Stanley Kubrick is an American film director, known for his movies such as Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick was born and raised in New York City in 1929. His father introduced him to chess at the age of twelve, with hopes to get him involved in something because of his lack of interest in school and poor grades. Kubrick’s passion for chess started at the age of twelve and remained a life long obsession. He would use chess later in life as an artistic motif in his films.
Throughout his teen years, he became an avid photographer. He would take pictures and develop them in a friends dark room and at the age of seventeen sold his own prints. He was offered a job at Look Magazine as an apprentice photographer. His interest in photography lead to an interest in film. He created his first documentary in 1952 with friend Alexander singer called Day of the Flight. Kubrick made a few more documentaries following it but it wasn’t until 1956, that he would have the attention of Hollywood when he directed Killer’s Kiss and The Killing.
Kubrick’s film Lolita was his first in the UK. The film was based on the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s about a middle-aged college professor that becomes infatuated with a 14-year-old nymphet. Kubrick changed the order of events so that the beginning of the film was the ending of the novel and the events unfolded from the start.
His next film that he directed as in 1964, based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and George. It was started from the idea Kubrick had to make a thriller of an accidental nuclear war. He had originally wanted the movie to be a serious drama but it turned into satire of the cold war.
“My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.”-Stanley Kubrick (Macmillan International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers)
In Kubrick’s film, A Clockwork Orange, he wanted it to have a dream like quality, so he used a fisheye lenses and used fast and slow motion to enhance the fantasy quality of the film. Kubrick experimented with different filming techniques, such as throwing the camera off a rooftop to get the effected he wanted. The film is about a psychopath, Alex Delarge, who is simultaneously attractive and repellant. He is bright, witty, handsome, self confident, brave and adventurous, however he is completely devoid of empathy for anyone but himself. He has no morals or conscience. He and his friends beat up drunks, fight rivals, and constantly look for people to rape, rob, and beat. Because of the films controversy, it was band in the United Kingdom until its release in 2000, after Kubrick’s death. This was also the point in his career that he was known of film sets for his perfectionism. He constantly made the cast and crew perform dozens of takes with no breaks.
Greed
Lust
Gluttony
Envy
Sloth
Wrath
Pride
