Gilbert Taylor, BSC (cinematographer, Dr. Strangelove): Stanley hated being airborne, so during prep on Strangelove, I did about 28,000 miles in a B-17 Flying Fortress, shooting aerial material [for the background plates]. I remember the night we took off; it was pitch black at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and we were going up with the Fortress to Iceland and then Greenland. It was semi-snowing at the London airport, and suddenly someone said, ’Stanley’s here.’ I thought to myself, ’Oh, Christ! Not now!’ He came on the plane and said to my mechanic, ’The camera mountings are too tight.’ I’d done a lot of that sort of work in my time, and I wanted those mountings to be absolutely solid with the airplane, and not all flippy-floppy. When he began his critique, I said to the pilot, ’Can you start one engine?’ He fired the engine up, and Stanley literally flew off the plane! As soon as he was out the door, I had them tighten those bolts right up again.
Diane Taylor (Gil Taylor’s wife; plate continuity on Dr. Strangelove): I’d done continuity for Disney on a couple of pictures, so I was desperately trying to get on [Strangelove]. I asked [actor] Peter Sellers about it, and he said, ’No problem, I’ll ask Stanley!’ Well, being very young and naive, I didn’t realize that you didn’t ask actors to do that sort of thing. The next time [Stanley] phoned, I asked, ’Could I come and see you?’ I went to his office and said, ’I’d like to do the continuity on your film, please.’ There was a total, terrible silence, and he replied, ’What’s your relationship with Peter Sellers?’ I said, ’There isn’t one at all.’ Stanley told me, ’You’re very young, and I don’t think you could really manage this, but you could probably do the flying stuff. Have you flown?’ I answered, ’Oh, yes!’—I said ’Oh, yes!’ to everything. And he said, ’Come up with some sort of system that would convince me that we could keep track of every [shot].’ I went away and came up with a kind of nautical system for the cameras, port and starboard, using colors and numbers. He told me, ’If you’d like to go ahead, okay!’ [Afterwards], Stanley—the silly billy—cut off all of these things I’d prepared! He found himself in a terrible pickle, because he couldn’t remember what we’d got and where we’d done it! I don’t know why [he did that]. He was a law unto himself.
Garrett Brown: After five takes, anyone else in the world would have considered my shot okay. After 14, it was what even I would consider perfect. But after 30, I was entering new realms. I was really conscious of where this foot or that finger went, as if I was a dancer on Broadway night after night, who learned every floorboard in the stage. It was fantastic. When we saw the dailies, the [Steadicam shots] were as smooth and accurate as a dolly and a great deal less constrained.
Dan Richter (played "Moonwatcher" and served as choreographer for the ape scenes on 2001): First of all, you have to understand one thing about Stanley: I never saw him get angry. He just kept working, you know? Once something was right, he moved on to the next thing, but if it wasn’t there yet, he just kept at it! Now, that might mean 40 takes, an extra eight months, tearing the whole set down and redoing it, or reshooting completely. The process involved a lot of refinement, and we did a lot of testing—over and over and over again. But I loved the guy for it, because that’s the way I liked to work!
Chester Eyre (director of operations, Deluxe Laboratories U.K.): My association with Stanley began when I served as one of the timers on A Clockwork Orange. Working with him was very interesting, because he was obviously a very important producer/director, and we were all in awe of him. Everyone who’s ever worked with the man has learned a lot from him—about both the industry and themselves. He always managed to draw more out of you than you thought was there.
I began working more closely with Stanley on Full Metal Jacket, and he showed me that there was nothing that couldn’t be achieved if you set your mind to it. He could never understand why people weren’t as absorbed with everything as he was. For example, there was one point on Full Metal Jacket where he wanted a special kind of gate made for a camera, and he telephoned an expert who had long since retired. He called me the next day and said, ’I can’t believe it. I offered this man the chance to make a special gate for me, and he told me, ’I’m sorry, I’ve retired.’ He simply couldn’t understand why the man didn’t share his enthusiasm.
Leon Vitali: I can’t understand why an actor complains when a director wants to do more takes, because it’s just an opportunity to do different things, and to give the scene another slant. Stanley was a wonderful director to work with as an actor. From the first day I met him on [Barry Lyndon], it was just a wonderful relationship. He was a very, very open person to talk to. He also had a unique way of working: it would only be you, whoever you were acting with, and him. Everyone else disappeared; there were no cameras, and nobody else was on the set, so you’d be very, very focused. During that time, he’d be looking for angles through his Arriflex viewfinder. You always had to do the scene for real, even if you were rehearsing, because you never know what’s going to happen. The entire course of the scene could change. If it wasn’t clicking for some reason, we’d all go to his caravan and work on the scene. He’d say, ’Well, how would you say this? How would you do this?’ All the time, he was probing you to find what it was you were trying find.
It was just the most magical experience to work for this man, and it happened on Eyes Wide Shut as well, because I was working for him as an actor again [playing the man in the red cloak in the orgy sequence]. We hadn’t really discussed my role in any detail whatsoever, and he didn’t say anything to me through the whole first day of shooting. I found our interaction to be almost like a sort of a teasing game, and Stanley finally said, ’I haven’t said anything to you. Just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s almost like a sadistic English schoolmaster talking to this unfortunate pupil.’ I just developed that idea more and more [as I confronted Tom Cruise’s character]. My tone was sarcastic and kind; it wasn’t brutal and sort of, ’Remove your mask!’ It was all very, ’May I have the password, please?’ Everything was very polite, which made it a bit more threatening, really. I felt exactly how I felt when we were doing Barry Lyndon. Stanley gave me a wonderful freedom.
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