Stanley Kubrick held his own camera, so why shouldn’t you? | Hacker News Reader

Stanley Kubrick held his own camera, so why shouldn’t you?

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74 pointsmaccman42 comments

First off it seems like there is a strange, specious simile the OP is trying to draw between a director doing some camerawork (note: Kubrick in that particular interview cited is only speaking of /handheld/ camerawork specifically because it's difficult to communicate the framing and such) themselves and an individual being able to do everything (within the scope of some discipline) themselves. Let's clear something up right now: directors who do some or all of their own camerawork are NOT tantamount to directors making a film by themselves. There is so much more that goes into making a film besides the raw camerawork. Even your average Joe will know this by proxy as big events like the Academy Awards highlight the complexity of big Hollywood productions and the many roles that individuals have mastered. Directors, e.g. Lars von Trier, will sometimes oscillate between doing all camerawork themselves and none of it. (In Trier's case he even experimented with allowing a computer program to compose shots in a completely automated way!) However none of this backs up the apparent assumption that this is equivalent to making the film wholly yourself.

That said I think this is a pretty weak and misleading analogy! We can give the OP a break here and say, "Sure I know what you're getting at." However, if you really want to get a strong point across, use a better analogy.

Finally, let me dwell on one passage in the posting that I find troubling:

> Lately it has started to feel like our society respects “vision” more than the actual craft of execution.

What is going through the OP's mind here? Execution is definitely the only thing that has ever mattered.

That's not really specious if you understand the rest of Kubrick's reputation and work history. Kubrick was well known for pretty much running the editing room (a big deal, since editors are usually given at least a degree of independence on the first cut) and also wrote the screenplays for most of his films. A single person taking the role of director/editor/screenwriter is pretty much unheard of in the industry.

> A single person taking the role of director/editor/screenwriter is pretty much unheard of in the industry.

Wrong.

Let's take a very recent example (and note well, this is not at all uncommon outside of Hollywood, for instance Teshigahara's famous collaborations with author Kobo Abe) Paul Thomas Anderson, directed, wrote, and produced/edited (both the 65mm and digital transfer, in tandem) The Master. It is not at all uncommon for a director to at least collaborate with a screenwriter if not write the screenplay themselves. And most directors would like (although this is sometimes prohibited by the studios, e.g. in the case of Orson Welles) to have creative power if not direct control over the production and editing process.

However, even at this level of involvement we are a far cry from the claim that a single person is responsible for the film as a creative work.

For instance, you're missing a critical piece of the equation: acting. You could easily make the argument the job of an actor is as important as any role a director might have and ultimately it is the centerpiece of so much film as well as the final artist presentation. Even the most controlling directors have limited ability to hold de facto control over this aspect of the film.

Considering all the multitude of complexities of the process, the myth of this superhuman director here is a lot less interesting than the actual process of filmmaking, if you ask me.

And Jackie Chan did all this plus acting, choreography, and stuntwork. He famously had an editing setup in his hotel room and would edit the footage himself after each day's shooting.

The best directors also cast and manipulate their actors into the performances they want. Some Kubrick examples: George C. Scott's manic performance in Dr. Strangelove was pulled from the actor when Kubrick repeatedly asked for a deliberately over-the-top performance in one take, promising that he would have Scott dial it down in further takes to get the performance he wanted. In reality, Kubrick just used the over-the-top take. Another technique of manipulating George C. Scott was to bet the outcome of any disagreement on a game of chess, which Kubrick invariably won and which Scott was nonetheless too competitive to turn down. Shelley Duvall's neurotic performance in The Shining was partially the result of Kubrick unsettling her by telling her none of the cast liked working with her, least of all Jack Nicholson. This was a lie, but it worked.

"The best"? Some directors use those kinds of methods to manipulate their actor's psychology. I don't understand why you think that's a mark of a better director though, and not just one technique among many. Some consider Kiarostami for instance one of "the best" and he gives only the minimal information needed to his actors for the scene and lets them do their thing. He does cast for the performance he wants though - not sure what director doesn't?

> He does cast for the performance he wants though - not sure what director doesn't?

A director will do what they can, but there's a reason Orson Welles directed Charlton Heston playing a Mexican.

Yeah, true - producers can pervert a film any way they like.

Paul Thomas Anderson, directed, wrote, and produced/edited

The author's point is that such arrangements are quite unusual. There are several top-line directors like that - PT Anderson; Christopher Nolan; Quentin Tarantino; Josh Wheedon; Darren Aronofsky; Clint Eastwood; Robert Rodriguez. But they're top-line directors because they're exceptionally talented, and can afford to make fewer films and exercise obsessive control over them, and the investment almost always pays off. I'd say there are 20-25 people working Hollywood who are that deeply involved in the creation of their films. They are a small proportion of the total number of working and would-be directors.

A single person taking the role of director/editor/screenwriter is pretty much unheard of in the industry.

Rare, but not unheard of. Soderbergh likes to do all of those things, though he uses pseudonyms for his "editor" self.

Kevin Smith is such a big fan of doing his own editing that he compares hiring an editor to delegating having sex with your wife to someone else, but that's Kevin Smith, for you.

Fassbinder, Gaspar Noe (sometimes), Mario Bava, Kurosawa, Coen brothers, Tsukamoto, etc.

Kubrick had a DP but like many directors sometimes operated it (or one of the cameras) himself.

Right, because nobody has heard of James Cameron.

I don't know how specious the analogy is as regards coding, but it's a spot-on observation as regards film. Most film directors are severely lacking in technical skill, and if they went ot film school they did enough manual work to fulfil the requirements and then pursued assistant director jobs. In other words, they went down a management path. The most common secondary skills for directors are screenwriting or producing, but it's a rare enough thing to see on commercial films because few directors are sufficiently skilled to do both things well. Now management and having a vision are important, because you need someone to be the decision-maker. However, if the person isn't skilled in technical matters or willing to put trust in people in who are, you get a director who constantly fights with and/or bullies the rest of the crew, and people like that are a fucking nightmare to work with.

Here on HN there are lots and lots of people with the DIY ethic, who make it their business to understand the development of the product and help out as they can. But realistically, there's also a lot of people in the software business, with a small idea, a middling amount of money, and a ton of attitude, and they are not very fun to work for, plus they tend to pay themselves grandiose amounts compared to the rest of staff.

The lesson that I take from it is that there's always more than one way to make great art. Some directors hold the camera, some don't. Some directors edit, some don't. Some directors write their own screenplays, some don't.

It's really easy to look at a limited sample size (say, your own career) and assume that the things that you've seen are pervasive. "Best Practices" are only best in a particular context.

I once read an interview with someone who had worked with Kubrick. He was talking about how deep Kubrick's knowledge of his tools went.

It went something like this- Stanley knew everything there was to know about the lenses he used. But he didn't just know the lenses, he knew the man who designed the lenses. And he didn't just know the man who designed the lenses, he knew how that man's daughter was doing in school.

He learned his tools thoroughly, often from the people who built them. And he knew the people, which is just as interesting in its own right.

Here is an article, where a lens maker recalls his experience designing special lenses for the film Barry Lydon. Kubrick wanted to shoot inside castles in only candle light...

No mention of knowing the lens makers daughter though...

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm

he knew how that man's daughter was doing in school.

That's obsessive beyond creepiness...

Or he was a friend of the family, knew how to make small talk, and had discussion about things other than just lenses...

Or Kubrick was a past master at getting the upper hand in his directorial decisions

  Stanley, we really should shoot the Obelisk with this Panaflex

  No, use that one, it was ground out last year by hendrickson in June, when his daughter was doing well in her exams and he always does a better job when his daughter is happy

  (holy fuck how do I argue with that)

So was that anecdote a one-off, or was Kubrick that way with every part of the camera?

Did he visit the summer home of the guy who milled the camera's metal bits? Did he play with the camera assembler's dog?

Lenses are a different class of camera component. The camera itself is just a dark box to advance film, the lens is everything in terms of image quality. The only other component on the same level of importance is the film stock itself.

Off-topic: if you like kubrick's movies, do yourself a favor and watch this documentary right now: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278736/

It's exceptionally great. Kubrick himself would've been proud of it. I really can't recommend it enough. For me, it's almost Kubrick's 10th movie (not counting Spartacus, The Killing, Killer's Kiss and Fear & Desire, of course) - that's how great it is.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNuzGlLqxNU

That is exactly the kind of off-topic comment that HN needs more of. Thank you.

The accompanying coffee table book is pretty great too.

Kubrick also had an insane obsession with his tools. Most of Barry Lyndon was shot on F1.0 (EDIT: it was F0.7) glass, which, as far as I know, was only available from NASA at the time and probably can't be found at all today for film cameras.

EDIT: f/0.7, thanks! Holy shit!

http://fstoppers.com/stanley-kubrick-films-natural-candlelig...

The elephant in the room here is the Auteur Theory [1]. Film is a uniquely collaborative art--a director needs to communicate his or her vision to a very large team with specialized technical skills. While tempting to do it all yourself, that doesn't scale. There's a direct corollary here with running a company.

The craft, skill, and genius of great auteurs and entrepreneurs is inspiring a team with his or her vision to build great things together, not in doing it all him or her self.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur_theory

While tempting to do it all yourself, that doesn't scale.

Of course Kubrick didn't do it all himself. He deliberately picked things that he wanted extremely fine-grained control over and delegated other things to trusted experts. His brilliance, at least part of it, was knowing what he could delegate and what he couldn't.

Kubrick's quote from the article:

"Yes, all of the hand-held camerawork is mine. In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it is virtually impossible to explain what you want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator."

Kubrick might have benefited from doing a few runs with his camera, THEN showed his camera people that this is how he wanted it. I find this is a powerful technique in delegation. Ie- where most will outsource a task with a rudimentary set of guidelines, the results can be exponentially better if the 'delegator' simply rolls up his or her sleeves and literally does the task at hand, albeit a rough draft first attempt, and shares the results; uses that as the guideline. Like planting a seed with water.

Yes, the article seems to entirely sidestep the possibility that perhaps Kubrick just had trouble communicating (at least with his cameramen).

This article is supposed to be hero worship, but all I see is a famous director outed as a person who couldn't delegate properly.

couldn't delegate properly

Why delegate tasks that you enjoy doing? He was obviously a competent camera operator.

I think Kubrick would have been happy to hand off the camera to another operator so he could be free to scrutinize other things. He very obviously did this with many other jobs on the set. However, there was a lack of ability to communicate with precision what he wanted done.

Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible.

In any event things like this are failures to communicate, and any time you have to do this, it should be treated as so. Sometimes it is more efficient to do something yourself than to communicate it to someone else; if that is the case more often than not, the most efficient thing to do might be to improve your communication skills.

You're missing something, and it should be pretty obvious, because you're criticizing an incredibly talented and successful movie maker's ability to communicate.

Art is all about communication. Stanley Kubrick is a fantastic communicator. He knows that things are always lost in translation. He knows that his priority is communication between him and his audience. Therefore, it makes sense for him to want to have direct control over an aspect of filmmaking that he finds incredibly important, that is, dictating the what is shown to the audience by manipulation of the camera.

Put another way, his insistence on operating the camera is not a failure of communication on his part, rather an elevation of his ideal way of communicating to an audience.

Don't try and criticize art using only ideas from business management.

Didn't the quotation from Kubrick in the original piece say exactly this? That it was nearly impossible to communicate what he (Kubrick) wanted to "even the most talented and sensitive camera man?

I think I specifically addressed this with the following quote:

"Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible."

Also the original article mentions that he couldn't communicate this to even the best camera operators. That is a failure of communication. Saying that someone failed to do something that is impossible is not a criticism.

Why didn't hey sew is own costumes and paint his own sets? Surely the content of the film is as important as the angle it is shot from.

This is just confirmation bias. Kubrick made great formalistic films, Robert Altman made great naturalistic films. Joss Whedon focuses on script and characterization. Christopher Guest focuses on casting and improvisation. Wes Anderson focuses on casting and tableau and music.

They all make great stuff. By all means be a Kubrick if it works for you, but don't try to be something you're not.

The problem is the vast majority of directors who fancy themselves a Kubrick, but whose ego trails somewhat ahead of their skill, and who thus succeed only in offending the DP and diminishing the quality of their film.

There was an expo in Venice a few years ago featuring his photography work before he become a film director. The man really knew how to capture mood through his knowledge of light. His time in old New York City produced some fantastic pictures of people and their locations.

isn't this a true gem: "Our surroundings have pressured us to believe that doing less and moving slower are negative characteristics, but I see them as a obvious advantages."...

This article might have been about something interesting. I don't know, because I stopped after this:

"It was less a surprise to the extent that he, famously demanding and meticulous, had a specific vision which needed to be realized, but more-so a surprise I had never thought of him to do such a peculiar thing."

I don't continue reading after it becomes clear that I'm looking at some kind of rough first draft. If you want it to appear that you have some respect for yourself and your potential readers, at least look over your output once quickly before sticking it on the end of a publicly-facing URL. You have some room. Try to be more articulate than a tweet.

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