Happy 90th Birthday, Mr. K, Who Gave Himself and the World a Dazzling Life

If you've thought of something, you don't need to say it out loud.

The New York Times on the day K was born carried two stories that, without meaning to, set up two coincidences: a boxing report, "Tunney Beats Heeney in the 11th Round, Champion Punishes Challenger" — boxing was the subject of his first film; and the surfacing, in the library of the Polish count Zamoyski, of a set of Napoleon manuscripts written between 1793 and 1797, which years later became part of the vast trove of research K assembled when he tried to make his (ultimately aborted) Napoleon.

K grew up in a typical middle-class family in the Bronx and was supposed to follow his father into medicine, but he never shone in school. He skipped class regularly from the first grade on; his social-conduct marks swung between A and C-minus, and he was rated "unsatisfactory" on personality, on getting along with classmates, on doing his own homework, on respecting other people's rights, and on expressing himself clearly. At 12 he was expelled from Bronx Public School 90 for bad grades and too many absences.

In fact, from age 7 to 13 he sat the citywide reading and intelligence tests across New York and scored well, but his mind was never on school. He seemed to know early what he really wanted: his father taught him to use a Graflex camera and to play chess, and neither ever left his life — ten years later, with no studio offering him work and no money coming in, he sat down in Washington Square and played chess with strangers for cash.

The neighborhood agreed this boy was a loner, and he soon began roaming the streets taking pictures. He didn't go to the candy store or watch ballgames with the other Bronx boys; the only places he turned up regularly were the Loew's Paradise and the Fordham movie theaters.

K brought up those early years at the movies in interview after interview. He went twice a week and sat through eight showings of "mediocre Hollywood films" — "the most important thing was realizing how bad a lot of these movies were." Before he understood how a film was made, he already felt sure he couldn't do worse.

This disregard for what he was supposed to be doing carried straight into Taft High School: attendance was terrible, his average was 67, he failed English at one point, and his math teacher reported that he liked to talk in class and never read the school's required books.

He never adapted to formal schoolwork, but his interests and gifts in art kept filling out. He enrolled in children's art and painting classes at the Art Students League of New York, played drums in the school orchestra with a 35mm camera hanging around his neck through rehearsals, and joined the school camera club. He would go to the ballpark, point his lens at three or four kids, and wait patiently until they had finished pulling faces, gotten absorbed in the game, and forgotten the photographer existed — then catch their expressions.

The 17-year-old photographer got his first break the day Roosevelt died. Passing a newsstand in New York, K caught the vendor's face wedged between three newspapers, the old man's chin in his hand, his eyes down, his expression heavy with grief. The headlines above and below him read "Roosevelt Dead," "Roosevelt Funeral Tomorrow," and "Truman Takes Over." He sold this newsworthy close-up for a handsome $25 to Look, the picture magazine then at the height of its fame, and it ran on June 26, 1945, in a photo essay comparing the two presidents, printed six times the size of the other pictures to bring out the link between them. Helen O'Brian, then head of the picture department, felt she had found a photographic prodigy: he was still a student, yet he shot with a technician's skill and an artist's eye, exactly like a veteran.

The other person who lit K's love of art was his English teacher, Aaron Traister — one of the rare teachers who could hold Stanley's attention. Traister loved literature and theater, taught with real feeling, and liked to lecture on Shakespeare while directing students to act the scenes out on stage. K soon shot another set of pictures for Look (April 2, 1946) of Traister teaching from a copy of Hamlet and performing as he went: across four photographs, Hamlet casting off Ophelia, the grief over Hecuba, and the prince's tirade against women, the drama of it fully on display.

That same year K's poor grades sank his application to New York University, and the timing could hardly have been worse: the G.I. Bill had just passed and Second World War veterans were pouring into the colleges, squeezing out a candidate whose chances were already thin. He enrolled in night school instead, hoping to lift his average to a decent mark and transfer into a regular program. When O'Brian at Look heard about his academic troubles, she generously offered him a job and made him a full-time staff photographer.

Looking back later on the years from 17 to 21, K thought the luckiest thing that happened to him was getting out of the by-the-book education system early and going straight into practical work and self-directed learning at the magazine. Over four years at Look, his eye for observation, his sense of drama, his unconventional angles, his instinct for catching feeling in people, and his technical command of a camera all quietly laid the ground for the film career ahead.

In a series called Shopping for a Hat, he used twelve consecutive photographs from one unchanging angle to build a single continuous scene of a woman trying on hats. In How Monkeys See Humans, he pushed his lens out from inside the bars to photograph the people watching the monkeys. His camera found the truest New York: he shot in dental offices, on the subway, on Bronx streets, camera around his neck and the shutter release hidden in his pocket, and came back with a young man holding flowers over his head so the crowd wouldn't crush them, a girl asleep in an evening gown in Grand Central, a patient bearing the pain in a clinic, a girl on the street showing off a new dress to a friend. He shot celebrity portraits; at a Dale Carnegie course he photographed Mrs. Carnegie and the faces in the audience; at 19 he went to Columbia University for a long feature and made a portrait of Eisenhower. He even started staging scenes himself — he had a girl slap a man who chatted her up in a movie theater; the man was a friend of K's, but he had no idea beforehand that she would react so fiercely.

While K was recording New York life, his colleagues at Look set up a "Raising Stanley" committee to remind him not to forget his keys, his glasses, his galoshes. That warmth toward the youngest man in the room turned, in the magazine's pages, into a summing-up compliment and a prediction —

"K is a quiet young man with brown eyes, and like any experienced photographer, he knows exactly what he wants... In his spare time he's trying to learn film technique, and dreams of making his own documentaries one day. This young man can go on forgetting his keys, but where photographic technique is concerned, K needs no help at all."

"Not a single studio called me, not for anything"

K's passion for film kept climbing. Over his four years at the magazine he read everything, still lived at the movies, watched the Museum of Modern Art's entire film collection twice through, and became a regular at Cinema 16, the experimental film society.

Perhaps it was a decision by his high school friend Alexander Singer that pushed Stanley down the same road. Singer got him onto the Russian master Eisenstein and on French experimental cinema. After Alexander Nevsky, K went home, bought the record and played the score on obsessive repeat (his sister Barbara finally had enough and broke the record) — this may be where his attention to film music begins. He watched Singer draw 900 sketches of his own trying to put Homer's Iliad on screen, and even used his connections at Look to get his friend's script into an MGM producer's hands (the answer came back: "Sorry, we only make one epic a decade, and right now we're making Quo Vadis.")

K also served as cameraman on Singer's first short, watching his friend go through every step — writing the script, drawing the storyboards, setting the camera positions. Singer recalled sensing that K might resent it, but after reading the script and the storyboards his companion said: "Alex, this is great, you should do it yourself. You haven't left me any room to create — all I have to do is fill in every frame with camera knowledge and technique."

K also learned to do the arithmetic. After calling around the equipment rental houses, Kodak among them, he worked out that a 9-minute short — film stock bought, camera rented, an entirely original score — would cost $1,000 all told, and that selling it to The March of Time, the newsreel outfit Singer worked for, could not lose money.

So it was time to act. K put four years of savings and money from his father into his first documentary. He had no formal training of any kind; his only instruction was a half-hour lesson from the owner of a camera rental shop. He shouldered a 35mm wind-up camera and shot the story of middleweight boxer Walter Cartier, Day of the Fight. With no money for professionals, he did every bit of the heavy lifting and the odd jobs on set himself — one man handling an entire production was rare in the 1950s.

The boxing documentary shows a fighter's working day exactly as it is, told in lean, brisk scenes with plenty of images that stay with you: the focus shifting between glove and fist, a shot taken from stool-leg height, a low angle up off the floor, crime-film lighting. He finished it for $3,900 and sold it for $4,000 to RKO, not yet bankrupt, as part of its This Is America series — a $100 profit, which for a first-time director was no failure at all.

RKO promptly gave him $1,500 for another documentary. The second one reflected K's love of flying (a love, as we'll see, full of surprising contradictions): he filmed a priest who flew a plane between parishes, Flying Padre. It stayed close to life and broke no new ground, but it sharpened Stanley's technique and made him more familiar with the production process. The short came out even in the end, and it gave him more confidence. K quit his job at Look and decided to enter the film business for good.

But the imagined scene of studios extending an olive branch to a promising young documentary director never happened. "Not a single studio called me, not for anything." With his income gone, K sat down in Washington Square again and played chess for a few cents at a time. Once he saw that no company would come looking for him, the man of action in him settled the question: the only money lay in producing proper features himself, films that "certainly won't be worse than what you see in theaters."

The world was about to watch a director who knew exactly what he ought to do take control and never compromise, never care about "the rules," never sit in his comfort zone, never try to please an audience.

"I did the right thing with other people's money"

People later hung all sorts of cool mythology on K, but he did walk the same by-the-book route as any newcomer: make films that earn money first, build some reputation with bigger productions, and use that as the base for creative independence.

His first feature, Fear and Desire, follows a squad lost behind enemy lines and struggling to escape — a practice piece. It played in a handful of theaters to small audiences and failed at the box office, yet it was taken for art cinema and drew some attention and praise, including a New York Times review that found the director's skill as a cameraman visible in the images: he had "artistically captured death, the wolfish, animal hunger of starving men, and, in one scene, the destructive desire of a pitiable young soldier (which sets him clumsily molesting a girl tied to a tree)." That pleased the 25-year-old Stanley; it embarrassed the director he became, who had no wish to see this piece of his "dark history" get out.

Killer's Kiss, next, was still meant to earn money. Unfortunately it is also the least characteristic film he made. Stanley wrote the script himself, which was rare, and beyond an authentic feel for New York's lower-class life it is boxed in by the conventions of the suspense-action picture, a little hackneyed and full of holes in the plot — so much so that years later its director wished he had never made it.

Still, the documentaries and two features had at least made K a director with work on his résumé and experience across the board. A chance meeting introduced him to Singer's friend James Harris. Harris could afford to finance a feature, and he chose not to become Singer's producer — Singer had never made one — betting instead on K, who had already completed two films on his own. A promising young director met a producer, and the two Leos founded a company together. Their first order of business: find material in a bookstore, have Harris buy the adaptation rights, go to a major studio together for financing, and let K run the entire production.

That is how The Killing, adapted from the crime novel Clean Break, came about. It had $200,000 from United Artists (total spending came to $330,000; beyond UA's money, both men put in their own savings), professional actors and crew, and a standard studio production route — but creative authority rested entirely with K, so it counts as an independent film. With a good story and reasonably sufficient money, K showed what happens when he makes a feature properly: The Killing is a well-crafted, intelligent crime picture. Time wrote: "the 27-year-old director-screenwriter shows uncommon nerve in his third feature; the script and the photography are both excellent, and he is another great director out of Hollywood since Orson Welles."

A film that made money and drew praise cleared K's path. Dore Schary, then president of MGM, spotted the young director and opened the studio's library and story files to the pair, letting them go through hundreds of book properties. This is also where Stanley sensed that he was not free: Schary had no interest in his proposed adaptation of Paths of Glory; the fallback option, Burning Secret, got a provisional green light, but the agreement required Harris-Kubrick Pictures to write, direct and produce it within 40 weeks. Just as the script was nearing completion, MGM's leadership changed, Schary was fired, and K and Harris were caught in the blast — MGM ended the deal on grounds of "breach of contract," having discovered that the two young men were quietly adapting Paths of Glory on the side. It was no serious violation, but it handed the studio a convenient reason.

Paths of Glory became K's main work. He took the script to United Artists, his earlier partner, and UA came back with the "legitimate" demand of the star system: it would consider financing this war film only if the script were rewritten or a superstar came aboard, since the touchy subject would likely get it banned in France. Luckily, the star K had in mind happened to be interested — Kirk Douglas's Bryna Productions had long been looking for new directing talent, and after reading the script Douglas said that although he didn't think the film would make money, "we have to make it."

In 1957, Paths of Glory was a big success and made the 29-year-old K a modest name in Hollywood; it also won him the chance to write a Western for Marlon Brando (One-Eyed Jacks). His next big production came three years later — Spartacus, a commercial epic entirely under Douglas's control. The star had just fired Anthony Mann over creative differences and thought of handing the film to K. This produced exactly the situation K least wanted to be in: he had no final cut, the set was not his to command, and beyond making the picture better within the limits he had, he was mostly playing the craftsman.

It never happened again. K's next film was Nabokov's Lolita. Facing Warner, he and Harris studied the contract closely and had their lawyer tell the studio that "on control of the film, there can be no compromise whatsoever this time." If Warner would not give up final say — including the right to name the composer, the cinematographer and the editor — the partnership could end on the spot.

So that plan duly collapsed, but the two of them found a new foreign distributor instead (going around America's conservative companies) and settled on a cheaper place than Hollywood to shoot in: England.

From this point on, two things never left K: final cut, which meant absolute control, and London, which cost less. That gave him enormous freedom — "I can finally film the stories I fall in love with at first sight."

It should be said that K was never truly a free spirit drifting outside the system; he understood clearly what it takes to keep the final word. He once compared the whole journey to chess: "Chess is the analogy — it's that same series of steps, you make one move at a time, and for each problem you have to find a solution that balances it. What chess needs is time. What film needs is time and money."

The way to get the money was to put production into a virtuous circle: everything went as he said, and he was confident he could do the right thing with other people's money.

"I don't know what I want, but I know what I don't want"

In 1999, a week before K died, his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, opened. In roughly 70 years in film he had made only 13 features. Set aside Spartacus, which he never controlled, and the rest scatter across completely different territory — yes, he made four films that look like war films (Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket), but nobody would call them repetitive. That word never came near K; he was always exploring new ground.

K was devoted to literature, and nearly all his films were adapted from novels, because he found he could not write a wholly original story out of his own experience and life. He admitted the shortcoming freely, saying that writing a novel filled him with awe — "it's one of the greatest achievements of the human race" — and that the hardest thing for him was finding the story: "finding a good story is a miraculous discovery, much harder than raising money, writing the script, shooting the film or cutting it."

His gaps between films were often long, and one reason was how hard it was to find a novel worth adapting. Asked in interview after interview what his standard was for choosing a story, he could never give a clear answer; the one constant was reading. He would either order books from America (he lived in London by then) and read five hours a day, or walk into a bookstore and pull a book off the shelf with his eyes shut. A book he didn't like at all he would simply never finish, but something always struck him at first sight, and by the last page he instinctively felt it could go on screen.

Adaptation habit favors novels with complicated plots; K wrote in a piece for Sight and Sound that "the perfect novel from which to make a movie is one concerned primarily with the inner life of its characters. It gives the adapter an absolutely clear fix on what a character is thinking and feeling at a given moment, and from that fixed point the adapter can invent behavior for the character that is objectively linked to the psychological content of the book." The finished film should carry the original author's point of view (and the director should not sacrifice any part of it for a dramatic climax) while also delivering, through the artist's own style, feeling that draws the audience in. Even so, the exposition a novel can hardly avoid has to be cut when you approach it as a film: Full Metal Jacket dropped the passages in its source novel, The Short-Timers, where the character talks about his alcoholic father and his girlfriend, because "everything you learn about a character has to come from watching the main action of the story."

Apart from the early, self-written Killer's Kiss and Spartacus, which was out of his hands, every one of his films has its own sharp and singular appeal:

Paths of Glory leads, ironically, to the grave, exposing the corruption and stupidity of the chain of command in the First World War. Lolita was hugely controversial, but K was not afraid to keep the novel's "immorality" — his only regret was that the sex scenes fell short, since the censors kept Humbert's sick desire for Lolita from showing clearly early on, so that at first he seems merely to have "loved" her. Dr. Strangelove, out of Red Alert, was turned into a tighter and far more satirical black absurdist comedy. A Clockwork Orange's naked display of violence, and of the more frightening, worse thing that is coercive power, leaves you unsettled. Barry Lyndon is a startling, abrupt return to classicism. The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut both seem to show a distrust of family and marriage. And 2001: A Space Odyssey is... something no words can describe, something humanity had never seen. None of them exists to make people comfortable or to please an audience ("doing everything you can to please an audience is not what you're supposed to do"), and not one came out of that giant system, so all of them are full of surprises.

The critic Norman Kagan summed up the patterns these completely different films share (K would not necessarily have agreed) as follows —

· An imagined world

· The uselessness of intelligence; the errors and unreliability of emotion

· A journey toward freedom / knowledge

· The victory of the obsessive, single-minded protagonist

· The killer and the suicide coexisting

The later K could not bear to look at his first feature, Fear and Desire — four soldiers dropped by accident behind enemy lines struggle to recover their identities and find their base, only to hit a dead end when they run into a young woman — and dismissed it as a solemn, flat, somewhat show-offy allegory. But people can always find traces there of the style and themes he would go on to favor, and it reads as a somewhat pessimistic view of life, as though life were hopeless and not worth fighting for.

That, of course, misreads K. As he said, "showing a dark point of view in a film doesn't mean you hate humanity." In fact, by putting the many threats inside human society and out in the universe on screen, K wanted audiences to see dangers they never normally think about. Like the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, he genuinely loved humanity; it is only that his unusually sharp, penetrating insight and his cool, rational, god's-eye view made people uncomfortable.

"You either care or you don't, there's no middle ground"

Audiences in 1968 witnessed the most exciting turn of all. The preview of 2001: A Space Odyssey sent 241 people out early (yes, K counted them himself), Warner executives held several emergency meetings on the spot in the hotel to work out what to do, and a number of New York critics angrily attacked the film as incomprehensible — you can't help imagining how much more interesting it would have been with social media and Rotten Tomatoes around.

Audiences found the film baffling and dazzling at once (one British boy fell for it too hard and fell in love with cinema because of it — "it taught me that film needs no rules at all" — and paid tribute to K in 2014 with Interstellar). Then the press caught its breath and began looking up at this indescribable work that belonged to no genre.

2001's storytelling broke with the traditional three-act model. K put forward another structure: the whole film built from six to eight "non-submersible units." The units are independent of one another, each with its own beginning, middle and end, each able to stand alone — but joined in sequence they form a complete narrative, and their power comes from the fact that the audience has to build the connections between them. 2001 shows this fully: the dawn of man; the discovery of the black monolith on the moon; Bowman and Poole's mission to Jupiter and HAL 9000's rampage; Bowman's contact with a higher species and his rebirth as the Star Child. Each is a separate story, and when the audience finds the thread that links them, the answers to many questions rise up in the mind on their own, in a form that isn't language — and as we'll see, K saw no need at all for the audience to put any of it into words.

For other filmmakers, what opened their eyes about this method was that it lets you explore timelines and themes of almost unlimited breadth. It has nothing to do with tradition and looks baffling at first glance, but it is remarkably efficient and elegant at conveying what its makers intend.

Plenty has already been written about where a film this bold on every level made its breakthroughs: the eerie rendering of the star gate, the revolutionary use of music, and more. Before 2001, a film score was decoration, there mainly to stress emotion; from the moment The Blue Danube comes in with the turning space station, the score became part of the essence of the film, even the engine driving it.

Other new things K did: to shoot Alex's suicide leap in A Clockwork Orange, he put the camera in a plastic box and threw it off a roof; to get the lens to hit the ground first they threw it six times, the camera survived all six drops, and the last throw finally landed lens-down the way he wanted. For Barry Lyndon he modified a Zeiss lens, drew on Renaissance painting, and shot the whole film in natural light and candlelight, creating the most beautiful, most antique images anyone had put on screen. And in subject matter, he was the one who inventively told the terrifying business of nuking the world as a joke.

Nobody could ever guess what outrageous thing his next film would do. He took big money and spent it making auteur films on his own terms, unafraid of form, of censorship, or of the limits of human understanding.

Learn even a little about how he worked, and every doubt about him falls away.

This workaholic, this detail obsessive ("every stone has a system of its own," which is why the war scenes used real stones and rubble), this control freak, perfectionist and tireless researcher (he did so much homework for each film he could have passed for a historian, an astronomer or a behavioral psychologist) had energy enough to oversee the whole process and, wherever he could reach, to make sure the crew got everything right — while still letting the people under him run experiments (which is how they worked out the star gate). A director, he said, is a machine for coming up with ideas and adding taste to a film; making a film calls for a whole series of creative technical decisions, and his job was to make the right one, quickly, as many times as possible.

"Even with only a little time, I'm preparing." He thought about the film almost without stopping, trying to make it visual, working through every idea he could find for each scene. Yet during shooting he always found he had not fully opened up everything in a scene, and all his earlier analysis had to give way to the feel on the day: "if you don't use that feedback, if you don't make the adjustment, you'll never get what the film wants." As a rule the entire crew waited for the moment when "he finally worked out how to shoot it"; once that moment came and K had what was worth having, shooting turned into recording. Stanley believed that an actor who played it badly once could always go again, and a cameraman who shot it badly once could go again too — three takes, 50, 100, all acceptable.

The crew grew sick of the endless "one more time," and could do nothing about it, because K had usually made up his mind to reproduce exactly the image in his head. The same compulsion carried into editing, his favorite stage (he thought it the most creative part of making a film). He studied the footage, took notes, decided what to use and what to throw out, and picked every piece with care to make sure it matched what he wanted "exactly."

"You either care or you don't. There's no middle ground."

"That kind of question can't be answered"

K saw no need for the audience to draw any conclusion from 2001. All he wanted to achieve was to stir feeling through images rather than words, to dissolve cultural barriers, to move people the way music does. In this two-hour-twenty-minute film there are only 40 minutes of dialogue, a deliberate choice to keep your attention on the images. "The film industry has developed very conservatively, always relying on language to carry ideas; now is the crucial moment to abolish that tradition."

Even so, he often cited one example of the trouble language creates in films: in 2001, when someone asks Dr. Floyd where he is going, he answers, "I'm going to Clavius." Plenty of adults came out asking whether Clavius wasn't a planet somewhere. But the children knew from the 15 shots of the moon that follow the line that the doctor was going to the moon (Clavius is a crater there).

Beyond a plain summary of the plot, K offered no "official" reading of what 2001 meant. Everyone's subjective experience differs; all he hoped was that it would push some people to think about humanity's fate and the part humanity plays in the universe. He knew that without this film, some people would never think about those questions in ordinary life at all.

After this philosophical epic, more people grew curious about the director's own concerns. They wanted to know what he thought about the "big questions" — good and evil, power, war, nuclear weapons and technology. The following are drawn from his interviews:

· The moral heart of A Clockwork Orange is choice: whether a man who cannot choose evil can be called good, whether a creature incapable of that choice can still be called human; redemption has to come from the inside out... If Alex weren't so evil, you wouldn't take the film's argument seriously. Obviously, if he weren't so evil, it would be easy to object to his treatment.

· Alex is used to explore one side of human nature — he knows what he does is wrong and does it anyway, and you are still moved by him and still accept his standard of judgment. That's because in a dream, film is temporarily exempt from moral judgment. Watching a film resembles dreaming or daydreaming; the part of consciousness it stimulates is the part where only dream and drama are at work, so you can explore anything you like there without answering for questions of right and wrong.

· The danger is not that authority will finally collapse; it's that as it collapses, to protect itself, it will turn more brutal.

· The nuclear strategists who might set off a war are never more inventive than reality; they have no control over the situation at all, and the political and military leaders in charge are not as shrewd or capable as they imagine.

· (On whether people who watch violence on screen will act the same way in life) I don't think so. It has been shown that even under deep hypnosis people will not do what runs against their nature. Compared with the "fun violence" of a James Bond film or Tom and Jerry, the realism in my films is less likely to push people into the corresponding violent acts. A boy fed nonsense about the glory of war will rush to the battlefield full of hope, and that hope will not be met. But once they have really watched a cruel, violent war film, they'll realize what is waiting for them.

· Deep down I believe in humanity's potential and capacity to seek progress. What Dr. Strangelove expresses is the unreason of a species threatening its own existence. But recognizing madness is not celebrating it, still less despairing of the chance to cure it. The reason a man doesn't stop worrying about humanity is that he understands its absurdity and its flaws.

· Nuclear power is a turning point in human development. Past it, humanity could travel through space more efficiently, and at the same time gained the ability to destroy itself.

· The destruction of this planet would count for nothing to the universe. Humanity's extinction would be like a match in space, burning for a second and going out. If that match had not shone in the dark, no one would grieve for the species — because it will have used, to light its own funeral pyre, the energy that could have lit a beacon for other worlds.

A few odds and ends: only cats can ignore him

· He got his private pilot's license in 1947 and could fly a single-engine plane, yet he was afraid of flying. He never took a plane between America and England, only ships, because he worried about "the uncertainty of life"; he had what you might call a well-informed man's cowardice, believing that commercial aviation's safety systems were not enough to guarantee his own safety.

· Charlie Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein were the two filmmakers he brought up most often, though their styles are worlds apart: the former cared about content, the latter about beautiful form.

· He chose the English countryside to live in not out of any liking for Britishness or British-flavored filmmaking, but simply because his wife didn't like New York, the Hollywood model held little appeal, London happened to be convenient for shooting, and those particular films happened to belong in England.

· A slovenly perfectionist. He never did housework, but he was very good at getting other people to do things — writing detailed lists telling his children how to look after the cats and dogs, including which cat should stay in which room and how to break up a fight among three cats according to each one's character.

· Forgetful, always mislaying things; his assistant Emilio had to keep cutting him new keys. He warned other people never to touch a machine before reading the manual, then heated an egg in the microwave himself and found the exploded "egg" incredible.

· He loved paradox, and his talk swung "between the believable and the absurd," so nobody could tell when he was joking. He once sent Emilio off, quite seriously, to strike up a conversation with a construction worker. "Are you trying to hire him as a laborer?" "No, I want him as an actor. His eyes are like Marlon Brando's."

· He handed out so much work that his assistants wanted to quit. He wouldn't let them, putting on an innocent or pleading look, sweetening it with a raise, and telling them "please don't leave me." "Finish out another six months" became a fixture of Emilio's life.

· Getting more screen time as an extra in a K film was easy: you only had to ask, and he might even write you a recommendation letter. During Full Metal Jacket, a Marine wanted to know whether he could get closer to the camera, add a few scenes, and stand out among the extras. K said, fine, remind me where he is and we'll give him a few close-ups. He later wrote the young man a letter of introduction, praising his dedication in particular.

· He thought writing a review after seeing a film once was absurd — "I don't think any of them go to as much trouble writing a review as we go to making the film, at least not that much trouble. Unfortunately, what makes most critics famous are bad reviews, and the reviews that are easy and fun to write are worthless."

· The director he kept in touch with most was George Lucas, whose skill with effects he particularly admired; James Cameron and Spielberg were both members of his "technical advisory group." He envied how fast Spielberg made films, but privately wondered "why doesn't he spend more time doing deeper research."

· He found television commercials fascinating, "visual poetry," able to create a complex impression of something in 30 seconds.

· "Only cats can ignore Kubrick." Because the house cats kept running into the road and getting killed, he had the carpenter from the Barry Lyndon crew put a wooden fence around the house. When a cat gave birth to kittens next to his assistant Andros's car tire and Andros couldn't move the car, K sent him home in a taxi. He once pushed a newborn kitten straight into Emilio's hands — "that's settled, take it home and raise it" — and when the assistant said his child had asthma, K cut him off: "Asthma isn't an allergy to cats." Only cats could disobey Stanley; they ran out of the house at once and ruled wherever they went.

1958

"If those in power have the slightest respect for film and the people who make it, that respect is offset by a more or less cynical observation: that bad and mediocre work can succeed just as well as high-quality film.

Television has changed everything too. Besides the unpleasant economic damage it has done to the film industry, I think it has also created a thrilling and stimulating challenge for it, and it is precisely this challenge that makes films of greater sincerity and courage all the more necessary.

If Hollywood has lost the glamour and excitement of its early years, then for young people today, what an environment full of opportunity and excitement this is."

Move this 1958 radio interview to the present and nothing about it feels out of place. Sixty years on, Hollywood is still fighting the same old fights: the studio system against the creator's authority, assembly-line product against auteur cinema, classics and mediocrities set side by side in the temple, and bold, unconventional work attacked in ways it never fully recovers from. Another K seems harder to produce now than in the 1960s — people are less able to accept dissent, quicker to follow whatever social media says, and taste has narrowed.

The world seems to have improved, but technology lets authority suppress minds that refuse to obey in ways more hidden and more refined; they are no gentler than A Clockwork Orange, and their reach goes further. Humanity is still locked in a tug-of-war over the use of energy, able to break out of the Earth and explore the galaxy, and able at any moment to die by nuclear fire, lighting its own funeral pyre.

Still, K was the kind of person who never gave up hope for humanity. Ninety years after his birth, perhaps we too should believe there are creators working their way down a similar road, ready to pull generation after generation of audiences into the dazzle of the universe in their images.

Thank you, Stanley Kubrick.

Cover image from 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange