Douglas Milsome, BSC (camera assistant, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining; cinematographer, Full Metal Jacket): I’ve actually had a much harder time working with a lot less talented people than Stanley Kubrick. He’s a drain because he saps you dry, but he works damn hard himself and expects everybody else to. Sometimes it becomes a plod because it’s so slow and intricate, but he loves to do things quite differently than they’ve been done before. You can’t really do that sort of thing off the top of your head, so you work very hard to get it together and make something different which bears his mark. Sometimes the relationship can get a little strained because you’ve got to be devoted to him. You eat, drink and sleep the movie, and you’re under contract to Stanley body and soul. But he allows you the time to get everything absolutely right, which is what I find so rewarding. (From AC Sept. 1987.)
Martin Hunter (editor, Full Metal Jacket): Full Metal Jacket was my first feature. [Stanley taught me] that to impart the intended emotion of the scene, it’s crucial that the reactions be precisely correct. Many [directors] believe that reactions are something you pick up at the end of a scene; they’ll just run the camera and say, ’That’ll do,’ which is not the best way to do it. [Stanley] would shoot take after take of people who were only observers in the scene, and didn’t have any dialogue. Then, as we were cutting it, he’d comb through the material exhaustively. I remember saying to him once, ’Stanley, would you ever consider looking at a couple of takes and picking a reaction shot that works, and not bother to look at the others?’ He looked at me in some shock and replied, ’I’d never think of doing that. So much work has gone into it so far, why not take it to its conclusion?’
Ken Adam: On Strangelove, it wasn’t so much the time one had to spend it was Stanley’s continuous questioning of ’What makes you tick?’ That could be soul-destroying. He wanted everything that I did to be justified, and that I found very trying. You finally are liable to lose your self-confidence if everything you do is being questioned, but that was because he wanted to make absolutely sure, intellectually, that what I came up with was right. For me, design, like so many other creative processes, is instinctive. Stanley knew practically every other job as well as and better than most of the other film technicians—he certainly knew photography and had a brilliant visual sense— but he didn’t really know design!
Gilbert Taylor: It’s pretty well universally known that Stanley was a frustrated director of photography, among other things. I never had any trouble with him, though. He had a habit of taking Polaroids and saying, ’I think you’ve got too much light on this.’ And I’d say, ’Well, your Polaroids might have too much light, but on my negative it’s dead right!’ I mean, that’s the sort of thing you had to put up with. He was a completely one-man band, but he was very talented!
Martin Hunter: Stanley once quoted Napoleon to me: ’A general should be able lead a cavalry charge or boil a chicken.’ The first time I actually had a conversation with him was when I was an assistant sound editor, and we were doing the mix [on The Shining] at Elstree Studios. He had caterers bring food into the mixing theater. He didn’t want anybody to take off and have long lunches—he wanted to make sure we were all captive there. Tables were laid out, and by the time I’d got my food, there was no room at any table but his! He was sitting there with his daughter, Vivian, and I felt somewhat embarrassed about sitting by the great man. I guess I had thought he was remote and unapproachable until I met him, but then I found him immediately approachable, and we just kind of chatted. He was incredibly interested in people’s lives and the sorts of mundane details that would be a total surprise to people who didn’y know him. When you knew him, you’d be surprised at just how ’normal’ a person he was.
Gilbert Taylor: You didn’t have a lot of fun with Stanley, because if anybody laughed out loud on the set, they got removed from the floor. He hated anybody who laughed [while working]; we certainly weren’t allowed to laugh on Dr. Strangelove.
Larry Smith: Stanley and I had a good understanding because we laughed at a lot of things. He was a very humorous man. A lot of people don’t understand that about Stanley; he was the funniest fellow you could ever meet. He told some incredibly funny stories and jokes. I’m quite an effervescent sort of person when I’m shooting, and I used to joke with him all the time, sometimes in very serious situations.
Martin Hunter: Between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket I used to do everything for Stanley, from taking meetings with the top brass at Technicolor to occasionally feeding the cats and walking the dog. When we were dealing with the restoration of Dr. Strangelove, one of the people at Technicolor asked me what my title was, and I said, ’I’m not sure. I’ll get back to you.’ When I asked Stanley what my title was, he asked me, ’What’s this other guy’s title?’ I said, ’He’s Director of Operations.’ And he replied, ’Tell him you’re my Director of Operations.’
Ken Adam: [On Barry Lyndon,] Stanley had my continuity sketch artist do hundreds of sketches using various lenses on groups of soldiers, to see how they would look through a 50mm or wide-angle lens. We also experimented with having the first line of infantry in proper uniforms, the second line in paper uniforms, the third line as cutouts, and so on, [and shooting with them] on a limited scale. I always felt that he put such a great amount of effort into the attack and defense sequences because he was thinking of Napoleon, and this approach would have been of vital importance on that project.
Chris Cunningham (animatronics effect expert, who was helping Kubrick develop the unfilmed science-fiction project A.I.): I met Stanley in late 1994, and I worked with him all through ’95. He wanted to see if a [synthetic] child could be made using animatronics to avoid digital effects work, and I was trying to talk him into doing it using computer graphics because I don’t think animatronics are very good. The ironic thing about it was that I was a cynical animatronics person, and it was almost like building an animatronic boy as perfectly as possible would only serve to show him that it still would never be perfect enough.
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