INSIDE THE London’s Design Museum honours the directorial brilliance of Stanley Kubrick – by unpacking the master storyteller’s methods WORDS: CHRIS UJMA
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ere’s Johnny!” grins a maniacal Jack Nicholson, peering through the splintered hole he’s hacked into the bathroom door, ready to hunt down his cowering female prey. This fraught scene from 1980’s The Shining became a meme so iconic it burst from the cinema and into popular culture. But do audiences remember the wood grain of the door itself? Or the exact shape of the axe? Across his directorial portfolio, Kubrick poured just as much attention into the minutiae of building a scene as he did to developing complex character arcs, or honing astute dialogue. While known for embracing cutting-edge film techniques, the Manhattan-born director was not averse to some good old tireless research. For 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, he spent a year photographing every house doorway in the Islington, London, postcode to find a perfect candidate for an fleeting scene. For the ominous underground beatdown in A Clockwork Orange, he tasked different crew members with taking thousands of photographs of London’s tunnels, after which he studied every
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single image (eventually plumping for Wandsworth Underpass). These anecdotes are symptomatic of Kubrick’s meticulous attention to every detail – however obscure. Each frame of his 16-film career was painstakingly crafted, drawing the audience into an immersive visual world. To honour the 20th anniversary of his passing, London’s Design Museum hosts a six-month stint of Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition. “Featuring more than 500 objects, projections and interviews, the exhibition brings to the fore Kubrick’s innovative spirit and fascination with all aspects of design, depicting the in-depth level of detail that he put into each of his films,” executive curator Alan Yentob surmises. The respected TV executive helped shape the journey along with Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, and co-curator Adriënne Groen. “When I delved through his extensive archives, one of the things I uncovered was his fascination with stationery,” says Groen, opting for a Kubrickian-level example of her most interesting curatorial find.