157 Facts About Stanley Kubrick

1.

Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, producer and screenwriter.

2.

Stanley Kubrick received average grades but displayed a keen interest in literature, photography, and film from a young age, and taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school.

3.

Creative differences arising from his work with Douglas and the film studios, a dislike of the Hollywood industry, and a growing concern about crime in America prompted Stanley Kubrick to move to the United Kingdom in 1961, where he spent most of his remaining life and career.

4.

Stanley Kubrick often asked for several dozen retakes of the same shot in a movie, which resulted in many conflicts with his casts.

5.

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26,1928, in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, New York City, to a Jewish family.

6.

Stanley Kubrick was the first of two children of Jacob Leonard Kubrick, known as Jack or Jacques, and his wife Sadie Gertrude Kubrick, known as Gert.

7.

Stanley Kubrick's sister Barbara Mary Kubrick was born in May 1934.

8.

Jack Stanley Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were of Polish-Jewish and Romanian-Jewish origin, was a homeopathic doctor, graduating from the New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1927, the same year he married Stanley Kubrick's mother, the child of Austrian-Jewish immigrants.

9.

Stanley Kubrick's parents married in a Jewish ceremony, but Kubrick did not have a religious upbringing and later professed an atheistic view of the universe.

10.

Stanley Kubrick's father was a physician and, by the standards of the West Bronx, the family was fairly wealthy.

11.

Stanley Kubrick's IQ was discovered to be above average but his attendance was poor.

12.

Stanley Kubrick displayed an interest in literature from a young age and began reading Greek and Roman myths and the fables of the Grimm brothers, which "instilled in him a lifelong affinity with Europe".

13.

Stanley Kubrick spent most Saturdays during the summer watching the New York Yankees and later photographed two boys watching the game in an assignment for Look magazine to emulate his own childhood excitement with baseball.

14.

When Stanley Kubrick was 12, his father Jack taught him chess.

15.

The game remained a lifelong interest of Stanley Kubrick's, appearing in many of his films.

16.

When Stanley Kubrick was 13, his father bought him a Graflex camera, triggering a fascination with still photography.

17.

Stanley Kubrick befriended a neighbor, Marvin Traub, who shared his passion for photography.

18.

Traub had his own darkroom where he and the young Stanley Kubrick would spend many hours perusing photographs and watching the chemicals "magically make images on photographic paper".

19.

Stanley Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 1945.

20.

Introverted and shy, Stanley Kubrick had a low attendance record and often skipped school to watch double-feature films.

21.

Stanley Kubrick graduated in 1945 but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated any hope of higher education.

22.

Later in life Stanley Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of American schooling as a whole, maintaining that schools were ineffective in stimulating critical thinking and student interest.

23.

Stanley Kubrick's father was disappointed in his son's failure to achieve the excellence in school of which he knew Stanley was fully capable.

24.

Jack encouraged Stanley Kubrick to read from the family library at home, while permitting Stanley Kubrick to take up photography as a serious hobby.

25.

Stanley Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs.

26.

Stanley Kubrick's first, published on April 16,1946, was entitled "A Short Story from a Movie Balcony" and staged a fracas between a man and a woman, during which the man is slapped in the face, caught genuinely by surprise.

27.

Stanley Kubrick was assigned to photograph numerous jazz musicians, from Frank Sinatra and Erroll Garner to George Lewis, Eddie Condon, Phil Napoleon, Papa Celestin, Alphonse Picou, Muggsy Spanier, Sharkey Bonano, and others.

28.

Stanley Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz on May 28,1948.

29.

Stanley Kubrick was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director Max Ophuls, whose films influenced Kubrick's visual style, and by the director Elia Kazan, whom he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors.

30.

Stanley Kubrick spent many hours reading books on film theory and writing notes.

31.

Stanley Kubrick was particularly inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and Arthur Rothstein, the photographic technical director of Look magazine.

32.

Stanley Kubrick shared a love of film with his school friend Alexander Singer, who after graduating from high school had the intention of directing a film version of Homer's Iliad.

33.

Stanley Kubrick had $1500 in savings and produced a few short documentaries fueled by encouragement from Singer.

34.

Stanley Kubrick began learning all he could about filmmaking on his own, calling film suppliers, laboratories, and equipment rental houses.

35.

Stanley Kubrick decided to make a short film documentary about boxer Walter Cartier, whom he had photographed and written about for Look magazine a year earlier.

36.

Stanley Kubrick rented a camera and produced a 16-minute black-and-white documentary, Day of the Fight.

37.

Stanley Kubrick had considered asking Montgomery Clift to narrate it, whom he had met during a photographic session for Look, but settled on CBS news veteran Douglas Edwards.

38.

Stanley Kubrick described his first effort at filmmaking as having been valuable since he believed himself to have been forced to do most of the work, and he later declared that the "best education in film is to make one".

39.

Stanley Kubrick stated that he was given the confidence during this period to become a filmmaker because of the number of bad films he had seen, remarking, "I don't know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a better film than that".

40.

Stanley Kubrick began making Flying Padre, a film which documents Reverend Fred Stadtmueller, who travels some 4,000 miles to visit his 11 churches.

41.

Day of the Fight, Flying Padre and The Seafarers constitute Stanley Kubrick's only surviving documentary works; some historians believe he made others.

42.

Stanley Kubrick assembled several actors and a small crew totaling 14 people and flew to the San Gabriel Mountains in California for a five-week, low-budget shoot.

43.

Stanley Kubrick had intended for Fear and Desire to be a silent picture in order to ensure low production costs; the added sounds, effects, and music ultimately brought production costs to around $53,000, exceeding the budget.

44.

Stanley Kubrick was bailed out by producer Richard de Rochemont on the condition that he help in de Rochemont's production of a five-part television series about Abraham Lincoln on location in Hodgenville, Kentucky.

45.

Stanley Kubrick began shooting footage in Times Square, and frequently explored during the filming process, experimenting with cinematography and considering the use of unconventional angles and imagery.

46.

Stanley Kubrick initially chose to record the sound on location, but encountered difficulties with shadows from the microphone booms, restricting camera movement.

47.

Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail directly influenced the film with the painting laughing at a character, and Martin Scorsese has, in turn, cited Stanley Kubrick's innovative shooting angles and atmospheric shots in Killer's Kiss as an influence on Raging Bull.

48.

Stanley Kubrick agreed to waive his fee for the production, which was shot in 24 days on a budget of $330,000.

49.

Stanley Kubrick clashed with Ballard during the shooting, and on one occasion Kubrick threatened to fire Ballard following a camera dispute, despite being aged only 27 and 20 years Ballard's junior.

50.

Stanley Kubrick operated an Arriflex camera for the battle, zooming in on Douglas.

51.

In November 1957, Gavin Lambert was signed as story editor for I Stole $16,000,000, and with Stanley Kubrick, finished a script titled God Fearing Man, but the picture was never filmed.

52.

Marlon Brando contacted Stanley Kubrick, asking him to direct a film adaptation of the Charles Neider western novel, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, featuring Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

53.

Many disputes broke out over the project, and in the end, Stanley Kubrick distanced himself from what would become One-Eyed Jacks.

54.

In February 1959, Stanley Kubrick received a phone call from Kirk Douglas asking him to direct Spartacus, based on the historical Spartacus and the Third Servile War.

55.

Stanley Kubrick had, at 31, already directed four feature films, and this became his largest by far, with a cast of over 10,000 and a budget of $6 million.

56.

Stanley Kubrick complained about not having full creative control over the artistic aspects, insisting on improvising extensively during the production.

57.

Lolita, Stanley Kubrick's first attempt at black comedy, was an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov, the story of a middle-aged college professor becoming infatuated with a 12-year-old girl.

58.

Stanley Kubrick was impressed by the range of actor Peter Sellers and gave him one of his first opportunities to improvise wildly during shooting, while filming him with three cameras.

59.

Stanley Kubrick shot Lolita over 88 days on a $2 million budget at Elstree Studios, between October 1960 and March 1961.

60.

Stanley Kubrick often clashed with Shelley Winters, whom he found "very difficult" and demanding, and nearly fired at one point.

61.

Stanley Kubrick became preoccupied with the issue of nuclear war as the Cold War unfolded in the 1950s, and even considered moving to Australia because he feared that New York City might be a likely target for the Russians.

62.

Stanley Kubrick studied over 40 military and political research books on the subject and eventually reached the conclusion that "nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd".

63.

Stanley Kubrick found that Dr Strangelove, a $2 million production which employed what became the "first important visual effects crew in the world", would be impossible to make in the US for various technical and political reasons, forcing him to move production to England.

64.

Peter Sellers again agreed to work with Stanley Kubrick, and ended up playing three different roles in the film.

65.

Stanley Kubrick intensively researched for the film, paying particular attention to accuracy and detail in what the future might look like.

66.

Stanley Kubrick was granted permission by NASA to observe the spacecraft being used in the Ranger 9 mission for accuracy.

67.

Stanley Kubrick was particularly outraged by a scathing review from Pauline Kael, who called it "the biggest amateur movie of them all", with Stanley Kubrick doing "really every dumb thing he ever wanted to do".

68.

Stanley Kubrick settled on A Clockwork Orange at the end of 1969, an exploration of violence and experimental rehabilitation by law enforcement authorities, based around the character of Alex.

69.

Stanley Kubrick had received a copy of Anthony Burgess's novel of the same name from Terry Southern while they were working on Dr Strangelove, but had rejected it on the grounds that Nadsat, a street language for young teenagers, was too difficult to comprehend.

70.

The film heavily features "pop erotica" of the period, including a giant white plastic set of male genitals, decor which Stanley Kubrick had intended to give it a "slightly futuristic" look.

71.

Stanley Kubrick personally pulled the film from release in the United Kingdom after receiving death threats following a series of copycat crimes based on the film; it was thus completely unavailable legally in the UK until after Stanley Kubrick's death, and not re-released until 2000.

72.

Stanley Kubrick spends the winter there with his wife, played by Shelley Duvall, and their young son, who displays paranormal abilities.

73.

Stanley Kubrick often demanded up to 70 or 80 retakes of the same scene.

74.

Stanley Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track was impractical.

75.

The Shining was not the only horror film to which Stanley Kubrick had been linked; he had turned down the directing of both The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic, despite once saying in 1966 to a friend that he had long desired to "make the world's scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience".

76.

Five days after release on May 23,1980, Stanley Kubrick ordered the deletion of a final scene, in which the hotel manager Ullman visits Wendy in hospital, believing it unnecessary after witnessing the audience excitement in cinemas at the film's climax.

77.

Stanley Kubrick met author Michael Herr through mutual friend David Cornwell in 1980, and became interested in his book Dispatches, about the Vietnam War.

78.

Stanley Kubrick was intrigued by Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel The Short-Timers.

79.

Stanley Kubrick eventually found Hasford's novel to be "brutally honest" and decided to shoot a film which closely follows the novel.

80.

All of the film was shot at a cost of $17 million within a 30-mile radius of his house between August 1985 and September 1986, later than scheduled as Stanley Kubrick shut down production for five months following a near-fatal accident with a jeep involving Lee Ermey.

81.

Stanley Kubrick explained he made the film look realistic by using natural light, and achieved a "newsreel effect" by making the Steadicam shots less steady, which reviewers and commentators thought contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film.

82.

Stanley Kubrick concluded: "Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is more like a book of short stories than a novel", a "strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material".

83.

The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Freudian novella Traumnovelle, which Stanley Kubrick relocated from turn-of-the-century Vienna to New York City in the 1990s.

84.

Stanley Kubrick was almost 70, but worked relentlessly for 15 months to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16,1999.

85.

Stanley Kubrick commenced a script with Frederic Raphael, and worked 18 hours a day, while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film.

86.

Stanley Kubrick sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release, but his sudden death on March 7,1999, came a few days after he finished editing.

87.

Stanley Kubrick never saw the final version released to the public, but he did see the preview of the film with Warner Bros.

88.

Stanley Kubrick approached Spielberg in 1995 with the AI script with the possibility of Steven Spielberg directing it and Stanley Kubrick producing it.

89.

Stanley Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his.

90.

Stanley Kubrick tried to see every film about Napoleon and found none of them appealing, including Abel Gance's 1927 film which is generally considered to be a masterpiece, but for Kubrick, a "really terrible" movie.

91.

Stanley Kubrick drafted a screenplay in 1961, and envisaged making a "grandiose" epic, with up to 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry.

92.

Stanley Kubrick intended hiring the armed forces of an entire country to make the film, as he considered Napoleonic battles to be "so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets", with an "aesthetic brilliance that doesn't require a military mind to appreciate".

93.

Stanley Kubrick wanted them replicated as authentically as possible on screen.

94.

Stanley Kubrick sent research teams to scout for locations across Europe, and commissioned screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, one of his young assistants on 2001, to the Isle of Elba, Austerlitz, and Waterloo, taking thousands of pictures for his later perusal.

95.

Stanley Kubrick approached numerous stars to play leading roles, including Audrey Hepburn for Empress Josephine, a part which she could not accept due to semiretirement.

96.

Stanley Kubrick had been given a copy of the Mike Zwerin book Swing Under the Nazis after he had finished production on Full Metal Jacket, the front cover of which featured a photograph of Schulz-Kohn.

97.

Stanley Kubrick was unable to direct a film of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum as Eco had given his publisher instructions to never sell the film rights to any of his books after his dissatisfaction with the film version of The Name of the Rose.

98.

Stanley Kubrick read Pudovkin's seminal theoretical work, Film Technique, which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, and it needs to be employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest.

99.

Stanley Kubrick found the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski to be essential to his understanding the basics of directing, and gave himself a crash course to learn his methods.

100.

Stanley Kubrick's daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, the Aryan Papers, having spent years researching the subject.

101.

Stanley Kubrick declared that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality".

102.

Walker notes that Stanley Kubrick was influenced by the tracking and "fluid camera" styles of director Max Ophuls, and used them in many of his films, including Paths of Glory and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

103.

Stanley Kubrick noted how in Ophuls' films "the camera went through every wall and every floor".

104.

Stanley Kubrick once named Ophuls' Le Plaisir as his favorite film.

105.

LoBrutto notes that Stanley Kubrick identified with Welles and that this influenced the making of The Killing, with its "multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus".

106.

Stanley Kubrick was very careful not to present his own views of the meaning of his films and to leave them open to interpretation.

107.

Stanley Kubrick explained in a 1960 interview with Robert Emmett Ginna:.

108.

Stanley Kubrick likened the understanding of his films to popular music, in that whatever the background or intellect of the individual, a Beatles record, for instance, can be appreciated both by the Alabama truck driver and the young Cambridge intellectual, because their "emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects".

109.

Stanley Kubrick believed that the subconscious emotional reaction experienced by audiences was far more powerful in the film medium than in any other traditional verbal form, and this was one of the reasons why he often relied on long periods in his films without dialogue, placing emphasis on images and sound.

110.

Stanley Kubrick believed that audiences quite often were attracted to "enigmas and allegories" and did not like films in which everything was spelled out clearly.

111.

Sexuality in Stanley Kubrick's films is usually depicted outside matrimonial relationships in hostile situations.

112.

Stanley Kubrick's films are unpredictable, examining "the duality and contradictions that exist in all of us".

113.

Ciment notes how Stanley Kubrick often tried to confound audience expectations by establishing radically different moods from one film to the next, remarking that he was almost "obsessed with contradicting himself, with making each work a critique of the previous one".

114.

Malcolm McDowell recalled Stanley Kubrick's collaborative emphasis during their discussions and his willingness to allow him to improvise a scene, stating that "there was a script and we followed it, but when it didn't work he knew it, and we had to keep rehearsing endlessly until we were bored with it".

115.

Once Stanley Kubrick was confident in the overall staging of a scene, and felt the actors were prepared, he would then develop the visual aspects, including camera and lighting placement.

116.

Walker believes that Stanley Kubrick was one of "very few film directors competent to instruct their lighting photographers in the precise effect they want".

117.

Baxter believes that Stanley Kubrick was heavily influenced by his ancestry and always possessed a European perspective to filmmaking, particularly the Austro-Hungarian empire and his admiration for Max Ophuls and Richard Strauss.

118.

Johnson notes that although Stanley Kubrick was a "visual filmmaker", he loved words and was like a writer in his approach, very sensitive to the story itself, which he found unique.

119.

Stanley Kubrick was notorious for demanding multiple takes during filming to perfect his art, and his relentless approach was often extremely demanding for his actors.

120.

Stanley Kubrick's high take ratio was considered by some critics as "irrational"; he firmly believed that actors were at their best during the filming, as opposed to rehearsals, due to the sense of intense excitement that it generates.

121.

Stanley Kubrick would devote his personal breaks to having lengthy discussions with actors.

122.

Stanley Kubrick didn't want cameras always in a wide shot twenty-five feet away, he wanted close-ups, he wanted to keep the camera moving.

123.

Stanley Kubrick allowed actors at times to improvise and to "break the rules", particularly with Peter Sellers in Lolita, which became a turning point in his career as it allowed him to work creatively during the shooting, as opposed to the preproduction stage.

124.

Stanley Kubrick further added that working with Kubrick was "a stunning experience" and that he never recovered from working with somebody of such magnificence.

125.

Stanley Kubrick credited the ease with which he filmed scenes to his early years as a photographer.

126.

Stanley Kubrick rarely added camera instructions in the script, preferring to handle that after a scene is created, as the visual part of film-making came easiest to him.

127.

Alcott considered Stanley Kubrick to be the "nearest thing to genius I've ever worked with, with all the problems of a genius".

128.

Stanley Kubrick used it to its fullest potential, which gave the audience smooth, stabilized, motion-tracking by the camera.

129.

Stanley Kubrick described Steadicam as being like a "magic carpet", allowing "fast, flowing, camera movements" in the maze in The Shining which otherwise would have been impossible.

130.

Stanley Kubrick was among the first directors to use video assist during filming.

131.

Stanley Kubrick spent extensive hours editing, often working seven days a week, and more hours a day as he got closer to deadlines.

132.

For Stanley Kubrick, written dialogue was one element to be put in balance with mise en scene, music, and especially, editing.

133.

Stanley Kubrick's attention to music was an aspect of what many referred to as his "perfectionism" and extreme attention to minute details, which his wife Christiane attributed to an addiction to music.

134.

Stanley Kubrick preferred selecting recorded music over having it composed for a film, believing that no hired composer could do as well as the public domain classical composers.

135.

Stanley Kubrick felt that building scenes from great music often created the "most memorable scenes" in the best films.

136.

Nicholson likewise observed his attention to music, stating that Stanley Kubrick "listened constantly to music until he discovered something he felt was right or that excited him".

137.

Stanley Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz, a caricaturist, on May 29,1948, when he was 19 years old.

138.

Stanley Kubrick met his second wife, the Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952.

139.

Stanley Kubrick married Harlan in 1958 and the couple remained together for 40 years, until his death in 1999.

140.

The couple moved to the United Kingdom in 1961 to make Lolita, and Stanley Kubrick hired Peter Sellers to star in his next film, Dr Strangelove.

141.

Sellers was unable to leave the UK, so Stanley Kubrick made Britain his permanent home thereafter.

142.

Stanley Kubrick worked almost exclusively from this home for 14 years where, he researched, invented special effects techniques, designed ultra-low light lenses for specially modified cameras, pre-produced, edited, post-produced, advertised, distributed and carefully managed all aspects of four of his films.

143.

LoBrutto notes that Stanley Kubrick's confined way of living and desire for privacy has led to spurious stories about his reclusiveness, similar to those of Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes and JD Salinger.

144.

Stanley Kubrick disliked living in Los Angeles and thought London a superior film production center to New York City.

145.

Stanley Kubrick was a very shy person and self-protective but he was filled with the thing that drove him twenty-four hours of the day.

146.

Stanley Kubrick had obtained a pilot's license in August 1947 and some have claimed that he later developed a fear of flying, stemming from an incident in the early 1950s when a colleague was killed in a plane crash.

147.

Stanley Kubrick had been sent the charred remains of his camera and notebooks which, according to Duncan, traumatized him for life.

148.

On March 7,1999, six days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family and the stars, Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep at the age of 70, suffering a heart attack.

149.

Stanley Kubrick's funeral was held five days later at Childwickbury Manor, with only close friends and family in attendance, totaling about 100 people.

150.

Stanley Kubrick was buried next to his favorite tree on the estate.

151.

Part of the New Hollywood film-making wave, Stanley Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century", and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of cinema.

152.

Stanley Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, Todd Field, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noe.

153.

Stanley Kubrick won this award in 1999, and subsequent recipients have included George Lucas, Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, and Daniel Day-Lewis.

154.

On October 30,2012, an exhibition devoted to Stanley Kubrick opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and concluded in June 2013.

155.

In October 2013, the Brazil Sao Paulo International Film Festival paid tribute to Stanley Kubrick, staging an exhibit of his work and a retrospective of his films.

156.

Stanley Kubrick is widely referenced in popular culture; for example, the TV series The Simpsons is said to contain more references to Stanley Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon.

157.

Several works have been created that related to Stanley Kubrick's life, including the made-for-TV mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon, which is a parody of the pervasive conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick had been involved with the faked footage of the NASA moon landings during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.