The Advice Film Director Stanley Kubrick Left to All Photographers

You may not have been aware that film director Stanley Kubrick was also a professional photographer, having shot assignments for magazines before he ever made any of his award-winning movies. So what did his photographer’s eye bring to his movies, and what can we learn from his creative process?

In some of her previous (and always excellent) videos, photographer Tatianna Hopper has explored the creative process and visual aesthetics of some of Hollywood’s best known film directors in order to see what lessons we can learn from them as photographers ourselves. The importance of detail in good storytelling is a theme that she has explored before, and one that I have highlighted here in my previous reviews of her videos about Christopher Nolan’s use of the IMAX film format, and Steven Spielberg’s use of deep depth of field.

As a film director, Kubrick always maintained a laser focus on the visual aesthetic of his movies, working very closely with the cinematographer on the look and feel of every frame that was shot—much like Nolan and Spielberg, in fact. In Kubrick's case, the argument could be made that he carried this to an extreme level, bordering even on obsession—indeed, Kubrick’s obsessive and driven personality was often a source of conflict with the actors and crew on his sets, and he was by all accounts, certainly not the easiest person to work with creatively!

The basic theme of this new video by Tatianna is that we can learn a great deal by looking at Kubrick’s almost obsessive attention to detail in his filmmaking and in his still photography work that preceded it—examining how this more detailed knowledge of a subject can imbue the visual stories that we wish to tell with a greater degree of realism, and how this heightened realism can enhance their impact on the viewer.