Stanley Kubrick: Quotes

“Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?”

“His audacity is to insist on slowness in order to recreate the pace of life, and to ritualise behaviour of the time. A great example is the seduction scene, which he stretches until it settles into a sort of trance, what always struck me is the ballet of emotions of the film, watch the tension between the camera’s movements and the characters body language orchestrated by the music in this scene.”

“In other words, we’re all the children of D.W. Griffith and Stanley Kubrick.”

"...then you come across certain kinds of films that, when you go to the theatre and you see them, you're completely surprised, they make you look at life a different way, they make you look at being human a different way, they touch areas that you don't want touched sometimes, they provoke you, which is good...and then there's that rarest of films where when you see them continually over years, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty years, you still see more in it. And what's even better, is that if you're making pictures, you go back to this well, this source, for inspiration and to learn. To learn how to make pictures."

"Remarkable film, remarkable. And the more you see Eyes Wide Shut, the more you get involved in that world. At certain points you don't want to, because it's too painful, but it's...and Bernardo Bertolucci was saying this in Rome, he said "Eyes Wide Shut is really good, he puts you into his world!" and I said "yeah, I really know!"

"There's many ways I look at his films, besides the big screen. I like watching them on the television. I like watching them with the sound off. Sometimes you can see the rhythm of the cutting and the camera moves...and when he cuts in a two shot conversation and when he destroys the invisible line and when the cut gets tighter...on which line of dialogue."

"Why does something stay with you for so many years? It's really a person with a very powerful storytelling ability. A talent...a genius, who could create a solid rock image that has conviction."

"One of his pictures is equivalent to ten of somebody elses".

"The last frontier may be sexuality and beyond sexuality the complexity of the human psyches. This is the territory that Stanley Kubrick has minded in his films, like Kazan, Kubrick was a New York rebel that converted into an iconoclast. He emerged from independent productions and film noir to create his own unique visionary worlds. His association with Kirk Douglas on Paths of Glory and Spartacus established him as a mayor player, but he couldn't stand being an employee on studio projects and moved to London to make Lolita. He stayed there and hasn't worked in Hollywood since. He is one of the rare iconoclasts who has enjoyed the luxury of operating completely on his own terms."

"Here's James Mason, an European intellectual, discovering the trappings of small town America. When Kubrick made Lolita, the subject of a middle aged man infatuated with a sexually precocious minor was still completely taboo. This is not the contraband of a smuggler but an open defiance."

"Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's boldest project, it's a period piece set in 18th century Europe. He broke new technical ground having special lenses manufactured to capture the glow of the candle lit mansions of aristocracy, instead of a picaresque tale, Kubrick offered another grim journey of self destruction, the rise and fall of an opportunist, on the surface the approach was cold and distant, deceptive. But I found this to be one of the most profoundly emotional films I've ever seen."

"Kubrick's style is greatly unsettling. His audacity is to insist on slowness in order to recreate the pace of life, and to ritualize behavior of the time, a great example is Barry Lyndon's seduction scene, which he stretches until settles into a sort of trance, what always struck me is the ballet of emotions of the film, watch the tension between the camera's movements and the characters body language orchestrated by the music in this scene."

"Kubrick is really the killer. The other night, there it is again--The Shining. What could I do? I had to watch the whole goddam thing."

"Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had."

"When Eyes Wide Shut came out, a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you’ll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since.

If Kubrick had lived to see the opening of his final film, he obviously would have been disappointed by the hostile reactions. But I’m sure that in the end he would have taken it with a grain of salt and moved on. That’s the lot of all true visionaries, who don’t see the use of working in the same vein as everyone else. Artists like Kubrick have minds expansive and dynamic enough to picture the world in motion, to comprehend not just where its been, but where it’s going."

"The most interesting aspect of a scene is “controlled uncertainty”. That's what Kubrick got. Everybody else would shoot pretty conventionally, but when I saw Godard or Kubrick, in that period when I was studying film with more intensity, there was an unpredictability about Stanley Kubrick. Even as a kid, I didn't know what he would do next. It's the way Kubrick looks at reality. His reality is supercharged."

“He was the single greatest director of his generation. He influenced me deeply.”

"I was eighteen years old and it seemed so silly and ridiculous, and yet there was something undeniably powerful about it. It was one of the first films I saw as a young man that pointed to the government as indifferent to the needs of the people. Government as enemy to the people. I suppose many of our fears of big government are rooted in that theme, in Kubrick’s paranoia."

“I remember going with a great sense of anticipation to each new Stanley Kubrick film and thinking, “Can he pull it off and amaze me again?” And he always did. The lesson I learnt from Kubrick was, “Never do the same thing twice.”

"My goal is to rekindle those amazing mystical moments my generation felt when we first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey."

"It was my 40th birthday present to myself. I was on vacation in Europe, and I called him up and said, ‘I’m coming over,’ and went to his house in England. My wife at the time was freaked out that I wasn’t going to be back home for my birthday. But I said, ‘I’m going to meet Stanley Kubrick. There’s no present, no surprise party, no nothing you could give me that would supersede that.’ So I went to see this reclusive guy knocking around this big house and he just totally wanted to know how True Lies was made. He had a print of it on his KEM down in his basement, and made me sit there and tell him how I had done all the effects shots. So I spent the whole time talking about my movie with Stanley Kubrick, which was not where I thought the day was going to go. But I want to be like Stanley, I want to be that guy. When I’m 80, I want to still be the guy trying to figure it all out."

(on Kubrick's curiosity regarding the SFX in "True Lies"): "But it turns out that he does this with everybody. He's like a brain vampire. He likes to get people and suck what they're doing out of their heads."

"In the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like Kubrick's vision. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery, of humour and contradictions. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy."

“Well don’t you (Kubrick) remember the sequence (in Dr Strangelove) when they were trying to re-take Burpelson Air Force Base, and you shot that tremendous cinema verite scene with long lenses and hand held cameras with people shooting at the base and the squibs going off…and it was all done hand held? Well, it was the Signal Corps cameraman, and you, that influenced me on how to tell the story (Schindler’s List) that way, and then later on how to do Saving Private Ryan.”

“He was the grandmaster. He copied no one while all of us were scrambling to imitate him."

“He created more than movies. He gave us complete environmental experiences that got more, not less, intense the more you watched them.”

“Yes, but "The Killing" was better than "The Asphalt Jungle". The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing the model. For me, Kubrick is a better director than Huston. I haven't seen Lolita but I believe that Kubrick can do everything."

“Among the young generation, Kubrick strikes me as a giant.”

"I really love "Eyes Wide Shut". I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died."

(when asked of his favourite directors): "I love Stanley Kubrick and I can watch his movies over and over again."

“Each month Stanley Kubrick isn’t making a film is a loss to everybody.”

“Stanley’s good on sound. So are a lot of directors, but Stanley’s good on designing a new harness. Stanley’s good on the colour of the mike. Stanley’s good on the merchant he bought the mike from. Stanley’s good about the merchant’s daughter who needs some dental work.”

"I'm ashamed to admit it, but the first thought through my mind when I heard that he died was not, Oooh, Stanley, my dear friend. It was, "Fucking shit! Not going to get to do another movie with him. I wouldn't have suspected that would have been my reaction, but it's true."

"Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he's the man, and I still feel that underrates him."

“Stanley Kubrick is one of the geniuses of this century.”

"Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit!"

"He'll be a fine director some day, if he falls flat on his face just one. It might teach him how to compromise."

"Stanley was my favourite [director to work with] and a genius with the camera...His greatest effectiveness was his one-on-one relationship with actors."

“One scene with Kirk and me, Stanley looked around and said to Russ Metty, the director of photography, "I can't see the actors' faces." Russ was sitting in his high chair, and there was one of those lights on the floor and he pushed it with his foot and the light skewered right into the shot. He said, "Now, is that enough light?" Stanley looked and said, "Now it's too much light." Cool through the whole experience -- nothing made him nervous.”

“Stanley would never capitulate. I remember he asked for 15 or 20 extras for a little scene and the assistant director came over and said they had talked it over with the studio and decided to cut down the amount of extras. And Stanley said, "No, we'll double the amount." He refused to allow anybody to tell him how to do the picture.”

"[In the original concept], once David was dumped he met up with a more adult mecha who led him through a more adult mecha world, and Gigolo Joe was much darker, much more aggressive, much more twisted."

"Kubrick's ideas for AI were much more extreme. More overty sexual. Huge phallic skyscrapers, buildings with their legs wide open.”

“Spielberg's approach to Gigolo Joe was the perfect middle ground, compared to Kubrick's far darker original vision. The character was originally much more aggressive, sinister, and far from Spielberg's revised conception as an innocent who's abused. He's a hooker who ultimately comes round to learning to love in a different way."

“I’ve always been an enormous fan of Stanley Kubrick.”

"It's the best of the best. No film can hope to top it(Kubrick's 2001)."

"Yes, I made this (a recreation of the trench sequence in Paths of Glory)...this was in the 60s with the BBC. Of course it was never aired, Kubrick would sue me, but I've always had tremendous respect for him."

“I was actually a film student when I first saw [A Clockwork Orange] on videotape, and eventually saw it in the theatre and discovered even more that I had missed before. And I discovered that you could actually get away with moving the camera slowly, revealing things slowly with a zoom or with a dolly, and having it still be continually interesting.”

"There's no point in making films unless you intend to show us something special, otherwise just go out and watch a play. Kubrick showed us something special. Every film was a challenge, and a direct assault on cinema's conventions."

"In the end, I think he began to have trouble, because if you can’t leave home, you lose track of reality, and I think that happened to him. Still, he made great movies and he was a completely gifted director. If you look at “2001: A Space Odyssey”, you suddenly realise: My God, there’s nobody in this movie!"

"Of course, his films are all chilling. 2001 blew away the 3 act structure, but his other films are equally unique. We are only now catching up."

"Kubrick projected such a completely distinctive style with so little previous filmmaking experience. Here was a typical, episodic detective story—nothing unusual in the plot—but Stanley made a series of bizarre and interesting choices which buttressed and embellished an ordinary story into an exciting film.”

"Stanley is unusually perceptive, and delicately attuned to people. He has an adroit intellect, and is a creative thinker--not a repeater, not a fact-gatherer. He digests what he learns and brings to a new project original point of view and a reserved passion."

"We'd spend endless hours talking. I could see he was trying to understand my feelings and I don't blame him for it. He's a very wise man."

"I saw Barry Lyndon at the Cinerama Dome on a screen so big I just went, "Oh my God!""

"It took me 20 years to appreciate Kubrick. I put Barry Lyndon on in my hotel room and couldn't look away. That's great film making."

"Kubrick was a wonderful director. I love all his movies. These are pictures any director would be proud to be associated with, much less to make."

"Kubrick's science fiction is always about the psychological. There's stuff in that movie. All the effects are inspired ideas, as is the case with A Clockwork Orange. In fact, A Clockwork Orange had a huge inspiration on Pi in that I was fed up with all the films that had been coming out that weren't really edgy. In the the theatres this past summer, there were no films had any sort of style or direction - that were cool, hip and different than other films. Growing up, I always wanted to see A Clockwork Orange. I've seen it at least ten times in the movie theatre because it's so riveting. I want to aspire to those heights."

"I think he's probably the greatest American film director. He's completely original. He's still ahead of anyone else."

"In the 60's they were four filmmakers who represented cinema and influenced everyone who came after: Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman and Kubrick."

"There's usually some of Kubrick in all of my films."

"Kubrick was a good model. He had an autonomy I've never had but that one desire. He organized things a certain way. And he had a good relationship with Warner Brothers. He was their class act."

"It was one of the few times in my life that I realised that the artist was so much ahead of me."

"We're all children of Kubrick, aren't we? Is there anything you can do that he hasn't already done?"

"It's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It always seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with. 'Singin' in the Rain'' in Clockwork Orange — that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind."

(while presenting the BAFTA/LA's Stanley Kubrick Britannia award to Sean Penn) "Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist and a man of amazing intellect. Sean's not really either one of those things. Stanley Kubrick was a photographer in the beginning of his career. Sean has done considerable damage to photographers' cameras in the beginning of his career.”

"He died too young, Stanley, and I'm sure he's absolutely pissed-off being dead. I think his movie (Eyes Wide Shut) definitely was not finished, because he had the sound mix still to do and the looping with the actors, where you add dialogue and so change performances. It's only people who don't know about filmmaking who think it will be Stanley's movie because a huge part of it won't be. And I wonder who the hell is finishing editing it. Are they going to get Spielberg? It did occur to me to finish it, especially given the subject matter. It feels a little like Crash to me on one level. But I don't know that I'd want to be in the middle of that. It could get very political. The answer for a filmmaker is ‘Don't die!'

"I relate to Kubrick's intelligence and literacy, and there seems to be a dearth of that in filmmaking these days, but I never thought of him as a comrade in arms. In terms of subject matter and methodology, I think we were at far distant poles. Even the way he made movies is much more techno-obsessed than I am. I don't think I'm techno-obsessed at all. I'm organic-obsessed. That's why my technology is all organic. My understanding of technology is as an extension of the human body. So when people say, ‘Are your movies about a fear of technology?' I don't see that. I see technology as innately human. It seems to be innate in us to create and so much of our creativity comes out as technological invention. And I don't think of it as being outside ourselves. I think it's inside us first and then it's an extension of us. And I don't get that from Kubrick's films."

“People say he had these phobias, he wouldn't go here and wouldn't go there. The truth is he lived in a paradise -- there wasn't any reason for him to go anywhere. It was a kind of a heaven.”

“My initial take on my part [in "Eyes Wide Shut"] was very different from what Stanley wanted. I came in with the idea of being tougher with the character of Tom [Cruise] because he had done something that I disapproved of strongly. And then Stanley had an idea of my wanting to manipulate him more and therefore be kinder, and he was very specific about how to communicate that. He knew I was another director -- he didn't have to beat around the bush. He wasn't trying to work any psychological tricks with me. And he was crazy about both Tom and Nicole.

I always think of Stanley literally on the edge of a smile. His eyes always had mischief in them. He always had this sense of the devil in him while he was very calmly asking questions. He read everything, and knew absolutely all aspects of the business, including literally what the box-office receipts of every theater in the world were over the past few years.”

(when asked about the constant Kubrick references in their films) "Sure, we like Kubrick."

"Yesterday I wore a particular shirt, which was Kubrick's favourite shirt. His last picture was costumed by an English costume designer who I used three times. She passed away a couple of years ago, but she said Kubrick had seven sets of this particular shirt. He'd only wear that shirt every day, so she made one for me and I love it. I just worship Kubrick. 2001, I couldn't really figure out what it was but I saw it when I was young and it captured me. It's like an acid trip! [laughs]"

"I see it (2001: A Space Odyssey) every week."

"I don't think that matters. I have a great affection for Kubrick and this film only strips things further."

"I wrote a 'Barry Lyndon' kind of narration because I love 'Barry Lyndon,' and in film school, they taught us that narration was poor taste."

"It was common knowledge that Stanley always knew something you didn't."

"I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don’t agree. I think that "Barry Lyndon" or "A Clockwork Orange" are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject. But in fact, "Full Metal Jacket" is even more so. It looked at rigidity and brutality with an almost clinical eye. It is, for me, a singular film about the military, about war and its consequences. The famous scenes, like the induction with R Lee Ermey where he renames the soldiers and reshapes them into sub-human maggots, had a particular impact on me. Also the suicide scene with Vincent D’Onofrio in the bathroom. And the sniper set-piece at the end. Those are absolutely virtuoso pieces of filmmaking."

"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."

"All you can do is either pose questions or make truthful observations about human behaviour. The only morality is not to be dishonest.”

"I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality. At the same time, it is very sad to say, films have had the opposite problem -- they have consistently tried to formalize and repeat success, and they have clung to a form and style introduced in their infancy. The sure thing is what everone wants, and originality is not a nice word in this context. This is true despite the repeated example that nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing."

"Observation is a dying art."

"I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it."

"I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old."

"How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001."

"The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves."

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.”

"Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all."

“I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are."

"I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker--in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business."

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. If we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

“...the question must be considered whether Rousseau's view of man as a fallen angel is not really the most pessimistic and hopeless of philosophies. It leaves man a monster who has gone steadily away from his nobility. It is, I am convinced, more optimistic to accept Ardrey's view that '...we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels...”

"Heroic violence in the Hollywood sense is a great deal like the motivational researchers' problem in selling candy. The problem with candy is not to convince people that it's good...but to free them from the guilt of eating it. We have seen so many times that the body of a film serves merely as an excuse for motivating a final blood-crazed slaughter by the heroes of his enemies, and at the same time to relieve the audience's guilt of enjoying this mayhem."

“The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.”

"One of the things that amazes me about some directors who have had financial successes, is that they seem eager to give up directing to become film moguls. If you care about films, I don't see how you could want someone else to direct for you."

"The novel (The Shining) is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is all that really matters.

"With The Shining, the problem was to extract the essential plot and to re-invent sections of the story that were weak. The characters needed to be developed a bit differently than they were in the novel. It is in the pruning down phase that the undoing of great novels usually occurs because so much of what is good about them has to do with the fineness of the writing, the insight of the author and often the density of the story. But The Shining was a differnt matter. Its virtues lay almost entirely in the plot, and it didn't prove to be very much of a problem to adapt it into the screenplay form. Diane and I talked a lot about the book and then we made an outline of the scenes we thougth should be included in the film. This list of scenes was shuffled and reshuffled until we thought it was right, and then we began to write. We did several drafts of the screenplay, which was subsequently revised at different stages before and during shooting. To be honest, the end of the book seemed a bit hackneyed to me and not very interesting. I wanted an ending which the audience could not anticipate."

"I only want people working on this one (Full Metal Jacket) that no one will hire, or, if they hired them, would never dream of hiring them again."

"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."

"If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered."

"I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was."