3/28/2016

The Kubrick Site: Comments by Kubrick on Film

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Kubrick's "Notes on Film"

From The Observer Weekend Review, Sunday, December 4, 1960, p. 21
"With his anti-militarist "Paths of Glory", Stanley Kubrick established
himself as one of the most alert and trenchant young directors in
Hollywood. Since then he has made "Spartacus", the star-lled epic
which opens in London this week, and he is now in England to direct the
lm version of Lolita.
Still only thirty-two, Kubrick is one of the great white hopes of the
commercial lm industry as well as of cineastes. Box-ofce and the starsystem are conditions that Kubrick feels a good director should be able to
dominate: for him the fact that the cinema is an industry is part of its
essence as an art. His previous lms were "Fear and Desire", a dark,
moody study of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, "Killers Kiss",
and "The Killing", a microscopic record of a gang-robbery that had the
intensity of Ri and a style that moved critics to speak of Welles and
Max Ophuls. In 1957 "Paths of Glory" made Kubricks name.
These thoughts, jotted down for The Observer in odd moments, are a
Directors Notes on his Trade."
I don't think that writers or painters or lm 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 dont think that any genuine artist has
ever been orientated by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.
The making of any lm, whatever the historical setting or the size of the sets, has to
be approached in much the same way. You have to gure 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 rst as if there was nothing back there. Once it was rehearsed,
we worked out the background.
I must confess that I never thought very much about the proportions of the wide
screen after the rst day or two. I think that much too much emphasis is put on it. It
is really just another shape to compose to: for some scenes it's a better shape than
others; for some scenes it just doesn't make too much difference. Instead of having
the people stand two feet apart, sometimes you have them standing four feet apart;
or you throw up a prop in the corner or something. As to the big screen, a big screen
is a small screen from the back of the house and a normal screen is a big screen
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The Kubrick Site: Comments by Kubrick on Film

from the front rows.

I haven't come across any recent new ideas in lms 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 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.
When you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the crew, because it
is like getting undressed in front of fty people. Once you're accustomed to them, the
presence of even one other person on the set is discordant and tends to produce
self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in myself.
You feel you should run up to the person who is watching and say: Now look -- this
scene comes in here after this scene and we have just this other take: the reason
she is yelling so much is because... and so on.
Maybe the reason why people seem to nd it harder to take unhappy endings in
movies than in plays or novels is that a good movie engages you so heavily that you
nd 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 lm, it is almost like a bullght: 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.
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The Kubrick Site: Comments by Kubrick on Film

It is sometimes supposed that the way to make pictures entirely as one wants to,
without having to think about the box-ofce, is to dispense with stars in order to
make them on a low budget. In fact, the cost of a picture usually has little to do with
how much the actors get paid. It has to do with the number of days you take to shoot
it, and you cant make a lm as well as it can be made without having a sufcient
length of time to make it.
There are certain stories in which you can somehow hit everything on the nose
quickly and get the lm shot in three weeks. But it is not the way to approach
something of which you want to realise the full potential. So there often is nothing
gained by doing without stars and aiming the lm at the art houses. Only by using
stars and getting the lm on the circuits can you buy the time needed to do it justice.
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 lm 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 lms 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.
The important thing in lms is not so much to make successes as not to make
failures, because each failure limits your future opportunities to make the lms you
want to make.
People nowadays seem to have a great deal of difculty deciding whether a
character in a lm is good or bad -- especially the people who are making the lm. It
seems as if rst they deal out twenty-ve cents worth of good and then twenty-ve
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.
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I have no xed ideas about wanting to make lms in particular categories -Westerns, war lms and so on. I know I would like to make a lm that gave a feeling
of the times -- a contemporary story that nally gave a feeling of the times,
psychologically, sexually, politically, personally. I would like to make that more than
anything else. And it's probably going to be the hardest lm to make.
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