangerous way to write because if the audience fails to discover what you mean, they’re left quite disturbed. It’s always safer to spell it out, in the last scene, and tell them exactly what you were after – which all too many people seem to do. 5
Horror As A Genre
About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn’t help writing the screen-play, but I think it’s an interesting insight into the genre.
And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn’t, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling.
I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what’s going to happen, and there’s a great satisfaction when it’s all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled. 8
Shooting Many Takes For One Scene
It happens when actors are unprepared. You cannot act without knowing dialogue. If actors have to think about the words, they can’t work on the emotion. So you end up doing thirty takes of something. And still you can see the concentration in their eyes; they don’t know their lines. So you just shoot it and shoot it and hope you can get something out of it in pieces.
Now, if the actor is a nice guy, he goes home, he says, “Stanley’s such a perfectionist, he does a hundred takes an every scene.” So my thirty takes become a hundred. And I get this reputation. If I did a hundred takes on every scene, I’d never finish a film.
Lee Ermey, for instance, would spend every spare second with the dialogue coach, and he always knew his lines. I suppose Lee averaged eight or nine takes. He sometimes did it in three. Because he was prepared. 14
The Idea To Go Into Film
Like everybody else, I was always very interested in movies and I used to go to see films and I’d see practically every film. And I used to see all the films at the Museum of Modern Art and the Thalia. There weren’t that many good films that were ever played in the theater’s around, except at the museum.
A friend of mine, who subsequently has become a film director named Alex Singer, was working as an office boy at The March of Time and one day he told me that it cost forty thousand dollars to make a March of Time and it was a one-reeler. And I said to him,“Gee, that’s a lot of money.” I said, “I can’t believe it costs that much to make, you know, eight or nine minutes of film.”
So, I called up Kodak and checked on the price of film. And then I called up the laboratory to find out how much it cost to develop it. Then I checked on how much it cost to rent 35mm movie cameras. And then I checked the cost of the other facilities, sound and editing and so forth. And I forgot what it added up to but it was something like… that I could do a documentary film, with an original music score and everything, for about thirty-five hundred dollars.
So I thought, “Gee, if they’re making these pictures for forty thousand and I can make them for thirty five hundred, surely I must be able to sell them and at least get my money back, and probably make a profit.” 10
Letter To Director Ingmar Bergman
Dear Mr. Bergman,
You have most certainly received enough acclaim and success throughout the world to make this note quite unnecessary. But for whatever it’s worth, I should like to add my praise and gratitude as a fellow director for the unearthly and brilliant contribution you have made to the world by your films (I have never been in Sweden and have therefore never had the pleasure of seeing your theater work).
Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today. Beyond that, allow me to say you are unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness of characterization.
To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a film. I believe you are blessed with wonderful actors. Max von Sydow and Ingrid Thulin live vividly in my memory, and there are many others in your acting company whose names escape me. I wish you and all of them the very best of luck, and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films.
Best Regards,
Stanley Kubrick
The Actor Is The Screenwriters Medium
At its best, realistic drama consists of a progression of moods and feelings that play upon the audience’s feelings and transform the author’s meaning into an emotional experience. This means that the author must not think of paper and ink and words as being his writing tools, but rather that he works in flesh and feeling.
And in this sense I feel that too few writers seem to understand what an actor can communicate emotionally and what he cannot. Often, at one point, the writer expects a silent look to get across what it would take a rebus puzzle to explain, and in the next moment the actor is given a long speech to convey something that is quite apparent in the situation and for which a brief look would be sufficient.
Writers tend to approach the creation of drama too much in terms of words, failing to realise that the greatest force they have is the mood and feeling they can produce in the audience through the actor. They tend to see the actor grudgingly, as someone likely to ruin what they have written, rather than seeing that the actor is in every sense their medium.6
Endings
Maybe the reason why people seem to find it harder to take unhappy endings in movies than in plays or novels is that a good movie engages you so heavily that you find an unhappy ending almost unbearable. But it depends on the story, because there are ways for the director to trick the audience into expecting a happy ending and there are ways of very subtly letting the audience be aware of the fact that the character is hopelessly doomed and there is not going to be a happy ending.
In a criminal film, it is almost like a bullfight: it has a ritual and a pattern which lays down that the criminal is not going to make it, so that while you can suspend your knowledge of this for a while, sitting way back of your mind this little awareness knows and prepares you for the fact that he is not going to succeed. That type of ending is easier to accept.
One thing that has always disturbed me a little is that the ending often introduces a false note. This applies particularly if it is a story that doesn’t pound away on a single point, such as whether the time-bomb will explode in the suitcase. When you deal with characters and a sense of life, most endings that appear to be endings are false, and possibly that is what disturbs the audience: they may sense the gratuitousness of the unhappy ending.
On the other hand, if you end a story with somebody achieving his aim it always seems to me to have a kind of incompleteness about it, because that almost seems to be the beginning of another story. One of the things I like most about John Ford is the anticlimax endings – anticlimax upon anticlimax and you just get a feeling that you are seeing life and you accept the thing. 3
The Greatest Moments In Film
When you think of the greatest moments of film, I think you are almost always involved with images rather than scenes, and certainly never dialogue. The thing a film does best is to use pictures with music and I think these are the moments you remember. 7
Get access to a FREE cheatsheet for this post which includes:
Concise summary of the most powerful advice and ideas.- 3 creative challenges inspired by the artists’ methodologies.
Next up: David Lynch on the art life.
References and Related Resources
- The Film Director as Superstar: Stanley Kubrick, by Joseph Gelmis
- An Interview with Stanley Kubrick, Director of Lolita, by Terry Southern
- Director’s Notes: Stanley Kubrick Movie-Maker, by Stanley Kubrick
- Stanley Kubrick: Playboy Interview (1968) – by Eric Norden
- The Artist Speaks for Himself, by Robert Emmett Ginna
- Words and Movies, by Stanley Kubrick
- Modern Times: An Interview with Stanley Kubrick, by Philip Strick and Penelope Houston
- An Interview With Stanley Kubrick, by Vicente Molina Foix
- Kubrick, by Michael Herr for Vanity Fair
- Kubrick Interview with Jeremy Bernstein 11-27-66
- Stanley Kubrick Interview with Michael Ciment
- Kubrick: Biographical Notes, by Michel Ciment
- Stanley Kubrick interviewed by Raymond Haine, Cahiers du cinéma, July 1957
- The Rolling Stone Interview: Stanley Kubrick, by Tim Cahill