When we think of a creative mastermind at work,
we usually picture like a watchmaker. Oh yeah,
someone sitting in this totally quiet, pristine
room. Right, just squinting through a tiny magnifying
glass, placing these microscopic gears into,
you know, perfect alignment. Exactly, because
every single piece behaves exactly as it's supposed
to. It's clean. It's totally predictable. But
what happens when you take that sterile, flawless
precision and try to apply it to a chaotic film
set? Right, because suddenly those little gears
are thousands of tired, argumentative human beings.
Exactly. They need feeding. They have huge egos.
And well, they talk back. Welcome to today's
Deep Dive. Glad to be here. Today we are unpacking
this massive collection of biographical records,
production notes, and historical accounts covering
the life, the films, and the truly obsessive
genius of director Stanley Kubrick. It's a wild
ride. It really is. And our mission today is
to figure out how a bored, failing high school
student evolved into the ultimate cinematic mastermind.
Yeah, we're really going to explore the absolute
extremes a person will go to in order to achieve
pure perfection. Right. And what his intense
need for control can teach you about realizing
your own creative visions. And, you know, what's
so compelling about this journey is the profound
irony of where it actually began. Oh, for sure.
If you looked at Stanley Kubrick on paper as
a teenager growing up in the Bronx, you would
not see a future mastermind. I mean, he wasn't
a child prodigy in the traditional academic sense
at all. Not even close. No. In fact, he was a
thoroughly mediocre student. We're talking about
a kid with a 67 or like a D plus grade average.
That is just so crazy to think about. Right.
He was introverted. He absolutely hated the rigid
structure of a classroom. And he would regularly
just skip school entirely. Just to go sit in
the dark at local cinemas watching double features
all day. Exactly. So how does a kid failing high
school become a visionary who literally redefines
an entire art form? Well, it all points back
to two really pivotal gifts from his father,
Jack Kubrick. His dad was a homeopathic doctor,
right? Yeah, and he was incredibly frustrated
by his son's poor grades. But he still recognized
that there was a sharp mind in there somewhere.
Right, he saw the potential. Did. So when Stanley
was 13, his dad gave him a Greflex camera. And
then the second gift was teaching him the game
of chess. And those two things just completely
changed the game for him. They essentially rewired
his brain. I mean, the camera gave him a way
to frame and capture reality. It gave him the
sense of ownership over what he was looking at.
But the chess, the chess was the absolute key,
wasn't it? Oh, the key to his entire philosophy.
Not just as a director, but just as a human being.
Because he actually joined the United States
Chess Federation, right? Yeah. He spent a lot
of time playing chess for quarters in Washington
Square Park. And he explained later that the
game taught him patience and discipline. It taught
him how to assess a complex board. Exactly. How
to anticipate multiple moves ahead, and above
all, how to maintain total control of the environment.
And you can really see those chess skills translating
directly into his career. Oh, absolutely. Because,
I mean, the jump from a kid who couldn't stand
the structure of high school to a man commanding
thousands of people on a film set, that's massive.
What a huge leap. But he started small framing
reality through a lens. In the 1940s, he gets
a job as an apprentice and eventually a staff
photographer for Look magazine. And this is where
you really see his obsession with human psychology
forming. There's this one assignment where he
took 18 different pictures of people just waiting
in a dental office. And that dental office assignment
is so revealing. because he wasn't interested
in glamorous, you know, staged portrait shots.
He wanted the real stuff. Exactly. He realized
that the first picture you take of someone is
just a pose. They're projecting exactly what
they want you to see. Right. They're smiling.
They're sitting up straight. But by the 18th
picture, the subject gets bored. They completely
drop their guard and you capture this raw. unstaged
human emotion in the most mundane environment.
He was learning how to tell a story visually,
basically by just waiting out his subjects until
they gave him the truth. Yeah, and he took that
scrappy, independent mindset directly into his
filmmaking. Because he didn't even go to film
school, did he? No, not at all. He self -funded
his early short films. He made his very first
documentary short, Day of the Fight, for just
$3 ,900. Wow, just $3 ,900. Yeah. He literally
just rented a camera, carried it around, and
figured out the mechanics of filmmaking completely
on the fly. Which I imagine naturally led to
some major growing pains. Oh, definitely. His
first feature film, Fear and Desire, was this
famously chaotic, super low -budget shoot. Wait,
isn't that the one where he almost killed everyone?
Yes. At one point, he accidentally almost killed
his cast with poisonous gas because he was trying
to create an artificial fog effect. That is insane.
Just a casual chemical warfare on set. Right.
And later in life, he actually kept Prince of
the Movie out of circulation. He called it a
bumbling amateur film exercise. I mean, fair
enough after the gas incident. But the crucial
thing is that he learned the technical mechanics
of his craft from the ground up all by himself.
And that ground -up education really sets the
stage for his first massive Hollywood blockbuster,
Spartacus, in 1960. Yeah, this is a huge turning
point. He's just 31 years old, and he's handed
a six million dollar budget, which by the way
was the most expensive American film ever made
at the time. It was a massive undertaking. And
he has a cast of over 10 ,000 people, including,
like, 8 ,000 trained Spanish soldiers acting
as extras for the battle scenes? But this is
exactly where the watchmaker's gears start grinding
against the Hollywood machine. Right, because
he wasn't actually in charge of everything. No.
The film was actually produced by its star, Kirk
Douglas. And Douglas had fired the original director,
Anthony Mann, just a week into shooting. So he
brings Kubrick in to fix it. Exactly. And the
clashes between Douglas and Kubrick were just...
monumental Kubrick was absolutely furious about
not having full creative control over the script
and the visual style so what did he do well in
this massive power moves Kubrick took the script
and essentially gutted it he cut almost all of
Kirk Douglas's dialogue in the first 30 minutes
of the film Wow just cut the star producers lines
yeah forcing the story to be told visually rather
than through all this clunky exposition You know,
it's exactly like finally landing your absolute
dream job at this massive prestigious tech company.
Right. Only to walk in on day one and realize
the corporate bureaucracy is completely suffocating
your ability to actually build anything good.
There's a perfect analogy. You can really see
his chest training kicking in here. He looks
at the Hollywood studio system, realizes he's
basically playing as a pawn for the producers,
and decides, no, I need to be the grandmaster.
That is exactly what happened. Now Spartacus
went on to He won four Academy Awards. It was
a massive commercial success, taking in over
$14 million at the box office. Which is huge.
Huge. For most 31 -year -old directors, that
would be the absolute pinnacle of their career.
But not for Kubrick. No. It taught him a vital
lesson that permanently changed the trajectory
of cinema. Success without absolute creative
control was totally meaningless to him. He had
to have his hands on the wheel. Exactly. He realized
that to make the art he actually wanted to make,
he could never be a pawn again. Which triggers
a pretty extreme reaction. Very extreme. driven
by this refusal to ever compromise again. Kubrick
doesn't just change studios to find more control.
He changes continents. Yeah, he just packs up.
He permanently leaves the United States and moves
to England, and he sets up this isolated fortress
at a sprawling estate called Childwick Berry
Manor. Right. His wife, Christiane, referred
to it as a perfect family factory. Which sounds
so intense. Well, he essentially centralized
his entire operation, the writing, the heavy
the research, the editing, the management, it
was all brought completely in -house. So no more
studio lot offices. No. He completely shunned
the standard Hollywood publicity machine. You
know, the premier parties, the industry schmoozing.
He built his own self -contained ecosystem where
his word was absolute law. So think about your
own career for a second. If you suddenly completely
stop networking, stop going into the office,
move to the countryside, and just hit in your
house. Yeah. You'd probably worry about becoming
totally irrelevant. It feels like a musician
refusing to ever tour or do press interviews.
So how did he stay tapped into the culture while
he was geographically hiding from it? Well, that's
the real paradox of Kubrick's isolation. By locking
himself away in an English manner, he wasn't
actually hiding. What was he doing? He was building
a highly controlled laboratory. He removed himself
from the noise and those fleeting trends of Hollywood
so he could focus entirely on the work itself.
Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah, he read voraciously
and he managed a massive global network of collaborators
entirely over the phone lines. So he wasn't just
sitting in silence? Not at all. Michael Herr,
a screenwriter who worked with him later, pointed
out that the idea of Kupik as a hermit was a
total myth. He was actually incredibly gregarious
and talked for hours and hours. It just all happened
remotely. Exactly. His physical isolation preserved
the purity of his ideas. And the results of that
absolute control were just staggering. Let's
take Dr. Strangelove, for example. Oh, perfect
example. He decides he wants to make a serious
political thriller about the Cold War. But because
he's isolated and managing his own research,
he doesn't just read a script. No, he goes deep.
He reads over 40 dense military and political
strategy books on nuclear war. 40 books. Yeah.
And through that obsessive solitary research,
he comes to a profound conclusion. He realizes
the whole concept of mutually assured destruction
is inherently absurd. Right. So he completely
pivots the entire project from a tense thriller
into a pitch black comedy. He just changes genres.
Entirely. Entirely. He brings in Peter Sellers
and lets him wildly intervise three completely
different roles. And he had the freedom to make
that massive pivot because he answered to absolutely
no one but himself. And he took that operational
freedom even further with 2001. A space odyssey.
Oh, this one is legendary. It really is. He gets
permission to work directly with NASA aerospace
engineers just to ensure the spacecraft designs
are physically accurate. Of course he does. Right.
He pushes the budget up to $10 .5 million. And
then in a move that would terrify any studio
executive today, he throws out an original commission
score by an established Hollywood composer. Just
tosses it. Tosses it and replaces it with classical
music like Strauss's Blue Danube. Which is such
a massive risk. I mean, why did he do it? Well,
because typical sci -fi movies of the 1960s used,
like, spooky theremin music or just standard
orchestral swells. Right, the classic alien sounds.
Yeah. But Kubrick felt that classical music brought
a specific... seriousness and transcendence to
the visuals. It completely elevated the film
from a pulp space adventure to an almost religious
experience about human evolution. And he couldn't
have made that choice if a studio committee was
breathing down his neck. No way. They would have
demanded the spooky aliens. Exactly. And this
transition is fascinating because once he had
secured his isolated fortress and his creative
independence, he started pushing not just the
boundaries of narrative but the absolute limits
of physical technology. Oh, he was relentless.
He demanded that the physical world bend to his
vision. Look at his 18th century period film,
Barry Lyndon. He wanted the lighting to look
exactly like the oil paintings from that era.
Right. No artificial movie lights at all. Right.
Which cinematographers at the time told him was
physically impossible. Because traditional film
lenses need a certain amount of artificial light
to capture an image. Otherwise it just looks
completely grainy and dark. So what does he do?
He tracks down and acquires three specially adapted
high -speed lenses. The F .7 Zeiss lenses. Yes.
Lenses that were originally developed for NASA
to take satellite photography of the dark side
of the moon. Unbelievable. To put that in perspective
for non -photographers, a lower f -stop means
the camera's aperture opens wider to let in more
light. And an f0 .7 is massively wide. Very wide.
It was one of the only lenses on earth capable
of capturing a clear image lit by absolutely
nothing but actual 18th century candlelight.
He literally had to have cameras heavily modified
just to accept these massive lenses. It's astonishing,
really. He was forcing the technology to catch
up to his imagination. Truly. And he was just
as aggressive in adopting new technology for
camera movement. In The Shining, he became one
of the very first directors to utilize the Steadicam
to its full potential. Oh, and the Steadicam
was brand new at the time, right? Yes. It's essentially
a vest and gimbal system worn by the camera operator.
It uses counterweights to completely absorb the
operator's footsteps. So the camera can move
over rough terrain without shaking at all. Exactly.
Kubrick called it a magic carpet. Traditional
movies used a camera on a dolly track, which,
you know, only moves in straight lines. Right.
But Kubrick used the Steadicam to follow the
young boy Danny riding his tricycle through the
twisting hallways of the hotel and over the uneven
gravel of the physical maze set. Which created
this totally unnatural, floating, predatory point
of view. It made the hotel itself feel alive.
But, you know, while he was pushing the technology
to its absolute limits, he was also pushing human
endurance. This is where it gets tough. Yeah.
The human element of his filmmaking is where
things get really intense. Yeah. Because to get
the perfect shot, he demanded dozens, sometimes
hundreds of retakes. Yes. Let's look at this
objectively, because this is where the whole
Watchmaker analogy really gets tested. For sure.
During The Shining, Shelley Duvall was required
to perform the exhausting hysterical baseball
bat scene 127 times. It's brutal. And Scatman
Crothers, a veteran actor, had to do the kitchen
scene with the young boy 148 times. Yeah. Doing
127 takes of a scene where you are crying and
swinging a bat isn't just about getting the framing
right. It's a massive. psychological and physical
toll it really is from a sheer management perspective
how does a director push people to that absolute
extreme without the whole production completely
falling apart like how do you demand that without
your entire team just walking out on you it is
the ultimate tension of Kubrick's legacy because
on paper it sounds completely brutal but his
justification for it was deeply tied to his views
on human psychology Well, Kubrick believed that
actors naturally relied on their conscious technique
-like. They knew their lines. They knew their
marks. They were acting. Right. He essentially
believed that the first 20 or 30 takes were just
glorified rehearsals. Wow. By making them do
it over 100 times, he wanted to exhaust them
so thoroughly that they actually stopped acting.
They forgot their technique entirely, and they
reached a deeper, unconscious state of pure,
unpolished emotion. And amazingly, some of the
actors actually defended the process later. They
did. Jack Nicholson, who starred alongside Duvall
in The Shining, noted that Kubrick would shoot
until the actor finally stopped thinking about
what they were doing. That's wild. And there's
a really telling observation from Michael Hare,
too. He noted that actors would go through absolute
exhaustion with Stanley. They'd swear they must
have been mad to get involved and swear they'd
never work with him again. I mean, I would too.
Right. But then, years later, they would look
back and spend the rest of their professional
lives longing for another director who cared
as deeply as Stanley did. Yeah, they realized
he wasn't pushing them out of malice. He was
doing it because he was entirely in service to
the film. But that relentless drive for pure
emotion and perfect execution... eventually became
a double -edged sword, didn't it? It did. As
we move into his final masterpieces, we see the
true burden of this perfectionism. His need to
control every single variable meant his physical
world actually started to shrink. Even as the
worlds he was creating on screen grew more ambitious.
We mentioned earlier that he isolated himself
in England, but a massive part of that was a
profound fear of flying. Yes, he completely hated.
the loss of control that came with getting on
an airplane. Right, which presents a massive
logistical nightmare when you decide to make
a sweeping movie about the Vietnam War. Oh, absolutely.
Because for Full Metal Jacket, he absolutely
refused to leave the UK. So how do you shoot
a Vietnam War epic in England? By exerting total
control over the environment. Exactly. He transformed
a derelict gasworks in the London Docklands into
the ruined Vietnamese city of Hu. Which is just
crazy to think about. The logistics are mind
boggling. He had his art department meticulously
recreate the rubble based on historical photographs.
Right. He actually imported 200 real palm trees
all the way from North Africa by road. And when
that wasn't enough, he ordered thousands of plastic
ones from Hong Kong. Just to make a freezing
industrial site in London look like a humid jungle
war zone. Just incredible. And that intensity
and need for absolute geographical control only
increased with his final film Eyes Wide Shut.
I mean, he was almost 70 years old by then, yet
he worked a relentless 15 -month shoot. 15 months.
Mostly at a soundstage right near his home. He
was pulling 18 hour days and maintaining complete
obsessive secrecy over the entire project. Tragically,
he suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep
just six days after screening the final cut of
that film for his family and the stars. So sad.
He literally worked on his craft until the very
end. But there's one story from his later years
that presents a really fascinating contradiction
to everything we've just discussed about his
need for control. Well, why know where you're
going with this? It's about a project he never
actually finished. For years, he developed a
sci -fi film called AI Artificial Intelligence.
It was this futuristic fairy tale about a robot
boy who wants to be human. But after years of
obsessive development, this man, the ultimate
control freak who demanded 100 takes and rebuilt
Vietnam and London, voluntarily hands the project
over to Steven Spielberg. It just seems wild,
right? It's like Steve Jobs spending years inventing
the iPhone, looking at the final blueprints,
and then just handing them over to Bill Gates
because he thought Gates would code the interface
better. That's a great way to put it. Why on
earth would Kubrick give up his passion project?
Because he actually recognized his own limitations.
Kubrick's cinematic style was often cold, clinical,
and very intellectual. Yeah, very detached. But
AI was essentially a fairy tale. It needed warmth.
It needed sentimentality. And that wasn't his
strong suit. Exactly. Kubrick told Spielberg
that the emotional nature of the story was simply
closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his
own. What's fascinating here is that this choice
reveals the very core of who Kubrick actually
was. His ultimate loyalty wasn't to his own ego.
Right. It wasn't about him getting all the glory.
No, it wasn't about him proving he could direct
anything. His loyalty was entirely to the idea
itself. If he truly believed the film would be
better served by someone else's aesthetic, he
was willing to step aside. That's powerful. It
really proves that his pursuit of absolute perfection
was never about personal vanity. It was always
only about serving the final product. So what
does this all mean for you listening to this
deep dive? Yeah, how does this apply? Whether
you are leading a team at work and designing
a new product or just trying to manage the chaos
of your own daily life, Kubrick's story asks
a pretty demanding question. It really does.
How far are you truly willing to go for your
vision? What are the things in your life that
you need to take absolute control over? And perhaps
more importantly, what are you willing to sacrifice
your time, your comfort, maybe even your popularity
to achieve that level of excellence? And I want
to leave you with one final fascinating paradox
to mull over. Lay it on us. Throughout this deep
dive, we've talked about Kubrick as the ultimate
champion of creative freedom. A man who fought
studio executives, completely bypassed the Hollywood
machine, and demanded the right to show audiences
his exact uncompromising vision. Right, the grand
master of the board. Exactly. Yet when his provocative
film, A Clockwork Orange, was released in the
1970s, it sparked massive cultural controversy.
Oh yeah, huge backlash. There were reports of
real -world copycat crimes, and Kubrick even
began receiving credible death threats against
his family. That's terrifying. But here's the
incredible part. It wasn't the British government
or some censor board that banned the film in
the UK. Really? Who was it? Stanley Kubrick himself
went to the studio executives and personally
pulled it from circulation. Wow. He made his
own movie, legally unavailable in Britain, and
it stayed that way until after his death. That
is profound. Right. For a man who spent his entire
life fighting for the right to show audiences
his exact vision, his ultimate most powerful
act of control as the grandmaster was deciding
what the audience was not allowed to see. He
didn't just control the pieces on the board.
He controlled the board itself. And sometimes?
That means packing the pieces away. Thanks for
joining us on this deep dive.