English
An interview with Stanley Kubrick
By Vicente Molina Foix
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If there's something they aren't doing, or it's pretty clear they can't do (I must say that's not true in The Shining because they were so great), you suddenly become aware of ideas and possibilities which just didn't occur to you. I've always been impressed reading that some directors sketch out the scenes and can actually find that it works. It may be some shortcoming of my screenplay, but I find that no matter how good it ever looks on paper, the minute you start in the actual set, with the actors, you're terribly aware of not taking the fullest advantage of what's possible if you actually stick to what you wrote. I also found that thinking of shots, or thinking of the way to shoot a scene before you've actually rehearsed it and got it to the point where something is actually happening that is worth putting on film, will frequently prevent you from really getting into the deepest possible result of the scene.
You always try to keep total control of every step taken in the making of a film. I feel curious about one or two aspects of this fastidious control. The first concerns the art direction of your films, and The Shining is particular. Do you intervene directly in this?
Well, yes. For example in this film, the art director, Roy Walker, went for a month all over America photographing hotels, apartments, things that could be used for reference. We must have photographed hundreds of places. Then, based on the photographs we liked, the draughtsmen drew up the working drawings from the photos, but keeping the scale exactly as it was, exactly what was there, not something like it. When the photographs were taken he stood there with a ruler, so that you could actually get a scale of everything, which is very important. Take something like the apartment they are living in at the beginning of the film, with very small rooms and the narrow corridors and that strange window in the boy's bedroom, about five feet high. Well, it's first of all silly to try to design something which everybody sees in real life and knows that looks slightly wrong. So, things like those apartments and their apartment inside the hotel, which is so ugly, with this sort of lack of design, the way things actually get built without architects, is also important to preserve. So those have to be carefully copied as well as the grander rooms, which are beautiful and where you want to preserve what the architect did.
Certainly, rather than have an art director try to design a hotel for this, which I think is almost impossible without it looking like a stage set or and opera set, it was necessary to have something real.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
If there's something they aren't doing, or it's pretty clear they can't do (I must say that's not true in The Shining because they were so great), you suddenly become aware of ideas and possibilities which just didn't occur to you. I've always been impressed reading that some directors sketch out the scenes and can actually find that it works. It may be some shortcoming of my screenplay, but I find that no matter how good it ever looks on paper, the minute you start in the actual set, with the actors, you're terribly aware of not taking the fullest advantage of what's possible if you actually stick to what you wrote. I also found that thinking of shots, or thinking of the way to shoot a scene before you've actually rehearsed it and got it to the point where something is actually happening that is worth putting on film, will frequently prevent you from really getting into the deepest possible result of the scene.
You always try to keep total control of every step taken in the making of a film. I feel curious about one or two aspects of this fastidious control. The first concerns the art direction of your films, and The Shining is particular. Do you intervene directly in this?
Well, yes. For example in this film, the art director, Roy Walker, went for a month all over America photographing hotels, apartments, things that could be used for reference. We must have photographed hundreds of places. Then, based on the photographs we liked, the draughtsmen drew up the working drawings from the photos, but keeping the scale exactly as it was, exactly what was there, not something like it. When the photographs were taken he stood there with a ruler, so that you could actually get a scale of everything, which is very important. Take something like the apartment they are living in at the beginning of the film, with very small rooms and the narrow corridors and that strange window in the boy's bedroom, about five feet high. Well, it's first of all silly to try to design something which everybody sees in real life and knows that looks slightly wrong. So, things like those apartments and their apartment inside the hotel, which is so ugly, with this sort of lack of design, the way things actually get built without architects, is also important to preserve. So those have to be carefully copied as well as the grander rooms, which are beautiful and where you want to preserve what the architect did.
Certainly, rather than have an art director try to design a hotel for this, which I think is almost impossible without it looking like a stage set or and opera set, it was necessary to have something real.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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The Stanley Kubrick Archives
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Kubrick's universe: the most comprehensive study of the filmmaker to date