On Directing: Why Stanley Kubrick was Always Right.

Stanley Kubrick was a legendary perfectionist, a filmmaker who left no detail to the wayside and who insisted on dozens, sometimes hundreds of takes per shot. Many actors speak of disdain of Kubrick’s method whilst simultaneously praising his genius, most notably Kirk Douglas, star of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Spartacus, calling Kubrick “a talented shit.” Kubrick’s insistence upon perfection drove actress Shelley Duvall to anxiety attacks and a nervous breakdown during the filming of The Shining, as she was more accustomed to an improvisational method employed by Robert Altman, and not Kubrick’s draconian and calculated pursuit of absolute perfection through retake after retake. Kubrick shot well over 1.3 million feet of film on The Shining.

Duvall, Douglas and the scores of other battered Kubrick collaborators insist on the man’s genius, and chalk up his maddening methodology as “Stanley instinctively knowing what to do,” as Douglas put it. It adds to the legend of Kubrick’s pursuit of perfection through meticulous research, and paints the portrait of the artist as a cold, unforgiving perfectionist who knew exactly what he wanted, and who had a God Complex of the highest order.

A talented shit.

But I don’t think that’s correct. I never met Stanley Kubrick but my obsessive study of him leads me to believe the exact opposite, that Kubrick really didn’t know exactly what he wanted going into a shoot. I think what he embraced was the furthest thing from a God Complex, which was to employ a methodology of trial and error, the most logical and guaranteed way to achieve desired results. Kubrick was not a heartless dictator, in fact he was quite compassionate, sensitive and soft spoken, a man who humbly understood that he didn’t have the answer, and who obsessively pursued his objectives until the correct answer manifested itself.

Now if we look at the bigger picture, society has created an image of what a successful director or leader is all about. Decisive, confident, loud, aggressive and assured in precisely what they want. We want our leaders to be built to perfection, born with clearly formed ideas in their heads and the exact means in which to execute those ideas. As a director, people look to me and are comforted and motivated by the idea that I have the film laid out exactly in my head, and all I have to do is articulate that vision in as firm, confident and assured manner as possible. A director who does countless retakes (as I do, although not to the level of Kubrick - I think on Lilith we did up to seventeen takes on a few scenes), is ultimately seen either as completely incompetent or saddled with a God Complex. The producers and studios get worried and intervene, fire the director or cut down the retakes with the threat of firing, and get the job done.

But in reality it is those very producers and studios that are displaying that dreaded God Complex, in that they believe they have the right solutions to every problem, no matter how complex the situation. The truth of the matter is that when we are creating something from nothing, there are no pre-established solutions. They must be found using trial and error, and trial and error requires making mistakes, adjusting, and refining until the solution presents itself.

Kubrick, I believe, did this on set. With a clear idea of his final goal, he crafted his shots in accordance to trial and error, taking small bits that worked and building upon them. Many of these bits may have seemed imperceptible to the actors or crew, but each was an act of evolution. It’s a myth that the very final take is the absolute correct and perfect one; in fact the final take can be absolutely dead wrong. But it is important to achieve this take, because in the process of reaching that point we have knowledge of what actually worked, and we select and craft that final solution in the editing room.

The process of trial and error is frowned upon because as aforementioned, it is viewed by larger society as a sign of weakness, of indecisiveness. But fuck that - it’s about getting things right. The scientific method condones trials and retrials to make sure that we reach a solution that can be duplicated, wherein hypothesis becomes theory. Directing is no different, and I feel Kubrick adhered to this methodology fervently, and it gave him the razor precise results that we see today in his canon, which is amongst the greatest collections of art in all of history.

Perfection in ‘Barry Lyndon’

It’s daunting as a director to admit that we don’t know something, becuase we’re paid to know everything, and it’s in that belief where we are slowly painting ourselves into a corner of mediocrity. Because in those who embrace the God complex - the all knowing entity who has the solution to everything - we will find that the solutions they proffer so confidently are in fact old, conservative and tired. Their solutions will surely work because they’ve worked before, but that’s not what we need to move ahead, to make progress. We need to experiment, and the only way to experiment is through trial and error.

But there’s a downside to trial and error, which is that it is extremely painful. It’s painful because it forces us to confront multiple failures in succession, including the loss of time and resources. Dealing with failure is likely one of the most taxing emotional situations outside of mourning, because failure makes us question ourselves, our faith, and the trust our collaborators have put in us. It takes someone really strong to deal with constant failure when they are striving for forward thinking solutions, and that strength is what defines the greatest of leaders. Kubrick had immense strength and conviction to get it right in the face of failure, and perhaps his greatest ability was to get his collaborators to stick with him through it all, because in the end, they all believed in him. And they were right.

Busting his hump to get it done right.

In the coming presidential election, we will be bombarded with candidates who will each profess that they have the answers to all of our problems. And the moment we hear that, we need to call bullshit on them. I want a president who says “I want the economy fixed and jobs created, and I have no immediate solution how to do it, but I’ve got a lot of forward-thinking ideas and good people to execute them, and we’re going to try all of them until we get it right.” That’s a leader. Someone who’s willing to be frank that because of the immensity and complexity of our challenges, we likely won’t get it right the first time, but if we stick with it and carry each other through the pain, we’ll achieve perfection. That person has my vote, my time, and my belief.

And that’s the standard we must all hold ourselves to, something which for the rest of my life and work I shall herein refer to as “The Stanley Standard.”