Inside the Mind

London’s Design Museum honours the directorial brilliance of Stanley Kubrick – by unpacking the master storyteller’s methods

WORDS: CHRIS UJMA

Stanley Kubrick on set during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey, (1965–68; GB/ United States). © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

‘Here’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 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.

Kubrick directs a scene of his 2001: A Space Odyssey © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc

“Kubrick wanted to use a particular type of paper to write upon. There’s a page we found where the director typed upon it, with a typewriter, ‘This is how it types’, and a fountain pen annotation that says ‘This is how it draws ink’. It shows his character – tirelessly looking for just the right paper, to ensure the ink was absorbed in the way he wished.”

Through the filmmaking process, “Kubrick was ‘hands on’ from start to finish, even sitting at the editing desk with just a pencil and an eraser. Everything had to be ‘just right’, and his obsession for perfection drove him to embrace advanced technology and techniques,” says Groen, of his method. “His remarkable canon comes from a time before films were made digitally – pre-CGI, before access to technology was easy.”

For instance, to simulate gravity-free weightlessness in his 2001: A Space Odyssey, the director had a giant rotating centrifuge – essentially a 38ft Ferris Wheel – purpose-built by the Vickers Engineering Group; astute camera work completed the trick of the eye. (The Design Museum has one, as part of the exhibit installation).

Staying with Space, Kubrick famously purchased a f/0.7 lens (and the custom-modified Mitchell 35mm) from NASA itself, in order to shoot Barry Lyndon with an ethereal, candlelit-style patina true to the story’s 18 th -century setting. The lenses had been used by the space agency in the 1960s to take low-light photos of the dark side of the Moon, and aided Kubrick’s filming of actors by the light of flickering flame.

Groen enthuses how the films, despite belonging to that pre-digital era, “Are still current and exciting. 2001: A Space Odyssey in particular redefined the science fiction genre, and doesn’t look like it was made back in the 1960s; his films are still able to fascinate audiences as they did when first released.”

He was deeply committed to finding the right way of doing something, even if it took years to realise. He possessed creative vision, but with it incredible patience; a keen chess player in his spare time, Kubrick was a strategist.

In the case of A.I: Artificial Intelligence, says Groen, it was about a move he chose not to make.

If you can get people to the point where they have to think for a moment about what it is you’re getting at – and then discover it – the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart"

“Kubrick bought the rights to the Brian Aldiss’ story in the 1970s, but held off on its creation as he felt that there wasn’t sufficient camera and computer technology to do justice to his vision for the script,” she explains.

He acquired stories (usually middling novels, which he made great) and – be the genre crime, war, thriller, romance or sci-fi – went to any lengths to visually unfurl the narrative.

He cultivated patience in his audiences: the director is synonymous with slowpaced, protracted (yet enthralling) scenes. The role of music, for example, was so important to setting the mood that he would often extend a scene to allow the score to finish in full.

Kubrick’s perspective was underpinned by that insatiable hunger for detail. Groen cites the prep he put into a film project that did not even get made: a proposed biopic on 19 th - century French emperor and military commander Napoleon Bonaparte.

“He embarked on this massive journey to gather all the information he could find about a leader he greatly admired,” she says.

“Kubrick compiled his findings on date cards, with each assigned a chronological day in Napoleon’s life accompanied by research about what happened to him on that day – who he met, what he’d eaten etc. It was all handwritten, stored in a filing cabinet; in a way it’s Kubrick’s paper version of a Google search, or a Wikipedia page. It’s fascinating to see the amount of information and research he acquired” – before the internet age, no less.

“Nobody could craft a movie better than Stanley Kubrick,” praised fellow film great Steven Spielberg (who Kubrick eventually endorsed to direct the aforementioned A.I., released in 2001).

“He is an inspiration to us all. Stanley was a chameleon with the astonishing ability to reinvent himself with each new story he told. I defy anyone who just happens upon a Kubrick film while channel surfing to try with all your might to change the station – I have found this to be impossible.”

Every detail was a step closer to his endgame: producing a cinematic work of art the viewer just can’t turn away from.

Of his method, Kubrick imparted, “If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.”

For its showcase, the Design Museum has upheld this beguiling spirit. “We’re dissecting his process, rather than showing all the material per film,” explains Groen. “We worked very closely with the Kubrick archives [which is housed at University of the Arts London] and it’s so vast – with boxes upon boxes of notes and material – that this exhibition is based on a relative fraction.”

For the guest, then, these thoughtfully curated slivers of his legacy are a thrilling opportunity to discover the man behind the movies – whose genius goes right through the heart of cinema.

Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition shows at The Design Museum until 15 September, while the British Film Institute screens his masterpieces during its ‘Kubrick season at BFI Southbank’, throughout May. designmuseum.org/exhibitions/

Matthew Modine and Stanley Kubrick on the set of Full Metal Jacket, © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Stanley Kubrick and actor Jack Nicholson on the set of The Shining – which was directed by Kubrick (1980; GB/United States).© Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc