A COLLECTION OF QUOTES

JOHN MILIUS: “He just had all kinds of things to discuss- everything. He had theories. He felt most film was fraudulent. He felt most people who made films were frauds. He was fascinated by the idea of pure film as opposed to just narrative storytelling. He felt that film broke down to just getting the story across, like an episodic TV show.”

OLVIER STONE: "The most interesting aspect of a scene is “controlled uncertainty”. That's what Kubrick got. Everybody else would shoot pretty conventionally, but when I saw Godard or Kubrick, in that period when I was studying film with more intensity, there was an unpredictability about Stanley Kubrick. Even as a kid, I didn't know what he would do next. It's the way Kubrick looks at reality. His reality is supercharged."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "All you can do is either pose questions or make truthful observations about human behaviour. The only morality is not to be dishonest.”

JAMES CAMERON: “I remember going with a great sense of anticipation to each new Stanley Kubrick film and thinking, “Can he pull it off and amaze me again?” And he always did. The lesson I learnt from Kubrick was, “Never do the same thing twice.”

MICHAEL HERR: "Hypocrisy was not some petty human foible, it was the corrupted essence of our predicament, which for Stanley was purely an existential predicament. In terms of narrative, since movies are stories, the most contemptible lie was sentimentality, and the most disgusting lie was sanctimoniousness."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality. At the same time, it is very sad to say, films have had the opposite problem -- they have consistently tried to formalize and repeat success, and they have clung to a form and style introduced in their infancy. The sure thing is what everone wants, and originality is not a nice word in this context. This is true despite the repeated example that nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "Observation is a dying art."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it."

BENJAMIN ROSS: “Kubrick argued that film has not progressed at a formal level since the first pioneers discovered its basic syntax of composition, montage and mise en scene.  Kubrick himself might be one of the exceptions, and seems to me to have been chipping away at film on a formal level for years.  From "2001" onwards his narratives have been the most experimental in the mainstream.  They have somehow contrived to become both more visceral and more abstract--inviting and repelling interpretation with equal measure. They are enigmas which contain rather than yield up their complexity, demanding to be felt and experienced before they are analysed. Kubrick likes to invert the half-baked sentimentalities of conventional film narrative so that something more substantial can emerge.  And this "something" turns out to be moments, images, or whole narratives of stunning emotional primacy, so self-contained as to be perfectly mysterious and dreamlike.”

STANLEY KUBRICK: "I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001."

ALEXANDER WALKER (author): “Only a few film directors possess a conceptual talent - that is, a talent to crystallise every film they make into a cinematic concept. It transcends the need to find a good subject, an absorbing story, or an extraordinary premise to build on. Essentially, it is the talent to construct a form that will exhibit the maker's vision in an unexpected way. It is this conceptual talent that distinguishes Stanley Kubrick.”

MARTIN SCORSESE: “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?”

NEIL LABUTE (director): "Barry Lyndon is the most distinctive and beautiful re-creation of period on film, bar none, and its leisurely pace and novelistic approaches to style—watch the way Kubrick slowly reverse zooms on the opening shot of many scenes, as he unveils each new chapter—are pure cinematic pleasure."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: “He created more than movies. He gave us complete environmental experiences that got more, not less, intense the more you watched them.”

MARTIN SCORSESE: “His audacity is to insist on slowness in order to recreate the pace of life, and to ritualise behaviour of the time. A great example is the seduction scene, which he stretches until it settles into a sort of trance, what always struck me is the ballet of emotions of the film, watch the tension between the camera’s movements and the characters body language orchestrated by the music in this scene.”

STANLEY KUBRICK: "The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves."

ORSON WELLES: “Yes, but "The Killing" was better than "The Asphalt Jungle". The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing the model.  For me, Kubrick is a better director than Huston.  I haven't seen Lolita but I believe that Kubrick can do everything."

MIKE KAPLAN (director): "One of the hallmarks of Stanley’s films is that they all have a visceral impact: even back in 1955 it was there."

PETER BISKIND: “Long before John Cassavetes or the auteur rebels of the '70s came along, Kubrick was there, completely self-taught, totally uncompromising, not allowing any interference from the studios.”

MARTIN SCORSESE: “In other words, we’re all the children of D.W. Griffith and Stanley Kubrick.”

STANLEY KUBRICK: “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.”

STANLEY KUBRICK: "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."

DAVID LYNCH: "I really love "Eyes Wide Shut". I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died."

STANLEY KUBRICK: “I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are."

STANLEY KUBRICK: "I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker--in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business."

NICK NOLTE: “He was a brilliant director; he was a man that told stories his own way.”

OLIVER STONE: “He was the single greatest director of his generation. He influenced me deeply.”

ORSON WELLES: “Among the young generation, Kubrick strikes me as a giant.”

LUIS BUNUEL: “A Clockwork Orange is my current favourite. I was very predisposed against the film. After seeing it, I realize it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.”

STEVEN SPIELBERG: “He was the grandmaster. He copied no one while all of us were scrambling to imitate him."

JACK NICHOLSON: “Stanley’s good on sound. So are a lot of directors, but Stanley’s good on designing a new harness. Stanley’s good on the colour of the mike. Stanley’s good on the merchant he bought the mike from. Stanley’s good about the merchant’s daughter who needs some dental work.”

SIDNEY LUMET: “Each month Stanley Kubrick isn’t making a film is a loss to everybody.”

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: "I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don’t agree. I think that "Barry Lyndon" or "A Clockwork Orange" are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject. But in fact, "Full Metal Jacket" is even more so. It looked at rigidity and brutality with an almost clinical eye. It is, for me, a singular film about the military, about war and its consequences. The famous scenes, like the induction with R Lee Ermey where he renames the soldiers and reshapes them into sub-human maggots, had a particular impact on me. Also the suicide scene with Vincent D’Onofrio in the bathroom. And the sniper set-piece at the end. Those are absolutely virtuoso pieces of filmmaking."

ROBERTO BENIGNI: “Stanley Kubrick is one of the geniuses of this century.”

BARBET SCHROEDER: “It was a strange phenomenon with his movies: they were never completely understood when they were released. Then, once you let a few years pass, they are suddenly deemed masterpieces and no one really discusses them. It even happened with his last movie, “Eyes Wide Shut”. When it came out, people were floating. In my opinion they didn’t really “get it”. There is so much substance and so much craft, it’s visually quite staggering. The right amount of time hasn’t quite passed for it to be reconsidered. It always takes a few years. It’s very strange. The reason for this, I think, is that each of his films is so different, there’s no precedent for any of them. Every movie stands on its own. And that’s what I like."

MARTIN SCORSESE: "Remarkable film, remarkable. And the more you see Eyes Wide Shut, the more you get involved in that world. At certain points you don't want to, because it's too painful, but it's...and Bernardo Bertolucci was saying this in Rome, he said "Eyes Wide Shut is really good, he puts you into his world!" and I said "yeah, I really know!"

KIRK DOUGLAS: "Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit!"

IAN WATSON: "Irrespective of writers, Stanley was in his unique way, much preoccupied with the welfare of dumb animals...the cats all drank Evian water."

TONY KAYE (director): "Though I only realised this recently, I have not been influenced by any other filmmaker other than Stanley Kubrick."

MICHAEL HANEKE: "I'm a huge Kubrick fan, but I find 'A Clockwork Orange' a kind of miscalculation, because he makes the brutality so spectacular - so stylized, with dance numbers and so on - that you almost have to admire it."

MARTIN SCORSESE: "There's many ways I look at his films, besides the big screen. I like watching them on the television. I like watching them with the sound off. Sometimes you can see the rhythm of the cutting and the camera moves...and when he cuts in a two shot conversation and when he destroys the invisible line and when the cut gets tighter...on which line of dialogue."

MICHAEL MOORE: "He was the greatest American director of all time."

MATTHEW MODINE: “One day I said: "I've got a joke for you…You're dead." He said, "It's not funny." I said: "Let me tell the joke. Steven Spielberg's dead, too." He said, "Steven's dead, oh, that's funny." And I said: "You're dead and you're up in heaven and Steven Spielberg has just died and he's being greeted at the gate by Gabriel and Gabriel says: 'God's really dug a lot of your movies and he wants to make sure that you're comfortable. If there's anything you need, you come to me, I'm your man.' And Steven says, 'Well, you know, I always wanted to meet Stanley Kubrick, do you think you could arrange that?' And Gabriel looks at him and says: 'You know, Steven, of all the things that you could ask for, why would you ask for that? You know that Stanley doesn't take meetings.' He says, 'Well, you said that if there was anything I wanted.' Gabriel says: 'I'm really sorry. I can't do that.' So now he's showing him around heaven and Steven sees this guy wearing an army jacket with a beard riding a bicycle. And Steven says to Gabriel: 'Oh, my God, look, over there, that's Stanley Kubrick. Couldn't we just stop him and say hello?' And Gabriel pulls Steven to the side and says, 'That's not Stanley Kubrick; that's God -- he just thinks he's Stanley Kubrick.' "Stanley liked that joke.

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

MICHAEL MANN: “It said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time. In other words, you didn’t have to be making "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" if you wanted to work in the main stream film industry, or be reduced to niche filmmaking if you wanted to be serious about cinema. So that’s what Kubrick meant, aside from the fact that Strangelove was a revelation.”

STANLEY KUBRICK: “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. If we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

GERALD FRIED: “When we were teenagers hanging around the Bronx, he was just another bright, neurotic, talented guy. Just another guy trying to get into a game with my softball club and mess around with girls like the rest of us. In those days there were no film schools. We had to learn by going to movies. Our discussions after seeing them were primarily listening to Stanley kind of smirking at the tasteless sentimentality of most pictures.”

PAUL MAZURSKY (actor in "Fear and Desire"): “He just had so much determination, and so much of a desire to get what he wanted. I'd never seen anything like it. The money his uncle had invested in "Fear and Desire" ran out, so Kubrick drove down from where we were shooting in the San Gabriel Mountains to see his Uncle Martin, with Frank Silvera and me in the back. He needed another $5,000 to finish the film, and he says, "I'm gonna get the money from him no matter what -- I can tell you that right now." And he spat at the windshield from inside the car. I'll never forget that. He got the money.”

PAUL MAZURSKY: “He had to do everything, all the lighting, the camera work, the editing. He didn't know how to talk to actors -- not really. He just had a thing in his head. A few years ago, at a film festival, John Boorman was going to introduce "Fear and Desire," and Stanley got a hold of Boorman and said, "Please don't, I don't like that movie, I hate it."

GERALD FRIED: “I knew Toba Metz, his first wife. They were still in their teens- it almost didn't count. It was a legal marriage, but they were, like, dating. There was no exchange of any deep affection. Now with Ruth Sobotka, Kubrick's second wife, she was a match. She was a dancer -- bright and good-looking and accomplished, and there was a lot of sparring, but I thought they were quite perfect for each other. He wrote that dance sequence in Killer's Kiss for her. And she also was the costume designer or something. So I was surprised and kind of uncomfortable about their breaking up.”

JAMES B. HARRIS (director; producer; Kubrick's producing partner on "The Killing," "Paths of Glory" and "Lolita"): “Ruth was an over-the-hill ballet dancer who wanted to be an art director. So Stanley indulged her in that stuff. She couldn't understand why her name wasn't on the door of our office because Stanley's and my name were on there. They split up and he left. We left our wives together. He was rehearsing me on how to break the news. We were leaving for L.A. and we wanted to go out there on our own."

JAMES B. HARRIS: “We were not only partners, but we became best friends. We'd do all the usual stuff, like touch football, Thanksgiving dinner with our girlfriends or family. Stanley would start reading up on something that interested us and he'd become an expert on it. He'd get books on how to play poker and study them and then sit in a killer game, and hold his own."

When we first got together, he said: "We should never have a falling out and we should never have any kind of dispute that reaches an impasse because we're both intelligent, we're both articulate and one should be able to convince the other. If both people are intelligent they should be able to buy the other's argument if it's on the right track." So I must be the most intelligent person in the world because he convinced me every time.”

GERALD FRIED: “He was kind of an awkward kid, and the fact that he was bright and talented made it even worse. He just wanted to be a regular guy, as we all do, and he wasn't and it was very painful for him. So when he found out that he was smart and successful and all that, then it went the other way -- everything had to be grand.”

COLEEN GRAY (actress; co-star of "The Killing"): “He was this small man wearing army fatigues and clodhopper shoes, and had bushy hair and was very quiet. I kept waiting for him to direct and nothing happened. "When's he going to tell me what to do?" He never did, which made me insecure. He seemed extremely preoccupied. Maybe the fact that I felt insecure was fine for the part -- that girl was insecure.”

MARIE WINDSOR (actress; co-star of "The Killing"): “Stanley was an introverted person. He was very quiet and while on the set I never heard him yell at the crew or anybody. When he had some idea for me to do or change, he would wiggle his finger and we would go away from the action and he would tell me what he wanted or didn't want. One time when I was sitting on the bed reading a magazine, he came up and said, "I want you to move your eyes when you're reading." He was only in his 20's but you just had a sense of his having pure confidence in himself.”

MARIE WINDSOR: “When the picture opened, he came over to our house for a party. He always wore those tan work pants that labourers wear, and he wore them to the party. In fact, I never saw him out of them.”

RICHARD ANDERSON (actor; producer; dialogue coach and actor on "Paths of Glory"): “He had dark circles under his eyes, his hair all over the place. Stanley was a pro at chess -- he'd sit down and play chess on the set. He was very interested in people's motives, people's psyches.”

CHRISTIANE KUBRICK: “When he was a very young man I think he was a chess hustler. He played it very well -- not that I could judge.”

CANDIA MCWILLIAM: “It was among the closest intellectual contact I’ve known. Kubrick was not distractible, nor was he narrow. He was, if the word has meaning in a debased time, a genius. Instead of, like many directors, cultivating ‘profile’, he relayed the third dimension. He is one of the few great artists who can manifest thought.”

STANLEY KUBRICK: "I am certainly not an anarchist, and I don't think of myself as a pessimist. I believe very strongly in parliamentary democracy, and I am of the opinion that the power and authority of the State should be optimized and exercized only to the extent that is required to keep things civilized. History has shown us what happens when you try to make society too civilized, or do too good a job of eliminating undesirable elements. It also shows the tragic fallacy in the belief that the destruction of democratic institutions will cause better ones to arise in their place. Certainly one of the most challenging and difficult social problems we face today is, how can the State maintain the necessary degree of control over society without becoming repressive, and how can it achieve this in the face of an increasingly impatient electorate who are beginning to regard legal and political solutions as too slow? The State sees the spectre looming ahead of terrorism and anarchy, and this increases the risk of its over-reaction and a reduction in our freedom. As with everything else in life, it is a matter of groping for the right balance, and a certain amount of luck."

STANLEY KUBRICK: “...the question must be considered whether Rousseau's view of man as a fallen angel is not really the most pessimistic and hopeless of philosophies. It leaves man a monster who has gone steadily away from his nobility. It is, I am convinced, more optimistic to accept Ardrey's view that '...we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels...”

RICHARD ANDERSON: “Stanley was really smitten with Christiane. He said he had never experienced anything like this before.”

CHRISTIANE KUBRICK: “He saw me on television in Munich. He called my agent and hired me. I met him at a studio, and then he went to an enormous masked ball where I was performing. He was the only one without a costume. He was quite baffled. He found a cousin of mine to help find me.”

JAMES B. HARRIS: “They fell for each other, and that was it! She was kind of inhibited because she felt she didn't speak English well enough. She was a very beautiful actress. They've been together ever since. It was kind of a nice love story.”

FREDERIC MORTON (author; journalist; visited set of "Paths of Glory"): “It was a real turning point. Before this, he seemed rather gloomy. And those huge eyes of his always seemed to be lugubrious. He was extremely sensitive to everything around him. He would put his instructions to actors in the subjunctive -- not "Do this," but "Would you do this? Would you go over there?"

RICHARD ANDERSON: “One time when Kirk Douglas blew up at him on the set, Stanley said, "Jeez, Kirk, you don't have to do this in front of everybody, do you?" But he admired Kirk. He said, "My God, this guy always knows his lines." Stanley is very psychological to get what he wants. One time he had done about 40 takes and Jimmy Harris comes and says, "Stanley, it's now 1 o'clock and we're in terrible trouble and we gotta break this up." That was the only time I saw Stanley go nuts. He shouted, "It isn't right -- and I'm going to keep doing it until it is right!" He shot 84 takes. I think he wanted everybody to hear that -- he wanted it to get around.”

CHRISTIANE KUBRICK: “We moved in together in Munich -- I was still doing plays there and he was finishing his film. I was in the throes of a divorce, and so was he.

His clothes were still bought by his mother and they were very smart. So he was sort of dishevelled smart. It soon became clear that he didn't care what he wore. Later, the children tried to dress him up a bit better but it was hopeless.”

GERALD FRIED: “By the time we got to "Paths of Glory," he was already "Stanley Kubrick" and then it was a struggle -- I had to rationalize every note. It was fun and stimulating, but he was already sure that he knew it all. He was also a drummer, and the score for "Paths of Glory" was the first all-percussion score. As I remember, he also heard every single machine-gun sound effect before it went into the picture.

We had a date once to play tennis in Central Park, and it was around 10 to 2 and our court was reserved for 2, and he said, "Hey, we better run because if you're not there one minute before, they could give the court away." I said, "Stanley, for God's sake, keep your paranoia to yourself, man." And, of course, somebody showed up one minute before and took the court from us. So if you worry about enough things, sooner or later your paranoia is going to be fulfilled. And he worried about enough things. It was as if his success gave him permission to let his fears predominate.”

TONY CURTIS: “Stanley would never capitulate. I remember he asked for 15 or 20 extras for a little scene and the assistant director came over and said they had talked it over with the studio and decided to cut down the amount of extras. And Stanley said, "No, we'll double the amount." He refused to allow anybody to tell him how to do the picture.”

CHRISTIANE KUBRICK: “Spartacus was difficult. They were all famous actors in it and they treated him, because he was so young, with a certain arrogance. So he was arrogant right back. He loved Tony Curtis because they had lots in common -- they both liked magic tricks.”

TONY CURTIS: “One scene with Kirk and me, Stanley looked around and said to Russ Metty, the director of photography, "I can't see the actors' faces." Russ was sitting in his high chair, and there was one of those lights on the floor and he pushed it with his foot and the light skewered right into the shot. He said, "Now, is that enough light?" Stanley looked and said, "Now it's too much light." Cool through the whole experience -- nothing made him nervous.”

JUDE LAW: "Kubrick's ideas for AI were much more extreme. More overty sexual. Huge phallic skyscrapers, buildings with their legs wide open.”

JUDE LAW: “Spielberg's approach to Gigolo Joe was the perfect middle ground, compared to Kubrick's far darker original vision. The character was originally much more aggressive, sinister, and far from Spielberg's revised conception as an innocent who's abused. He's a hooker who ultimately comes round to learning to love in a different way."

ARLISS HOWARD: “I remember him saying: "The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie." He said when he did "Spartacus," he was astonished at how many people were allowed to have opinions about the content of the movie -- not just the execution of it. They'd actually have conversations with secretaries about the content. But he was very much about finding, in each little piece that he was putting together, the essence of what had excited him about that moment the first time.”

SHELLEY WINTERS: “He was very cognizant that actors are delicate. He would discuss the scene with you and you never thought you were being directed until you saw the rushes the next day. You almost said, "Gee, wasn't I clever to think of that?" But it was Stanley who had sort of planted it very subtly in your head. Like the dance I did with James Mason -- a sexy sort of South American dance -- he didn't really tell me to make a sexy dance. I decided to flirt with him while I was dancing in a sexy way and he said, "That's it." He was very elusive. Sometimes you might rehearse and you didn't even know he was watching. He'd be off somewhere, sort of hidden, watching.”

CHRISTIANE KUBRICK: “He liked working with women and worked with them very successfully. He was surrounded by women at home, nothing but daughters, and he employed quite a lot of women. He had an absolute angel of a mother -- extraordinarily nice woman -- very smart and very sweet. Stanley loved his parents -- he was close to them, his mother more perhaps than his father because she was more up on films and the latest news. So, in the end, he knew a great deal about women in general -- ranging from the sophisticated to girl talk.”

MARY DAY LANIER (potter; a production assistant on "Lolita"): “You mentioned a book, he immediately got a pencil and wrote down the name. He called one time and said, "Come out for a drink right away." I had just come back from art school -- I was covered in clay: "I need to shower." He said, "No, no, you haven't been digging ditches," so I went. I never thought of contradicting him.

If anybody had any problems they couldn't face, he would gently coax them through it. James Mason got the most terrible eczema on his hands when something came too close to home for him. He had to hide his hands because they were totally swelled up, but Stanley knew exactly how to be very gentle. He shut down the set -- he talked to him for a long time. He was fascinated by other people -- that's why he had this power. He and Jim Harris were very close. They used to talk about stuff a lot.”

FLORIAN VON DONNERSMARCK (director): “My megalomaniac goal is to make a film that could stand next to the films of Kubrick.”

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN (director): “I’ve always been an enormous fan of Stanley Kubrick.”

JAMES B. HARRIS: “I assume he must have been very confident because he always wanted me around next to him. The whole [fear of flying] thing came about when he was a kid and he had a pilot's license. He used to go out to Teterboro and fly those one-engine jobs where he had an experience: He started to take off and he was running out of runway and almost crashed into the fence. He had forgotten to turn on one of the magnetos. That developed in his mind. He thought that if he -- who is so meticulous about everything -- forgot to do something like that, then the pilots could make these errors. If he could do that, then anybody could do it.”

CHRISTIANE KUBRICK: “I suppose he wasn't really happy to be in Hollywood, but he didn't say, "I'm never going back to California again," or anything. But we enjoyed living in England. I fit in a bit better, and it's beautiful.”

KEN ADAM (production designer; designed "Dr. Strangelove" and "Barry Lyndon"): “I don't think I ever had such a close relationship with a director. There was a certain naiveté and charm about him, but you very quickly found out that there was an enormous brain functioning. I think the most difficult part was his questioning, almost computerlike, mind. He knew most of the technicians' work better than the technicians themselves. The only thing he really didn't know was design. So, obviously, he was fascinated by it, but I also found myself having to justify practically every line I drew, which wasn't always easy.

It was particularly so with the war room on "Dr. Strangelove" because I started doodling while we were talking about it, and he seemed to be very impressed by it, and I thought, "Well, this is an easy battle." After about three weeks, he decided to change his mind. Because the initial design was like an amphitheatre with two levels, he suddenly said: "Well, what am I going to do with that second level? It's going to be full of extras, and I wouldn't know how to use them, so you'd better start thinking again." I started redesigning it, and he was practically standing behind me all the time. When I came up with the sort of triangular solution, he said he felt the triangle was the strongest geometric form. And so combat developed at this circular table, playing for the fate of the world like a poker game.

He very often changed his mind. After two days of shooting, for example, he wasn't happy with Peter Sellers playing the B-52 bomber-captain [in addition to his other roles] and he cast Slim Pickens instead and then decided to have him ride the atomic bomb bronco-fashion into the Russian missile complex. It was a very exciting experience, but at the same time, I felt, you know, one film would be enough. Being exposed to Stanley 16 hours a day, you lost your resistance, and the danger was you would lose your confidence.”