The Making of Stanley Kubrick: the iconic film-maker’s creative process

The Making of Stanley Kubrick: a new oral history film series offer insights about the iconic film-maker’s creative process

More than a decade after Stanley Kubrick’s death he remains one of the most revered film-makers in history,  but little is known of his creative process. Six years ago, researchers at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at University of the Arts London proposed a series of oral history films that would explore this 20th century icon’s inspiration, challenges and philosophy about film through interviews with his inner circle.

Housed at London College of Communication, the archive is bathed in light: white walls, pristine white floor, glowing white ceiling. With its sparse modern furniture and gallery-like backdrop, it is reminiscent the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The idea began when the archive arrived in 2007,” says Sarah Mahurter, archive manager and one of the champions of the project. That was when the first of hundreds of crates of material – annotated scripts, props, equipment, posters and more – were delivered from the Kubrick home in St Albans, where he lived for the last 20years of his life. The director had meticulously salvaged and stored every last thing relating to his phenomenal catalogue, from the tiniest elements of original costumes (including hairpins from Barry Lyndon), personal photographs taken on-set and private correspondence, to the vast collections of books Kubrick collected when he researched new projects.

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Also see: The Conflict and Media NAM project http://conflictandmedia.arts.ac.uk/ initially seeks to bring together the photographic archives of Phillip Jones Griffiths, the film archive of Stanley Kubrick, and the journalistic archive of Phillip Knightley in an interactive multimedia resource that looks at the resonances of the conflict in Vietnam today.