Stanley Kubrick - How his days as a photo-journalist influenced him as a filmmaker.
When film actor, Jack Nicholson, was making, “The Shining”, Stanley Kubrick told him, “You don’t photograph reality; you photograph the photograph of reality”. Here, I feel is, the relationship between his life as a photographer and his filmmaking.
To me, the statement 'you don't photograph reality,’ means you don't let the actors simply act out the literal words printed in the script; you must push them past their notions of reality conditioned by society and culture. 'Photograph the photography of reality' implies therefore, using whatever means the director feels is required to push a path past the actors’ cultural preconceptions and down into their psyche to dredge up a unique and truthful performance in any scene. As with all great artists, he wanted to instil his images with universality.
Before Kubrick began to create moving and speaking images, he was an excellent still photographer. Below, is the first photograph he sold to “Look” magazine. It was immediately clear to the magazine what a gifted photographer he was; so much so, they employed him as one of their staff photographers. He was only 16 years old.
During his time at the magazine, he took 13,000 photographs, 900 of which were published. Regardless that his photos had striking compositions, his subjects appear to be very relaxed, most of them bathed only in what light happened to be there at the time. This helps give his images a strong sense of intimacy – almost as if no-one had been there to observe the subjects’ uninhibited private moments. These are the qualities key to his later filmmaking. The photographs below, I believe, illustrate this point.
So, when Kubrick came to make films, his challenge, I believe, was how to create the sense he achieved in his photos. How could he make his crew and himself disappear? Make it seem no-one had been there recording whatever it was his characters happened, privately, to be doing.
In his films, he uses three main ploys to get his distinctively ‘real, no-one-watching’ performances.
One. Minimise the number of non-performers on the set.
Two. Multiply takes.
Three. Use available lighting, or make any added lighting look like the natural light that happened to be there.
(1.) Kubrick kept a surprisingly small crew on his films helping to create intimate relationships on the set.
(2.) Why did Kubrick do multiple takes? Tom Cruise, for example, walked through the same doorway in, “Eyes Wide Shut”, 95 times. On “The Shining”, Shelly Duval, had to do a gruelling 127 takes of her walking backwards up the stairs swinging a baseball bat to protect herself from her husband, Jack. This was not the highest tally of takes. One shot was repeated 148 times. Now this may sound counter-intuitive, but when Tom Cruise asked Kubrick why he did so many takes, he replied, I’m looking for the “magic”. I think this was his way of saying, he wanted to circumvent the actors deep-seated inhibitions; to strip away any fog of protections and preconditions, that are, let’s face it, active in us all, and so create conditions for the actors to reveal something they themselves, even, were not aware existed in themselves. A raw primal sense of the real could then manifest in a performance so it became a portrayal of a real, living and feeling character; one that, in its uniqueness, would dazzle his audiences. Such an honest natural realism we can sense in even the most heightened and exaggerated characters in his films
(3) As with his still photography, he captured a lot of his images in available lighting. Especially in the films that followed “The Killing’, the light is deceptively mundane - in “The Shining”, for instance, in “Doctor Strange Love”, “Barry Lyndon”, “2001 A Space Odessey”, and in “Eyes Wide Shut”. There are little or no dark corners, no lurking shadows, from which threats may emerge. We are confronted with a world where the only place from which any threat will emerge is the psyche of the characters.