Stanley Kubrick citations

“Innover, c’est aller de l’avant sans abandonner le passé.”

“Selon moi, le cinéma a eu deux artistes fondamentaux: Orson Welles et Stanley Kubrick.”

“J'ai une certaine faiblesse pour les criminels et les artistes; ni les uns ni les autres ne prennent la vie comme elle est. Toute histoire tragique doit être en conflit avec les choses comme elles sont.”

“Il y a un thème dont je suis conscient et qui se retrouve dans tous mes films : l’échec de la communication.”

“Stanley Kubrick est un emmerdeur bourré de talent.”

“Un film de lui en vaut dix d'un autre.”

“Si Stanley pensait que vous aviez raison, il le reconnaissait. Mais s'il croyait que vous aviez tort, il pouvait dépenser un million de dollars pour le prouver.”

“Quiconque a eu le privilège de réaliser un film est conscient que c'est comme vouloir écrire Guerre et Paix dans l'auto-tamponneuse d'un parc d'attraction, mais lorsqu'enfin la tâche est bien accomplie, peu de choses dans la vie peuvent se comparer à ce que l'on ressent alors.”

“Stanley Kubrick ne répondait jamais, mais questionnait toujours. Sa filmographie nous rappelle que le questionnement est le style même de la liberté. Il est devenu le vrai mémorialiste du vingtième siècle, et son moraliste le plus acerbe. Ses films existent dorénavant, calmes blocs ici-bas chus d'un désastre obscur, et éclairent d'un jour étrangement crépusculaire l'histoire du vingtième siècle.”

“J'ai plus appris en un film avec lui que sur tous mes autres films.”

“Je vous mets au défi de me citer un film de Stanley Kubrick que l'on peut interrompre.”

“C'était un fait acquis que Stanley savait quelque chose que vous ne saviez pas.”

“Chaplin travaille le contenu sans le style tandis qu'Eisenstein travaille le style sans le contenu. Mais si je dois choisir, je préfère Chaplin.”

“La science est potentiellement bien plus dangereuse que l’État parce qu’elle a un effet durable.”

“En perdant Kubrick, le cinéma a perdu un de ses géants. C'est comme d'avoir perdu Hitchcock ou John Ford.”

“Stanley est fort sur le son. Stanley est fort sur la couleur du micro. Stanley est fort sur le vendeur du micro. Stanley est fort.”

“Jack Nicholson peut aller aussi loin que n'importe quel acteur.”

“Regarder un film de Kubrick, c'est comme regarder le sommet d'une montagne depuis la vallée. On se demande comment quelqu'un a pu monter aussi haut.”

“Stanley Kubrick doit continuer à filmer des personnages qui existent, et non idées qui n'existent plus que dans les tiroirs de vieux scénaristes croyant que le cinéma, c'est le septième art.”

“Au sommet du cinéma comme art total, Kubrick parvient à inscrire l'odyssée sociale du héros irlandais picaresque du romancier Thackeray, de duels en guerres, sur le fond de la fresque historique: comme un détail dans le tableau.”

“Rien n'est plus dangereux qu'une chose sur”

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation.”

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

“If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.”

“The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.”

“Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.”

“I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner.”

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

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”

“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.”

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

“The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive”

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

“Think [Schindler's List] was about the Holocaust?… That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ‘'Schindler’s List’' is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?”

“The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.”

“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.”

“There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”

“When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.”

“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

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

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

“The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, '2001' shows that what some people call 'god' is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call 'god' -Stanley Kubrick, interview, 1963”

“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.”

“You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.”

“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.”

“One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.”

“I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.”

“The reason movies are often so bad out here isn't because the people who make them are cynical money hacks. Most of them are doing the very best they can; they really want to make good movies. The trouble is with their heads, not their hearts.”

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?…
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.”