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DGA QUARTERLY 45 seen in one scene asking himself, "Does Stanley Kubrick ever get depressed?" The question Scorsese has said that he asks himself, when he feels tired during production, "How can I make this better? Kubrick wouldn't let it stay this way! He would change the angle, or work out a way to get more time to do the scene—he would've really seen it through to its end. I must say, that's my inspiration." Steven Spielberg's relationship with Kubrick was perhaps unique among all filmmakers: Beginning, like everyone else, as a fan, he forged a friendship and a bond of trust that led to Kubrick signing off on Spielberg as the eventual director of Kubrick's screenplay A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. In a 1999 interview with filmmaker Paul Joyce, Spielberg describes the day in his teenage years when he discovered Kubrick's brand of cinema. He had been waiting in line for a Phoenix, Arizona, screening of Dr. Strangelove, and his father drove up to his spot in line PHOTOS: (TOP) PHOTOFEST; (BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT) MGM; PHOTOFEST(4) to give him a notification from the Selective Service to appear for the military draft. "I had the letter in my pocket," Spielberg recalled, "and when Strangelove was finished and I left the theater, I was sitting on the curb waiting for my dad to pick me up. I had totally forgotten that I had a letter threaten- ing to draft me into the United States armed services. That's when I first became aware of the power of Stanley Kubrick. The ethos of the movie so caught me, and the black com- edy, and I got into George C. Scott's character and all the great Peter Sellers performances, that it all made me utterly forget that I might perhaps be facing the same conflict someday. "Every phone conversation I had with him was an inspiration. After he watched Saving Private Ryan, he asked me, 'Who influenced you to handle the hand-held camera like that?' I told him that I got it from World War II documentaries shot by the Signal Corps camera units and 'from you.' He said, 'What do you mean from me?' I said, 'Remember when they're trying to re- take Burpleson Air Force Base in Strangelove and you shot that tremen- dous cinéma vérité sequence with long lenses and hand-held cameras?' 'Yeah,' he said. 'Well, it was the Signal Corps and your sequence that showed me how to shoot the hand-held footage.' He said, 'Gee thanks' and changed the subject. He wasn't much for compliments." For Spielberg, Kubrick's ultimate impact is much longer term. "What made him special is that he was a chameleon and never made the same picture twice. He made them in different periods, different genres, with different stories and different risks. Every story was mys- terious in the ways they were told. So he'll inspire us to be different every time we do something, and try to reinvent ourselves every time we have the opportunity. I'm sorry his body of work is so small, but I think he had the greatest vertical penetration of any of us." ® > To create the sense of a "moving ghost" tracking Kirk Douglas' WWI character Col. Dax in the Paths of Glory trenches, Kubrick developed a more refined track that would allow the camera to move without the slightest bump for the 1957 film. > This sense of creating artistic vision through tech- nical means reached a higher phase in 1964's Dr. Strangelove, for which Kubrick told production designer Ken Adam to build the movie's famed "War Room" (pictured at top) on the Shepperton Studio set with such height and with a concrete ceiling that it would demand natural lighting—not at all the look expected for such a place. Obsessed with filmmak- ing logistics, Kubrick—on the 1960 epic Spartacus— invented a new method for organizing extras in large-scale scenes with an elaborate numbering system that became an industry norm. > Before Barry Lyndon (1975), cinema hadn't been able to create period images purely lit by candles. Kubrick's unrelenting mis- sion for natural lighting led him to arrange, with techni- cian Ed DiGiulio, adapting an ultra-fast, 55mm, 0.7 f-stop Carl Zeiss lens (developed by NASA's Apollo program for satellite still photography) for the production's Mitchell cameras. The lenses are two stops faster than the fastest lenses currently used. Zeiss manufactured only 10 of the 0.7 lenses in the 1960s, sold six to NASA, kept one and sold three to Kubrick. —ROBERT KOEHLER D R . S T R A N G E LOV E