Stanley Kubrick was born on 26 July in the Bronx, New York. His parents were American Jews of Central European origin. He has one sister, Barbara, six years his junior. His father, a well-known doctor, introduced him to chess at the age of twelve and to photography the following year when he gave him his first camera -- a Graflex -- for his birthday. The gift took Kubrick's mind off another of his youthful enthusiasms, jazz, and his dream of becoming a professional drummer. At school -- William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx -- the only good grades he received were in physics (science was his favorite subject) and he left at seventeen with a poorish average of sixty-seven. He was therefore refused entry to college, especially as in 1945 the return of thousands of young GIs from the war made standards of enrolment in higher education even more strict.
While still at high school, Kubrick had taken numerous photographs -- he was actually made the official school photographer -- and a few of these were exhibited. One morning in April 1945, on his way to school, he chanced to snap the haggard features of a newspaper vendor beside headlines announcing the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt; he then sold the photograph for twenty-five dollars to Look magazine, which offered him ten more than the New York Daily News. Shortly after, he proposed two other features to Look and both were accepted. One of these involved his English teacher, Aaron Traister, who had aroused his interest by playing all the roles in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays himself (a fascination with multiple role-playing which will later be found in his films.)
Though he enrolled in evening city classes at New York's City College in the hope of eventually being eligible for university, his involvement in photography was given a boost when Helen O'Brian, the head of Look's photographic department, found him a place on the magazine's team. He worked there for four years, travelling all over the country and even to Portugal, his camera concealed inside a shopping bag so that he would not be taken for a tourist or a journalist.
During these years of apprenticeship -- when his independence, his stamina, and his bright ideas were already such that he came to be regarded as one of the magazine's best photographers -- Kubrick applied himself to the avid study of a wide range of books that would contribute to his intellectual development in every possible field of knowledge. Because of this thirst for facts and ideas, he enrolled as a non-matriculating student at New York's Columbia University, where he sat in on classes given by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren.
Though they were destined to give way to the cinema, the young Kubrick's three favorite activities (two of which, chess and photography, are often viewed as frivolous pastimes) left a lasting mark on him. From chess, which he would continue to practice between takes (with George C. Scott, for example, during the filming of Dr. Strangelove), cam the mathematical precision of his plots, his enthusiasm for abstract speculation, and his view of life as a game in which one wrong move could be fatal. Photography, of course, gave him a feel for composition and an interest in visual effects, qualities evident in all of his films: he controls their photographic textures by working in close collaboration with his lighting cameramen, and occasionally shoots certain hand-held camera sequences himself. Jazz, finally, gave him a grounding in rhythm, in editing and in the art of selecting the right musical accompaniment for a scene, a talent which will have struck everyone who has seen his films.
Everyone knows how exacting Kubrick can be, how he insists on being in sole command of a film from its preparation and shooting to the editing process. "Stanley is an extremely difficult and talented person. We developed an extremely close relationship and as a result I had to live almost completely on tranquillizers", remarked one of his set designers, Ken Adam. And Arthur C. Clarke, the scenarist of 2001, added, "Every time I get through a session with Stanley, I have to go lie down." In effect, Kubrick submits his scenarists (Jim Thompson, Calder Willingham, Vladimir Nabokov, Terry Southern and Arthur C. Clarke) to a gruelling work schedule in which he himself actively participates (he wrote A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon on his own), devoting between six months and a year to the preparation of the script. But his view of screenplays remains pragmatic: "Thinking of the visual conception of a scene at script stage can be a trap that straitjackets the scene. I find it more profitable just to try to get the most interesting and truthful business going to support the scene and then see if there's a way to make it interesting photographically. There's nothing worse than arbitrarily setting up some sort of visual thing that really doesn't belong as part of the scene."
Kubrick has no interest in theories and, like all American directors, gives prominence to his actors. Shooting a film is the natural extension of writing it and actors are the essential means by which a director can give flesh to his vision. "Writers tend to approach the creation of drama too much in terms of words, failing to realize 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." James Mason, Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor and Kirk Douglas have all recognized Kubrick as a great director of actors, who is willing to spend his 'breaks' in lengthy discussions with them. Much has been written about the number of takes which he requires for each shot in his search for perfection; but none of his actors has ever questioned the merits of this method, however much he might have suffered from it. As Lady Lyndon's spiritual adviser, Murray Melvin recalls having played one scene fifty times. "I knew he had seen something I had done. But because he was a good director he wouldn't tell me what it was. Because if someone tells you you've done a good bit, then you know it and put it in parentheses and kill it." Jack Nicholson adds, "Stanley's demanding. He'll do a scene fifty times and you have to be good to do that. There are many ways to walk into a room, order breakfast or be frightened to death in a closet. Stanley's approach is: how can we do it better than it's ever been done before? It's a big challenge. A lot of actors give him what he wants. If you don't he'll beat it out of you -- with a velvet glove, of course." Malcolm McDowell has spoken of the long discussions he had with Kubrick about his character, emphasizing the degree to which the director, far from browbeating the actor, leaves him free to invent gestures and suggest variations: notion of using 'Singin' in the Rain' to accompany one of A Clockwork Orange's most violent sequences. "This is why Stanley is such a great director. He can create an atmosphere where you're not inhibited in the least. You'll do anything. Try it out. Experiment. Stanley gives you freedom and he is the most marvellous audience. I used to see him behind the camera with the handkerchief stuffed in his mouth because he was laughing so much. It gave me enormous confidence." Anthony Harvey, who edited Lolita and Dr.Strangelove, has noted how Kubrick would adjust the editing to the performances: "If an actor gives something terribly exciting in terms of performance, I think it is important to stay on his face, even though the conventional thing is to cut every so often to the person he is talking to. I think the audience can imagine the other character's reactions for themselves. There was a scene in Lolita where Sue Lyon is talking to James Mason and they are alone in the room: she was so extraordinary that we remained on her for the entire scene without cutting to him at all." The shooting script of Dr.Strangelove, though regarded by Harvey as the most brilliant and most perfectly constructed he had ever read, was also modified at the editing stage. Once the film had been shot, they realised that the rhythm was not sufficiently varied and the tension did not develop properly. They therefore decided to delay each change of scene in order to gain clarity and sustain interest.
The reaction of the Hollywood community at Oscar time perfectly illustrates the ambivalence of Kubrick's status. Because of his ambition and commercial success they are obliged to recognize him, but his refusal to become one of the 'family' and the distance which he maintains from Hollywood have wrecked his chances of ever being honoured Nominated Best Director for four films in succession (Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon), he shares with Charlie Chaplin, Josef von Sternberg, Orson Welles and Robert Altman (rebels, all of them!), but also with Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch, the unique distinction of never once having received an Academy Award for Best Direction.
The explanation for his equivocal position vis-a-vis critics and film people lies in the very nature and personality of his art. Disturbing both stylistically and thematically, refusing ever to do what is expected of him though sometimes infiltrating traditional cinematic genres (the war movie, science fiction, horror), ceaselessly experimenting yet prepared to play the commercial game, preferring spectacle and fantasy to moral complacency and philosophical certitudes, Stanley Kubrick, as an intellectual and an artist, has contrived to win over the public without sacrificing any of his ambitions. Which is surely because as a visionary film-maker bringing personal obsessions to life on the screen of his fantasy, he has been able to apprehend the underlying tensions of his period and tap its collective unconscious.