Xixax Film Forum

The Director's Chair => Stanley Kubrick => Topic started by: SmellyBoobFungus on February 10, 2004, 02:35:29 AM

Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: SmellyBoobFungus on February 10, 2004, 02:35:29 AM
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

that's just so gawd damn profound
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: molly on February 10, 2004, 01:23:50 PM
i don't know any of kubrick's quotes, bring them more (it's kubrick!)
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: cron on February 10, 2004, 01:29:29 PM
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
Stanley Kubrick

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
Stanley Kubrick

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.
Stanley Kubrick

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.
Stanley Kubrick

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
Stanley Kubrick

I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists-neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.
Stanley Kubrick

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.
Stanley Kubrick

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.
Stanley Kubrick

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Stanley Kubrick

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
Stanley Kubrick

The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.
Stanley Kubrick

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Stanley Kubrick

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick, in Guardian, June 5, 1963


"I believe that drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist. I think that the illusion of oneness with the universe, and absorption with the significance of every object in your environment, and the pervasive aura of peace and contentment is not the ideal state for an artist. It tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas. The artist's transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and the mainspring of his subconscious. One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear to be so in the state of universal bliss that the drug induces on a "good" trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life. Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful."

"I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it."

"I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was."
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: ono on February 10, 2004, 01:34:16 PM
If we're talking about stuff he's said himself, I don't have much, but what cronopio has written is why I admire the man so very much.

If it's stuff from his movies, there's one line that pretty much sums up his whole body of work, the last line spoken in his last film.  So very beautiful, so incredibly perfect, in Kidman's delivery and everything.  "Fuck."
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: SoNowThen on February 10, 2004, 01:54:48 PM
Quote from: cronopio"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."
Stanley Kubrick

That's the one. The best one. I'm getting sick to death of people I know working themselves to the bone to learn based on what amounts to fear. The idea of teachers and school, it's all so... ugh, I've never got on board with it...
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Alethia on February 10, 2004, 02:35:09 PM
it's always very sad to me when report card day comes in high school.  many people i know (generally girls) end up in tears because of their grades (which, for them, bad means mid to low eighties) and they just work themselves so hard and for no other reason than fear.  fear that they won't get into the best school, fear that they won't get the best job, fear that they won't have the best life.  it's strange, i have never been afraid of any of that.  i've always been afraid of taking school too seriously.  rather than being afraid of failure in academics, etc...i have always been afraid of turning out dull later in life because of it.  not to denounce education or anything but.....i think generally, at least in my school, it's bullshit.  most of the teachers here are simply "doing their jobs" anyway...
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Alethia on February 10, 2004, 02:37:42 PM
after filming a take of one of the soldiers running toward a building (which is being blown apart by bullets), Kubrick and the FMJ crew run over to reset, etc...

kubrick turns to the camera, smiles, and says "Boy, that looked like something, eh?"
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: MacGuffin on February 10, 2004, 02:38:20 PM
"The audience should just watch the movie [The Shining] as a whole, and not focus on just the helicopter blades." - Kubrick to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: cron on February 10, 2004, 02:52:23 PM
Fernando's signature.
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: mogwai on February 10, 2004, 03:40:42 PM
"all day long except when i got to bed. that's the only time i take it off".

kubrick on his beard.
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: cron on February 10, 2004, 03:46:06 PM
"England is one of my favorite places. The fans are just so crazy." - Stanley Kubrick.

"There's no difference between a tacky Jew from Miami and a rap star. They both want the Cadillac and the Rolex with the diamonds." - Stanley Kubrick.

"I dress the way I want. I don't pretend to be someone I'm not." - Stanley Kubrick.

"Is there a rehab center for Coke drinkers? I drink six to eight cans a day." - Stanley Kubrick.

"I was watching an HBO special the other night on real-life maximum-security-prison guys. I glanced up, and my poster was in quite a few cells. I was screaming 'Oh, no!'" - Stanley Kubrick

"I never had my own name on a bathing suit on Baywatch. I was always given one that said Pamela or Yasmine. I earned my own suit, at the end of the season, which I now have framed." - Stanley Kubrick

"Just because I look sexy on the cover of Rolling Stone doesn't mean I'm naughty." - Stanley Kubrick

"Christina and I are friends no matter what the media makes up."  - Stanley Kubrick
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: SoNowThen on February 10, 2004, 04:00:25 PM
that zany Stanley Kubrick...
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: The Perineum Falcon on February 10, 2004, 05:15:23 PM
Quote from: cronopio1."England is one of my favorite places. The fans are just so crazy." - Stanley Kubrick.

2."There's no difference between a tacky Jew from Miami and a rap star. They both want the Cadillac and the Rolex with the diamonds." - Stanley Kubrick.

3."I dress the way I want. I don't pretend to be someone I'm not." - Stanley Kubrick.

4."Is there a rehab center for Coke drinkers? I drink six to eight cans a day." - Stanley Kubrick.

5."I was watching an HBO special the other night on real-life maximum-security-prison guys. I glanced up, and my poster was in quite a few cells. I was screaming 'Oh, no!'" - Stanley Kubrick

6."I never had my own name on a bathing suit on Baywatch. I was always given one that said Pamela or Yasmine. I earned my own suit, at the end of the season, which I now have framed." - Stanley Kubrick

7."Just because I look sexy on the cover of Rolling Stone doesn't mean I'm naughty." - Stanley Kubrick

8."Christina and I are friends no matter what the media makes up."  - Stanley Kubrick

1, 3, 7, 8. Britney Spears

2. Brett Ratner

4, 5, 6. Carmen Electra

Quick, what do I win? :-D

Seriously, cronopio, where'd you find all those _real_ Kubrick quotes at?
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Just Withnail on February 28, 2004, 12:47:53 PM
Quote from: ranemaka13Quick, what do I win? :-D

A date with Kubrick, in which you eat dinner and converse casually. The conversation will be printed in its entirey in the next issue of Playboy. Ask him the meaning of everything in 2001.
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: The Perineum Falcon on February 28, 2004, 03:35:21 PM
Quote from: Withnail
Quote from: ranemaka13Quick, what do I win? :-D

A date with Kubrick, in which you eat dinner and converse casually. The conversation will be printed in its entirey in the next issue of Playboy. Ask him the meaning of everything in 2001.
I swear cronopio replied already, but the post has strangely vanished. Mysterious............
Title: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Just Withnail on February 29, 2004, 08:40:49 AM
I swear I'm innocent.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Reel on October 13, 2011, 10:28:44 PM
This thread died way too soon, I'll never get enough of Kubrick in his own words:


I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.

One of the things that gave me the most confidence in trying to make a film was seeing all the lousy films that I saw. Because I sat there and thought, Well, I don't know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that.

To make a film entirely by yourself, which initially I did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography.

The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.

I can't honestly say what led me to make any of my films. The best I can do is to say I just fell in love with the stories. Going beyond that is a bit like trying to explain why you fell in love with your wife: she's intelligent, has brown eyes, a good figure.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: O. on October 14, 2011, 06:40:15 AM
The reason I hold Kubrick so highly (#1) is observed precisely in the stuff of this thread. Everything he's said and done resonates with me so specifically. His words on drugs, more specifically hallucinogens is what has kept me from using, not on a moral level, but on a pragmatic level.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: squints on October 14, 2011, 11:20:42 AM
^

"Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful."

yeah that's pretty great stuff.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Reel on October 14, 2011, 01:20:29 PM
yeah, I've noticed in my friends who've dropped acid repeatedly that everything cool loses importance to them and all they wanna do is go to shitty concerts and get in touch with the Universe MAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Alexandro on October 14, 2011, 03:22:19 PM
Quote from: O on October 14, 2011, 06:40:15 AM
The reason I hold Kubrick so highly (#1) is observed precisely in the stuff of this thread. Everything he's said and done resonates with me so specifically. His words on drugs, more specifically hallucinogens is what has kept me from using, not on a moral level, but on a pragmatic level.

Yeah but he never used drugs. His opinion on hallucinogens are not on drugs but on people who use them and become uncritical of the world around them; which is actually a good thing about them and why their effect should only last for so long. I think he was, as many of us are, against the notion that drugs somehow make you more creative or show you "the truth" about things that you normally wouldn't see. That second part, while is not a definitive, has some truth to it, as anyone who has ever used a hallucinogen can tell. Being high on a strong drug is definitely a different emotional state that sometimes opens up certain doors to the unconscious and to aesthetic appreciation. After a while that stops and you go back to normal critical thinking and behavior, at least most of us do. I think is dumb to ask for people to have sharp minds when they're on acid or something alike, that's what the substance does to you, perhaps you have a strong clarity moment while on mushrooms that will have a lasting impact, but smart people always come back to reality and make sense of the whole thing. That some people use drugs to liberate their dumber side is just a reflection of their personalities, not of the substances themselves.

Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on October 14, 2011, 06:42:39 PM
I guess I'm not that passionate about this issue anymore, because really people can do whatever they want... but I've always thought of the concept of opening your mind through drugs to be a lazy shortcut that's destined to yield inferior (chemically-induced) results.

And I've always seen the concept of attempting to reach spiritual enlightenment through drugs as especially silly/insulting.

So much crap has been produced by people on drugs... utter crap. There's also the question of correlation vs. causation. Many people who've created innovative things have also tended to be curious enough that they'd also try drugs, especially when there was an actual thriving drug culture.

I've often made something or written something and people have said (jokingly of course) "what were you on when you made that?" or something to that effect. This deeply annoys me, this phenomenon of assuming people have to be on drugs or have to have experimented with drugs to create something "out there" or experimental or whatever.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: O. on October 15, 2011, 07:38:21 AM
Indeed, it bothers me too. I can become a pretty outrageous person, create something absurd and so on, and people will frequently ask me what substances I've taken. It's insulting.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Alexandro on October 15, 2011, 11:12:19 AM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on October 14, 2011, 06:42:39 PM
I guess I'm not that passionate about this issue anymore, because really people can do whatever they want... but I've always thought of the concept of opening your mind through drugs to be a lazy shortcut that's destined to yield inferior (chemically-induced) results.

And I've always seen the concept of attempting to reach spiritual enlightenment through drugs as especially silly/insulting.

So much crap has been produced by people on drugs... utter crap. There's also the question of correlation vs. causation. Many people who've created innovative things have also tended to be curious enough that they'd also try drugs, especially when there was an actual thriving drug culture.

I've often made something or written something and people have said (jokingly of course) "what were you on when you made that?" or something to that effect. This deeply annoys me, this phenomenon of assuming people have to be on drugs or have to have experimented with drugs to create something "out there" or experimental or whatever.

That doesn't bother me at all. If it's a joke it's a joke, and if it's not you're probably talking with someone who clearly has never worked in a creative enterprise or tried drugs, so they don't get it anyway.

I had a life changing "spiritual enlightenment" experience while on drugs once. I wasn't attempting to have it, I was just having fun, yet something happened. It was truly mind blowing, and almost 10 years later, I consider it one of the most important experiences of my life. Even one day after it happened I knew this, but I also knew that the drug alone wasn't the cause for it. It was something within me that exploded at that precise moment with that "shortcut". Since then I never pass judgement on people who make claims like that. But I do get exasperated with people who give drugs the whole credit, because to me is the same as people who give drugs the whole blame when they're addicts or do stupid/dangerous things while high. Leaving the person out of the equation doesn't make any sense.

The same goes for the art producing thing. So much crap has been produced by people on drugs, and off drugs. Should we blame their sober state for that? Wouldn't it be stupid for sober people to claim they did amazing creative work because they were sober?



Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: O. on October 15, 2011, 12:06:46 PM
I feel that generally, people who are sober make more beautiful things than those creating under an influence -- while both produce their fair share of shit, those possessed by a substance can fall victim far more.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on October 15, 2011, 12:41:10 PM
Even those who experiment with drugs for creative purposes usually do the actual creating while sober. Animal Collective is a recent example... although I think most of their music is still too drugged-out.
Title: Re: favorite kubrick quotes
Post by: Alexandro on October 15, 2011, 03:43:44 PM
write while drunk. edit sober.

-- ernest hemingway.