Stanley Kubrick is widely considered to be one of the best filmmakers of all time. From Clockwork Orange and 2001 to Full Metal Jacket, his movies were memorable and unique. Marlon Brando said, “Stanley is unusually perceptive and delicately attuned to
people. He has an adroit intellect and is a creative thinker, not
a repeater, not a fact-gatherer,. he digests what he learns and
brings to a new project an original point of view and a reserved
passion.”

I’ve collected a few quotes on his process and creativity.

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.

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.

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

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

I think it was Joyce who observed that accidents are the portals to discovery. Well, that’s certainly true in making films. And perhaps in much the same way, there is an aspect of film-making which can be compared to a sporting contest. You can start with a game plan but depending on where the ball bounces and where the other side happens to be, opportunities and problems arise which can only be effectively dealt with at that very moment.

I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality.

The events and situations that are most meaningful to people are those in which they are actually involved–and I’m convinced that this sense of personal involvement derives in large part from visual perception. I once saw a woman hit by a car, for example, or right after she had been hit, and she way lying in the middle of the road. I knew that at that moment I would have risked my life if necessary to help her…whereas if I had merely read about the accident or heard about it, it could not have meant too much. Of all the creative media I think that film is most nearly able to convey this sense of meaningfulness; to create an emotional involvement and a feeling of participation in the person seeing it.

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.