Dennis Muren, ASC (ILM visual effects supervisor, consultant on A.I.): He wanted the kid to look sort of real but not real. I just remember that he was always searching. That’s the way I’m going to remember Stanley— always searching. I don’t think he ever just looked at something and said, ’That’s it.’
Ned Gorman (ILM visual effects producer, consultant on A.I.): It seemed to me that getting a ’Stanley Kubrick’ performance from this CG kid was going to be really problematic. That’s my personal opinion, but I have a sense that he was so hands-on it would have been almost impossible for him to work with an animation director and get what he wanted. Something I didn’t quite say to him was that if his live-action pictures took two years to post—given his well-deserved reputation for perfection—I could see something like this going on for five years. Presented with the infinite palette of possibilities digital techniques allow, Stanley would have created something amazing, but it could have been tough for him to know when to stop. He was the master and I mourn for the films we won’t see.
Ty Ruben Ellingson (A.I. preproduction effects artist): Kubrick wanted a lot of extra frames on the head and tail of every effects shot. He wanted to be able to say, ’I want this kid to go pick up a ball and walk to the next room,’ and he really wanted it from before and after. I think in a weird sense, he was playing back to his strengths. By leaving an unknown in there, it was like shooting all of those takes: he was leaving himself an option to move around a little bit.
Dennis Muren: Stanley lived on the telephone, just sort of keeping up with things, like where is digital [technology] at? The last time I heard from him, he left me a voicemail and said he’d call me back up at about 9 o’clock. I counted out the time difference [between England and the U.S.], and that was about 5 a.m. his time! I think he just lived at night. He was always up late, at least until 1 or 2 o’clock, because that’s when I would often talk to him. I think it was because he always needed to talk to people in the States. Everybody got phone calls from him. He would call ILM and ask for me, and if I wasn’t there, he would say, ’Well, can you put me in touch with somebody in optical?’ I think John Knoll got a call like that, and I know Stefan Fangmeyer got a call like that. I was even getting calls at home on Sundays. I still don’t know how he got my home number.
Gilbert Taylor: Stanley used to telephone me at home, at around midnight, and say, ’Gil, I want to buy a camera, what shall I buy? And what should I buy along with it?’ He’d spend a whole hour talking to me about which camera he should buy—it was nothing whatsoever to do with [his current] movie or anything! I’d talk to him about it, say ’Bye-bye, Stanley,’ and not hear from him for another year. He was a very strange man.
Ed DiGiulio (President of Cinema Products, supplier of camera equipment for >A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut): Stanley’s death was shocking. I really enjoyed interacting with him, and I still feel a great love for him. He was persistent, insistent, eager for the technology—eager to understand it, deal with it, and use it. You had mixed emotions with Stanley. Generally speaking, my attitude always was, ’What are you bugging me for? Get out of here!’ But then I began to respect and admire him, and to appreciate that he was a true filmmaker. Since then, I’ve often said that filmmaking is an art form, and its palette is technology. Stanley kept pushing the envelope to actually use technology to enhance his filmmaking and storytelling.
Dennis Muren: Stanley’s death was a terrible loss. You’d think that you just wouldn’t hear from for awhile, but the calls would just keep on coming, even after he turned 70. His passing was a real shock and a tragedy; the guy was just great. I mean, he’s one of the few people whose movies are totally him. Nobody else could copy him, and he wasn’t trying to copy anybody else. He was a real artist.
Garrett Brown: My first reaction was perhaps the best sort of feeling one could have at the death of a true artist: I was just sorry that I wouldn’t get to see any more of his movies. I won’t ever get to see A.I. or Napoleon.
Ken Adam: I had just arrived in New York, where I’d been invited by the Lincoln Center Film Society to give a lecture on design, and two producer friends met us at the airport to tell us about it. I paid tribute to Stanley at the lecture, and it was really heartfelt. I don’t think I’ll ever have that sort of relationship with a director again. I recently found some very interesting correspondence from Stanley, and it’s really very touching. You know, we were really like a sort of marriage!
Gilbert Taylor: I was amazed. I thought, ’Gosh, somebody put something in his coffee,’ or something like that! I didn’t think it was natural, because he was the sort of figure that would still be around at 90, you know?
Martin Hunter: I sent Stanley a fax on his 70th birthday, and he sent me back a fax thanking me for my fax! That was our last communication. [His death] came as a huge shock, and it was very sad. I came to terms with it by deciding that Stanley had left us in the way he’d done everything else: it was entirely unexpected. He had seemed immortal, but he just fooled us all again!
Additional material for this piece was provided by Stephen Pizzello, and excerpted from AC issues Jan. 1961 and May ’91 (Spartacus), June ’68 and Oct. ’69 (2001: A Space Odyssey), Mar. ’76 (Barry Lyndon), Aug. ’80 (The Shining), and Sept. ’87 (Full Metal Jacket).