How Stanley Kubrick Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels
INTRODUCTION
In the world of cinema, Stanley Kubrick is a household name. With a career that spanned multiple decades, he’s considered, with good reason, to be one of the most influential directors of all time.
Despite his longevity, his output of films was pretty low. In 39 years he made 13 films. Part of this can be attributed to him being a filmmaking perfectionist.
His movies typically involve expressions of inner struggle, supported by inventive photography, innovative editing and a strong use of, usually classical, music.
In this episode I’ll examine Kubrick’s approach to shooting 3 films at 3 different budget levels: Fear And Desire, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining to identify the similarities between the three films and how his way of working progressed over his career.
FEAR AND DESIRE - $53,000
“I then found out how much feature films were being made for, you know, millions, and I calculated that I could make a feature film for about $10,000...by projecting the amount of film I’d shoot, figuring that I could get actors to work for practically nothing. I mean at this point I was the whole crew, cameraman, assistant cameraman, you know, director, everything.”
Before he had even left high school, Kubrick took up photography and sold his first picture to Look magazine - where he was later hired. From looking at some of his early photographic work it’s easy to tell that he had an incredible eye for visual storytelling and framing.
However he had the desire to make the jump from the photojournalistic world into photographing moving images in the form of short documentaries.
His first documentary short, ‘Day Of The Fight’ was self financed independently and shot with the same careful framing as his photojournalistic work with Bell & Howell Eyemo cameras.
These compact daylight loading 35mm cameras allowed him to work quickly and use them handheld but their small 100 foot magazines meant that the camera could only roll for just over a minute before it had to be reloaded. After producing and selling a couple of these independent short documentaries he decided it was feasible to embark on a narrative feature.
He chose Fear And Desire, a screenplay with a small scope, contained story about an allegorical Odyssey on the philosophical and psychological struggles of war, which he could produce with his limitations. He calculated that he needed a budget of $10,000 to pay for production and again managed to raise the funds independently.
To save money, the entire production cast and crew consisted of just 15 people. The director, 5 actors , 5 technical crew and some assistants who help transport the gear around the mountain locations they were shooting in.
With the small budget he carefully planned out the film shot for shot beforehand - as he did not have the luxury of affording the film stock or time required to shoot excess shots. To reduce costs and maintain creative control, Kubrick served as both director and cinematographer.
He shot it on a rented Mitchell NC camera with a set of four Baltar lenses - a 25mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm. He also used the Eyemo again for certain scenes. He mixed 35mm black and white film stock from DuPont and Kodak, exposing only 50,000 feet of film, a fraction of what standard Hollywood productions used at the time.
The low budget also forced Kubrick to come up with inventive solutions to cinematography and filmmaking, something which he’d repeat throughout his career. For example, to achieve tracking shots without access to a dolly he used a baby carriage to move the camera.
For another scene where he wanted fog he got hold of a crop sprayer instead. Apparently the cast and crew were nearly asphyxiated because the machinery still contained some insecticide used for its agricultural work.
Despite Fear And Desire being a solid effort for a first film with bold ideas, Kubrick did make some technical mistakes during production, such as a scene inside a cabin where the action was incorrectly blocked and an actor crossed the line by entering the frame from the wrong side. Fixing it required flipping the 35mm negative in the printing process to preserve continuity.
Kubrick pieced the film together himself in the edit and used an array of unusual cuts, such as abruptly cutting to quick close ups of characters for moments of emphasis that suited the visual storytelling.
In the end principal photography was achieved on the $10,000 budget. However after forking out for recording sound, effects and a prominent classical music score in post production, the final budget ended up closer to $53,000.
Although not a perfect film - Kubrick would later disown it - it showed great promise for a debut low budget independent narrative feature without a full professional crew.
Fear And Desire also hinted at some stylistic traits which were carried over into his later films such as: realistic performances, a deliberate visual camera language, using interesting cuts for emphasis, a strong use of music and maintaining complete creative control by working with a small crew.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - $2 MILLION
“There’s this myth going around that Stanley is in complete control which is not true because Stanley never knows where to put the camera, he barely knows what scene we’re shooting. He comes in with no preparation. Any director who knows what he is going to do is a very poor director as he must use the elements, spontaneity that happens on the set. He’s able to do that.” - Malcolm McDowell
After a string of successful films Kubrick’s career had progressed from planning out everything beforehand - in Fear And Desire - to being allowed the luxury of spending time on set to work things out. After his work on higher budget, critically acclaimed releases such as 2001 and Spartacus, he wanted his next film to be less ambitious in scope - at the medium budget level.
While looking for a new story to shoot, he came across Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick was immediately attracted to it.
By this point, he had become a perfectionist who researched meticulously, with thousands of photographs taken of potential locations that he requested be within an hour and a half of his house.
During production, as had become his technique, he insisted on shooting a large number of takes with actors for most scenes until he had multiple takes he was happy with. Despite this, filming took place between September 1970 and April 1971, making it one of the quickest film shoots of his professional career.
A Clockwork Orange mainly used real locations situated around London and only two sets were built. Although many locations incorporated vividly colourful or bleak production design - depending on the psychological state of the character.
Kubrick’s reputation for perfectionism carried through when it came to photographing the film. Since first working with a DP on The Killing, he had insisted on retaining control over almost every visual component of production, from framing to even deciding on the lens used. He did however hire DPs to execute his lighting plans.
For A Clockwork Orange he called up English cinematographer John Alcott, who had previously shot the latter part of 2001.
To suit the dream-like quality of the film’s dystopian world, Kubrick decided to use a favourite lens of his, an extremely wide-angle 9.8 mm. This lens gave the image a very wide field of view which distorted and exaggerated the spatial relationships of locations and objects.
He shot it on the Arriflex 35 IIC for handheld as well as his own customised Mitchell BNC camera. It was shot on Eastman 100T film stock. The production used over 450,000 feet of film, which, when compared with the 50,000 feet used on Fear And Desire, gives you an idea of how many more takes he now did. He paired the camera with an interesting customised lens. To achieve extremely long continuous zooms he requested that the Angenieux 20:1 zoom be used. However, since it was built for 16mm film, and they were shooting on 35mm, it needed to be reconfigured with a 1.6x extender in order to cover the 1.66:1 aspect ratio without vignetting.
To give Kubrick the freedom to shoot scenes 360 degrees and to save on budget, Alcott did a lot of the lighting with practicals, such as Photoflood bulbs or fluorescent tubes which appeared in the shot. The lighting in the film mixes the well exposed high-key illumination in high society interiors with more low-key grungy lighting setups.
For a scene where a character jumps out a window, Kubrick again used an innovative camera technique where a crash cam, a Newman-Sinclair clockwork camera, was placed in a box and dropped from the window. It survived 6 takes.
A Clockwork Orange used its medium budget to create an experimental, highly stylised look, with an expanded scope story, which was shot over a production timeline shorter than many of Kubrick’s other films.
THE SHINING - $19 MILLION
“Filmmakers are encountering the problem of subconsciously, or unconsciously, of - what importance is a story. Is it more than just a way of keeping people’s attention while you exercise the most subtle aspects of the medium that you’re working with? Or is the story the most important thing or is the story just holding your interest? And the execution of the art form becomes what the audience is interested in.”
After the lack of commercial success and air of disappointment following Barry Lyndon, Kubrick sought to make a film which would be more commercially viable - while still being artistically fulfilling.
He settled on the genre of horror for his next project.
The story goes that while going through a stack of potential horror novels, Kubrick's secretary would hear the sound of a book hitting the wall as the director threw them into a reject pile after reading the first few pages. Until one day, when she no longer heard any more thuds of books hitting the wall, she went to check on him and found him reading The Shining.
Kubrick had enormous sets constructed on soundstages at EMI Elstree Studios in England for the interior shots in the film. Having all these sets constructed allowed him to shoot the film in chronological order, bouncing around from one stage to another depending on the scene.
“First of all, since it was a supernatural story, we didn’t want to have any impressionistic sets. We wanted it to look like a real hotel. And this is also carried forward into the lighting. You know, we didn’t fall into the trap of a haunted hotel look.”
By now, Kubrick’s directing techniques had evolved tremendously from doing very few takes in Fear And Desire out of necessity to doing absolutely tons of takes on The Shining over an arduous and lengthy production. To facilitate the long production window, which was over a year, he used a small crew.
His philosophy of being spontaneous on set also expanded to the point where he would constantly change the shooting script, sometimes even multiple times per day.
His reported mistreatment of lead actress Shelley Duvall, along with the lengthy and strenuous amount of takes per scene led to her falling physically ill due to stress to a point where, according to reports, Shelley was no longer representing a terrified woman; she was literally terrified.
Again, Alcott was called upon as cinematographer to technically execute the lighting for Kubrick.
It was photographed with an Arriflex 35BL as well as the IIC for certain scenes, with Zeiss Super Speeds and Cooke Varotal lenses. Again he used Eastman 100T 35mm film.
This time, Kubrick innovated with cinematography through the early use of the Steadicam, which had recently been invented. He got its inventor, Garrett Brown, to operate the Steadicam for shots which required a smooth, floating motion where dolly or crane use wasn’t possible.
Kubrick’s desire to view the Steadicam image at all times, without using cables, also led to innovations in wireless video transmission technology.
One famous example of Steadicam use was during the maze scene, which they shot on Kubrick’s 9.8mm lens with the camera 24 inches above the ground, chasing the action through the fake snow.
The Shining used its larger $19 million budget to construct enormous sets on various sound stages and shot meticulously with a large shooting ratio for over a year of production.
CONCLUSION
Stanley Kubrick was an independently minded director who did not like to be held back creatively by studios and over the years created a unique style of working which reflected this.
His working style grew from carefully planned low budget filmmaking all the way to taking over a year to photograph a feature with a high budget. His innovative, experimental style, supreme technical photographic knowledge and desire for ultimate creative control did however remain present throughout his career.
If ever there was a director who made sure to fully utilise all the funds at his disposal in the pursuit of bringing his singular artistic vision to the screen, it was Stanley Kubrick.