Only 25 when he made his first film, Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick was already a complete director: he wrote the script, did the shooting, directed and edited. Two years later, in 1955, prefiguring La Nouvelle Vague, he similarly controlled Killer's Kiss, filming in the streets of New York with a modest budget.
Jazz drummer and chess player in his youth, he always associated manual labour with mental work. At the same time, practicing photography – with a Graflex that his father gave him when he was 13 – combined the technical with the artistic.
More so than any of his contemporaries, he accorded the greatest importance to the resources of technology to make it correspond to his stylistic needs. Like Renaissance painters, he would neglect nothing of the concrete practice of his art to achieve his aesthetic goals. While some have maintained that he could have been a great general in another life, he could just as well have been a topflight engineer.
A film-buff filmmaker, Kubrick always aspired to do better than his predecessors, to respond to the dissatisfaction he felt with films from the past. Thus, with 2001: A Space Odyssey, he hoped to forget the approximations of cinematographic journeys in the cosmos. The film's 205 special effects, entrusted to Douglas Trumbull, were perfected over a period of a year and a half after the end of the shooting. For the first part, 'The Dawn of Man', the filmmaker found very wide-angle lenses and built a 10" x 8" projector to project photos on a 30 m x 10 m screen in the background. The transparencies consisted exclusively of photos taken in Africa according to his precise instructions. For the sequence of the journey to infinity, he took inspiration from an experimental film by Jordan Belson and developed the Slit Scan system. His work on lighting in 2001: A Space Odyssey foreshadows his later films: he opened the diaphragm to the maximum to film the interiors as well as the models. As far as possible, the light really came from sources present in the film set, either on the ceiling (the entrance hall of the space Hilton) or under the floor (the 18th-century bedroom).
With his chief cameraman, John Alcott, he sought to use only candlelight to illuminate the gaming room in Barry Lyndon. To that end, he used three Zeiss 50mm f/0.7 lenses perfected for NASA's Apollo lunar landing project. An old Mitchell BNC camera was modified to receive these lenses of very wide aperture. For the battle scenes in this film, and with equal concern for realism, he used a dolly wheel bogies placed on ordinary metal platforms. Three cameras with 250mm fixed-length lenses, the longest in existence, shooting simultaneously, thereby moved along a 300-metre rail to follow the combatants.
The invention of the Steadicam by Garrett Brown was going to enable him to perfect the fluidity of his camera movements. This system, intended to stabilise the camera, gave him the possibility, in The Shining, of filming Danny's tricycle travels through the corridors of Hotel Overlook four centimetres from the ground. The film's artistic conception was inseparable from this technical breakthrough. For Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick camouflaged the lighting in natural sources. In the opening sequence, we see the film set of the barracks in 360° thanks to broads placed in front of the windows. As his chief cameraman, John Alcott, avowed admiringly, "Working for [Kubrick] is like going to school and, in addition, getting paid for it!"
Michel Ciment