Where to Start with Stanley Kubrick

There are few names in cinema that are so famous, so synonymous with excellence, that you only need their surname to identify them. Coppola, Kurosawa, Spielberg, Miyazaki, Nolan, Bigelow; these are just some of the directing greats, and Stanley Kubrick certainly ranks amongst them. Even with those referred to by just one name, only a rare few have such an identifiable style, a way of thinking, and authorial control over their films, that they could be called a genuine ‘auteur’. Even fewer can have an ‘-ian’ suffix applied to them. Kubrick is one such name.

Born in Manhattan, New York on July 26th, 1928, Kubrick was deemed in his early years to have an above average IQ but distaste for the schooling system, recording only average grades and below-average attendance. He would later speak out against the American education system, claiming it narrowed critical thinking and creativity. In his teenage years, however, he discovered a love of photography, and spent much of his time in the 1940s making an income selling photographs to Look magazine and chess hustling in Washington Square Park for quarters and dimes to make ends meet.

Shy and introverted, he was often told that he didn’t have the personality for Hollywood, and that he’d never make it as a director. Despite this, in the early 1950s he saved and scrounged to make several short documentaries. Most of these have been lost, with only fragments surviving. They did, however, give him the experience he would need regarding filmic technique, as well as a little exposure to the industry. So, when 1953 came around, he would borrow $9,000 from his uncle to help finance his first narrative feature film; Fear and Desire.

Throughout the career to come, Kubrick would become famous for many things. Directorial trademarks would include long dolly shots, symmetrical framing, the ‘Kubrick Stare’ (a character with their head tilted slightly down, looking up to put their gaze on the level), multiple takes, and the use of practicals (lighting sources naturally in the film itself). His need for control over every aspect of filmmaking made him one of a kind, and his introverted, sometimes cold nature made him a nightmare for many who worked with him. His mark on cinema is undeniable, however; Kubrick is one of the giants of the craft of film directing. In this Guide from The Film Magazine are three of his very best cinematic paintings, the perfect places to begin your exploration of a fascinating, conflicting individual. This is Where to Start with Stanley Kubrick.

1. The Killing (1956)

Before he could do almost whatever he wanted with his auteur status, Kubrick had to earn his reputation. Although he later derided and refused to acknowledge his first film, Fear and Desire (1952), and Killer’s Kiss (1955) was an interesting if flawed trip into noir, his third film, The Killing (1955), would go on to be one of the defining film noir pieces, influencing everyone from Christopher Nolan to Quentin Tarantino.

Based on the novel “Clean Break” by Lionel White, Sterling Hayden’s Johnny Clay has planned the perfect heist: to rob a racecourse of two million dollars. For that he needs a team of other criminals who are all wanting a cut, and for nothing to go wrong.

Roger Ebert would retrospectively describe The Killing as Kubrick’s first mature picture, and it would be difficult to disagree. The film shows off Kubrick’s tight control of narrative, even when it’s jumping back and forth in a non-linear fashion, and his love of the moving camera, cutting only when absolutely necessary. With noir stalwart Elisha Cook Jr. at Hayden’s side (Cook famed for The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Shane, and others), the main cast give a fascinating script the paranoia and dread it needs. It’s proper noir, and done with such style and flair that it feels fresh, even if everything in it has been done to death already. The final sequence is one of the great images of mankind’s struggle against the coldness of an uncaring universe, seemingly Kubrick’s guiding philosophical direction throughout his oeuvre.

The film was plagued by producer interference, however, who demanded the typical noir voice-over and a cut of the film that was more linear in form, based on audience test screenings. Kubrick, much to his annoyance, relented, with further test screenings allowing him to go back to the jumbled narrative, but further cementing that he had to leave in the voice-over. Despite these problems, the film retains the atmosphere and style that only someone of Kubrick’s talents could give to a film. Inspiring numerous filmmakers, including Tarantino in Pulp Fiction’s scene of someone coming blasting out of a bathroom, to Nolan’s use of clown masks in the opening heist of The Dark Knight, this influential picture still holds audiences rapt all these years later.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

For many, 2001: A Space Odyssey is an impenetrable wall of pretentious, up-itself nonsense, filled with so many moments that require a response of ‘what the hell?’ that it makes the whole thing pointless. For others, it is one of the definitions of cinema itself, a blend of sight and sound that transcends millions of years and wraps the viewer up in the pure experience of cinema.

Using the Arthur C. Clarke short story “The Sentinel” as a starting point, 2001: A Space Odyssey charts the evolution of humankind, from the dawn of man to the beginnings of spaceflight and across the gulf of space to Jupiter and beyond, all in the search of the source of a mysterious black tablet, the monolith. Is this the work of extra-terrestrials? Gods? Another extension of ourselves?

Perhaps it is all of those things.

What is certain is that Kubrick tried with all his might to create something monumentally different in the science-fiction genre to anything most had seen before. The genre at this point was generally a very low-budget affair, with cheap alien invasion movies or space battle films reserved for William Castle and Roger Corman, or the matinee serials. Even Ray Harryhausen’s brilliant flying saucers in Earth vs Flying Saucers (1956) still didn’t enhance the genre’s reputation. Kubrick put budget and scope and arthouse into a schlocky genre, made over half the film without dialogue, and won his only Academy Award for technical achievement with the stargate sequence (he would be the only director to win the Oscar for special effects for the same film until Takashi Yamazaki for Godzilla Minus One in 2024). His aim, so he says, was to create ‘the ultimate science-fiction film.’ For 1968, nobody could argue that he probably achieved it. For many, it still hasn’t been topped.

With Kubrick’s attempt to give ideas through image and sound alone, using as little dialogue as he can get away with, he creates an almost transcendental experience that has become one of the most influential films of all time. Some films can be seen on any sized screen and the impact is the same, but 2001: A Space Odyssey should be seen on the biggest screen with the biggest sound system possible. It isn’t so much a film as an experience, an event through humanity itself.

3. The Shining (1980)

10 Best The Shining Moments

Kubrick was well known for creative license with his source materials. He turned “Lolita” and “Dr Strangelove” into comedies, turned the short story for 2001 into something which diverged from Arthur C. Clarke’s novelisation, and would take only the first 60% or so of “The Short Timers” for adaptation when he made Full Metal Jacket. When it came to The Shining, however, the adaptation of Stephen King’s 1976 novel of the same name, nobody knew what to make of it, including Stephen King himself. King would later show appreciation for the craft of the film, but also dislike it, claiming that Kubrick had created a grenade and heroically thrown himself onto it to muffle the blast.

Indeed, Kubrick’s version of the haunted Overlook Hotel, where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his family (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd) hole up through the winter as he takes on the role of caretaker, diverges much from the novel. Gone is most of the alcoholism theme that King put in (the novel is semi-autobiographical, hence his displeasure at the changes), and into it comes an unredeemable Jack, a far less resourceful Wendy, and a complete revamping of much of the iconography. Added to this is the ever-present question as to the true nature of events happening. King’s novel is very clear; ghosts. Kubrick’s film has been argued over a ghosts/madness interpretation almost as much as some of the centuries-old literary classics.

What makes The Shining unmissable is that it is possibly the most Kubrick a Kubrick film could be. The slow, single-point perspective tracking shots, the Kubrick stare, the balanced framing, the ambiguity, the sense that there are symbols and hidden meanings everywhere; everything is all there in one film. More than that, however, is the sense of dread and unease that permeates it. With a deliberately illogical set design constructed to disorient the viewer, we are taken into a labyrinthine world where we are sure secrets hide, but their revelations are not the point. Everything is designed to disorient and trap us with the unknown – the unknown anger of a family member, the unknown of the world itself. Jack Nicholson’s immortal performance and the endless tales of Kubrick’s perfectionism (including a much-debated 100-plus takes of Shelley Duvall’s bat-swinging scene) only add to its mystery and its prestige. There’s nothing quite like The Shining, and there may never be again.

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In later life, Stanley Kubrick would become good friends with up-and-comer Steven Spielberg, who was due to use the soundstage used for the Colorado Lounge in The Shining for the Well of Souls scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The two would spend many hours together and be firm friends over the next two decades. Spielberg’s own Schindler’s List moved Kubrick so much that he gave up on his own holocaust film. Years later, after his death, Spielberg would finish and direct 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a project Kubrick had been working on throughout the nineties, remarking that he had directed it in the way he imagined Kubrick would have done. Ironically, considering Kubrick didn’t believe in spirits, Spielberg commented that he felt himself directing A.I., almost as if he himself was being directed by Kubrick’s ghost.

When Stanley Kubrick passed away on March 7th, 1999, mere days after a final edit on his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, the tributes poured in. Posthumous BAFTAs and other awards were given, and soundstages at Pinewood Studios were renamed in his honour. He was often a difficult man, as the numerous reports of verbal and psychological abuse towards The Shining actress Shelley Duvall attest to, demanding dozens upon dozens of takes, seemingly for no reason at all, all in the quest for perfection. Kubrick was and continues to be a name for inciting discussion in the film world; he was truly one of a kind. Regardless of what one thinks of his on-set manner, it is impossible to argue that he was one of the giants of cinema.