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Stanley Kubrick Filmography
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Stanley Kubrick: The first major films
During Kubrick's attempt to direct the Hollywood "epic" film Spartacus, creative differences arose with both the cast (especially its star
Kirk Douglas) and the crew. Kubrick was frustrated that he did not have total creative control over the film, a result of having been selected as the second director after
Anthony Mann dropped out for similar creative differences. Although well-received by critics and moviegoers, the battles waged over
Spartacus convinced Kubrick that he would never work within the Hollywood system again and he remained an outsider to the end of his life. Financially, however, Kubrick would prove uniquely successful in harnessing Hollywood's resources for his own ends even as he brazenly defied its conventions.
He moved to Britain in the early 1960s to make Lolita, and lived there for the rest of his life. He owned and resided at Childwickbury Manor in the district of St Albans in the south of England. Much of the filming of his later movies involved careful reproduction of foreign locations in England, eg. scenes in the Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket were filmed at Beckton Gasworks.
Kubrick's 1960 decision to film Lolita would cause Kubrick's first major controversy. He worked with the book's author, Vladimir Nabokov, to produce a screenplay that would allow the book to be filmed without being banned from theaters worldwide. It was with
Lolita that he discovered the talent of
Peter Sellers. Kubrick asked Sellers to play four roles simultaneously in his next film,
, and Sellers accepted (though he eventually only played three of those roles).
Kubrick's decision to film a Cold War thriller as a jet-black comedy was a daring risk, one that paid off handsomely for both himself and Columbia Pictures. Kubrick's misanthropic detachment from political poles was clearly both incendiary and resonant. By belittling the sacrosanct norms of the political culture as the squabbling of intellectual children, Strangelove foreshadowed the great cultural upheavals of the late 1960s as well as Kubrick's next project.
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