Influence of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick is regarded by film critics and historians as one of the most influential directors of all time.^[1][2] Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan,^[3][4] David Lynch, and George A. Romero,^[5] have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration.^[6][7] In an interview for the Eyes Wide Shut DVD release, Steven Spielberg comments that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history", and that Kubrick told stories in a way "antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese notes most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released, only to be considered masterpieces later on.

Orson Welles, one of Kubrick's strongest personal influences, famously said: "Among those whom I would call 'younger generation' Kubrick appears to me to be a giant."^[8] The directors Richard Linklater,^[9] Sam Mendes,^[10] Quentin Tarantino,^[11] Joel Schumacher,^[12] Taylor Hackford,^[13] and Darren Aronofsky^[14] have all mentioned Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films.

Influence

Kubrick continues to be cited as important to the artistic careers of several later directors, including David Fincher,^[15] Guillermo del Toro,^[16] David Lynch,^[17] Lars von Trier,^[18] Michael Mann,^[19] and Gaspar Noé.^[20] Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick.^[21] The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent,^[22] contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The storytelling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Dr. Strangelove.^[23] Director Tim Burton has included a few visual homages to Kubrick in his work, notably using actual footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,^[24] and modeling the look of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in his version of Alice in Wonderland on the Grady girls in The Shining.^[25] Film critic Roger Ebert also noted that Burton's Mars Attacks! was partially inspired by Dr. Strangelove.^[26] The video for The Killers' song "Bones" that Burton directed includes clips from Kubrick's Lolita, as well as other films from the general era.

Kubrick's influence on Todd Field was perhaps the most direct. After acting in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Field immediately went on to make In the Bedroom. William Arnold, in reviewing the film, wrote:

"Like Kubrick, Field's direction manages to feel both highly controlled and effortlessly spontaneous at the same time; and his lifting of the facade of this picturesque, Norman Rockwell setting is carried out with surgical precision ... also like Kubrick, Field doesn't make any moral judgments about his characters, and his film remains stubbornly enigmatic. It can be read as a high-class revenge thriller, an ode to the futility of vengeance or almost anything in between.."^[27]

In January 2002 Field cited Kubrick as an important inspiration:

"'He confirmed a lot of things for me about the process of making a film… single-mindedness… trusting your script, not trying to make everybody love it.."' ^[28]

Use of music

Paul Thomas Anderson (who was fond of Kubrick as a teenager)^[29] in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, stated "it's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It can all seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with."^[30] Reviewer William Arnold described Anderson's There Will Be Blood as a stylistic homage to Kubrick, "particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey– opening with a similar prologue that jumps in stages over the years and using a soundtrack throughout that employs anachronistic music."^[31]

Although Michael Moore specializes in documentary filmmaking, at the beginning of shooting his only non-documentary feature film Canadian Bacon, he sat his cast and crew down to watch Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. He told them, "What this movie was in the '60s, is what we should aspire to with this film." Moore had previously written Kubrick a letter telling him how much Bacon was inspired by Strangelove.^[32]

Film director Frank Darabont has been inspired by Kubrick's use of music. In an interview with The Telegraph, he states that 2001 took "the use of music in film" to absolute perfection, and one shot employing classical music in The Shawshank Redemption follows Kubrick's lead. On the other hand, while Darabont has followed Kubrick in directing two Stephen King adaptations, Darabont shares Stephen King's negative view of Kubrick's adaption of The Shining and claims that 2001 is his greatest film.^[33]

Critics occasionally detect a Kubrickian influence when the filmmaker acknowledges none. Critics have noticed the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Danish independent director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jim Pappas suggests this comes from Refn's employment of Kubrick's cinematographer for Eyes Wide Shut in his film Fear X, suggesting "it is the Kubrick influence that leaves us asking ourselves what we believe we should know is true".^[34] The apparent influence of Kubrick on his film Bronson was noted by the Los Angeles Times^[35] and the French publication Evene^[36] When asked by Twitch about the very frequent comparisons by critics of the film Bronson to A Clockwork Orange, Refn denied the influence.^[37] Refn stated

Of course if you put violence with classical music, people think it's obvious that's Clockwork Orange, because Kubrick used it very well and you always look at it as a reference. There are similarities between my Bronson and the Alex character from Clockwork Orange. There is kind of anti-authoritarian popculture iconish quality, but I stole every single thing from Kenneth Anger. Bronson is a mixture of [Anger's] Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Scorpio Rising (1964).

Kubrick's direction has impacted the field of rock music as well. American rock group the Byrds were inspired to cover Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" for their album Mr. Tambourine Man after hearing the song's use in Dr. Strangelove.

Homages

In 2000 BAFTA renamed their Britannia lifetime achievement award the "Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award".^[38] Kubrick is among filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Laurence Olivier, Cecil B. DeMille, and Irving Thalberg, all of whom have had annual awards named after them. Kubrick won this award in 1999, and subsequent recipients have included George Lucas, Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, and Daniel Day-Lewis.^[39]

Entrance to Kubrick museum exhibit at LACMA

A number of people who worked with Kubrick on his films created the 2001 documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who had executive produced Kubrick's last four films.^[40] The film's chapters each cover one of Kubrick's films, and Kubrick's childhood is explored in the introductory section.

On October 30, 2012, an exhibition devoted to Kubrick opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and concluded in June 2013. The exhibition, curated by Deutsches Filminstitut and Deutsches Architekturmuseum, was previously displayed in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2004); Berlin, Germany (2005); Melbourne, Australia (2006); Ghent, Belgium, and Zurich, Switzerland (both in 2007); Rome, Italy (2008); Paris, France (2011); and Amsterdam, Netherlands (2012).^[41] Exhibits include a wide collection of documents, photographs and on-set material assembled from 800 boxes of personal archives that were stored in Kubrick's home-workplace in the U.K.^[42] A number of celebrities attended and spoke at the museum's pre-opening gala, including Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson,^[43] while Kubrick's widow, Christiane, appeared at the pre-gala press review.^[44]

On November 7, 2012, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in conjunction with the LACMA exhibition, celebrated Kubrick's life and career. Malcolm McDowell hosted, and along with other actors, including Paul Mazursky, Ryan O'Neal and Matthew Modine, discussed personal experiences of working with Kubrick.^[45]

In October 2013, the Brazil São Paulo International Film Festival paid tribute to Kubrick, staging an exhibit of his work and a retrospective of his films.^[46] The exhibit was also scheduled to open at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in late 2014.^[47]

In popular culture

The TV series The Simpsons is said to contain more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound to many of his films, including 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining.^[48] When the Directors Guild of Great Britain gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a cut-together sequence of all the homages from the show.^[49]

In 2009, an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films was held in Dublin, Ireland, entitled 'Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light'.^[50] In 2010, painter (and film storyboard artist) Carlos Ramos held an exhibition entitled "Kubrick" in Los Angeles, featuring paintings in a variety of styles based on scenes from Stanley Kubrick films.^[51]

Among her multiple allusions to Kubrick in song and video, pop singer Lady Gaga's video for "Bad Romance" appeared to pay homage to Kubrick,^[52] and her concert shows have included the use of dialogue, costumes, and music from A Clockwork Orange.^[53]

The Jim Carrey comedy Fun with Dick and Jane refers several times to an all-important "CRM-114" form. CRM 114, or variations, is an "easter egg" in several Kubrick films, such as Dr. Strangelove.

Both heavy metal bands, Slipknot and Mudvayne payed homage to The Shining; the former with the music video of their song, "Spit it Out", directed by Thomas Mignone, where it consists of conceptual imagery of the bandmates each portraying characters enacting iconic scenes from the film, with Joey Jordison as Danny Torrance; Shawn Crahan and Chris Fehn as the Grady twins; Corey Taylor as Jack Torrance; Mick Thomson as Lloyd the Bartender; Craig Jones as Dick Hallorann; James Root as Wendy Torrance; Paul Gray as Harry Derwent; and Sid Wilson as the corpse in the bathtub. The video was banned from MTV for overtly graphic and violent depictions, including Corey Taylor's smashing through a door with an axe and the scene wherein James Root viciously assaults Corey Taylor with a baseball bat. Mignone and the band eventually re-edited a less violent version, which was subsequently aired on MTV.^[54][55] Mudvayne's song, "Dull Boy" is a tribute to the film quoting the line, "all work and no play makes me a dull boy."

Films about elements of Kubrick's life

In the early 1990s, a con artist named Alan Conway frequented the London entertainment scene claiming to be Stanley Kubrick, and temporarily deceived New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, as well as multiple aspiring actors. Kubrick's personal assistant, Anthony Frewin, who helped track Conway down, wrote the screenplay for a film based on the Conway affair Colour Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich as Alan Conway. Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, was also a consultant for the film. The film contains several tongue-in-cheek homages to scenes from Kubrick's films. Conway was earlier the subject of a short documentary film The Man Who Would be Kubrick.

In 2002, the French documentary film maker William Karel (occasionally referred to as "Europe's Michael Moore") made initial plans for a documentary on Stanley Kubrick, but changed course. Karel was fascinated by the pervading conspiracy theory that Kubrick had faked footage of the NASA moon landings during the filming of Space Odyssey, and chose to make a parody "mockumentary" entitled Dark Side of the Moon advancing the same thesis entirely in jest. He had the help of Kubrick's surviving family who both acted as consultants for the film and gave scripted fake interviews. In spite of clues that the film is a news parody, some test audiences believed the film to be sincere, including at least one believer in the moon landing conspiracy.

Kubrick has been portrayed on film by actor Stanley Tucci in the film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Although Sellers acted in two of Kubrick's films, the material here is almost wholly focused on their work together in Dr. Strangelove.

In 2012, the documentary film Room 237 was released, which speculates about overt and hidden meanings behind the The Shining. The film includes footage from that and other Kubrick films, along with discussions by a number of Kubrick experts. The film includes nine segments, with each segment focusing on different elements within the film which "may reveal hidden clues and hint at a bigger thematic oeuvre."^[56]

References