title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Following "Fear and Desire", Kubrick began working on ideas for a new boxing film. Due to the commercial failure of his first feature, Kubrick avoided asking for further investments, but commenced a film noir script with Howard O. Sackler. Originally under the title "Kiss Me, Kill Me", and then "The Nymph and the Maniac", "Killer's Kiss" (1955) is a 67-minute film noir about a young heavyweight boxer's involvement with a woman being abused by her criminal boss. Like "Fear and Desire", it was privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends, with some $40,000 put forward from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousse. Kubrick began shooting footage in Times Square, and frequently explored during the filming process, experimenting with cinematography and considering the use of unconventional angles and imagery. He initially chose to record the sound on location, but encountered difficulties with shadows from the microphone booms, restricting camera movement. His decision to drop the sound in favor of imagery was a costly one; after 12–14 weeks shooting the picture, he spent some seven months and $35,000 working on the sound.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Alfred Hitchcock's "Blackmail" (1929) directly influenced the film with the painting laughing at a character, and Martin Scorsese has, in turn, cited Kubrick's innovative shooting angles and atmospheric shots in "Killer's Kiss" as an influence on "Raging Bull" (1980). Actress Irene Kane, the star of "Killer's Kiss", observed: "Stanley's a fascinating character. He thinks movies should move, with a minimum of dialogue, and he's all for sex and sadism". "Killer's Kiss" met with limited commercial success and made very little money in comparison with its production budget of $75,000. Critics have praised the film's camerawork, but its acting and story are generally considered mediocre.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: While playing chess in Washington Square, Kubrick met producer James B. Harris, who considered Kubrick "the most intelligent, most creative person I have ever come in contact with." The two formed the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation in 1955. Harris purchased the rights to Lionel White's novel "Clean Break" for $10,000 and Kubrick wrote the script, but at Kubrick's suggestion, they hired film noir novelist Jim Thompson to write the dialog for the film—which became "The Killing" (1956)—about a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong. The film starred Sterling Hayden, who had impressed Kubrick with his performance in "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950).


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick and Harris moved to Los Angeles and signed with the Jaffe Agency to shoot the picture, which became Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. The Union in Hollywood stated that Kubrick would not be permitted to be both the director and the cinematographer, resulting in the hiring of veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Kubrick agreed to waive his fee for the production, which was shot in 24 days on a budget of $330,000. He clashed with Ballard during the shooting, and on one occasion Kubrick threatened to fire Ballard following a camera dispute, despite being aged only 27 and 20 years Ballard's junior. Hayden recalled Kubrick was "cold and detached. Very mechanical, always confident. I've worked with few directors who are that good".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "The Killing" failed to secure a proper release across the United States; the film made little money, and was promoted only at the last minute, as a second feature to the Western movie "Bandido!" (1956). Several contemporary critics lauded the film, with a reviewer for "Time" comparing its camerawork to that of Orson Welles. Today, critics generally consider "The Killing" to be among the best films of Kubrick's early career; its nonlinear narrative and clinical execution also had a major influence on later directors of crime films, including Quentin Tarantino. Dore Schary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was highly impressed as well, and offered Kubrick and Harris $75,000 to write, direct, and produce a film, which ultimately became "Paths of Glory" (1957).


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "Paths of Glory", set during World War I, is based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel. Schary was familiar with the novel, but stated that MGM would not finance another war picture, given their backing of the anti-war film "The Red Badge of Courage" (1951). After Schary was fired by MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris managed to interest Kirk Douglas in playing Colonel Dax. Douglas, in turn, signed Harris-Kubrick Pictures to a three-picture co-production deal with his film production company, Bryna Productions, which secured a financing and distribution deal for "Paths of Glory" and two subsequent films with United Artists. The film, shot in Munich, from March 1957, follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission, and follows with a war trial of three soldiers, arbitrarily chosen, for misconduct. Dax is assigned to defend the men at Court Martial. For the battle scene, Kubrick meticulously lined up six cameras one after the other along the boundary of no-man's land, with each camera capturing a specific field and numbered, and gave each of the hundreds of extras a number for the zone in which they would die. Kubrick operated an Arriflex camera for the battle, zooming in on Douglas. "Paths of Glory" became Kubrick's first significant commercial success, and established him as an up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Despite the praise, the Christmas release date was criticized, and the subject was controversial in Europe. The film was banned in France until 1974 for its "unflattering" depiction of the French military, and was censored by the Swiss Army until 1970.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In October 1957, after "Paths of Glory" had its world premiere in Germany, Bryna Productions optioned Canadian church minister-turned-master-safecracker Herbert Emerson Wilsons's autobiography, "I Stole $16,000,000", especially for Stanley Kubrick and James B. Harris. The picture was to be the second in the co-production deal between Bryna Productions and Harris-Kubrick Pictures, which Kubrick was to write and direct, Harris to co-produce and Douglas to co-produce and star. In November 1957, Gavin Lambert was signed as story editor for "I Stole $16,000,000", and with Kubrick, finished a script titled "God Fearing Man", but the picture was never filmed.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Marlon Brando contacted Kubrick, asking him to direct a film adaptation of the Charles Neider western novel, "The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones", featuring Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Brando was impressed, saying "Stanley is unusually perceptive, and delicately attuned to people. He has an adroit intellect, and is a creative thinker—not a repeater, not a fact-gatherer. He digests what he learns and brings to a new project an original point of view and a reserved passion". The two worked on a script for six months, begun by a then unknown Sam Peckinpah. Many disputes broke out over the project, and in the end, Kubrick distanced himself from what would become "One-Eyed Jacks" (1961).


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In February 1959, Kubrick received a phone call from Kirk Douglas asking him to direct "Spartacus" (1960), based on the historical Spartacus and the Third Servile War. Douglas had acquired the rights to the novel by Howard Fast and blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo began penning the script. It was produced by Douglas, who also starred as Spartacus, and cast Laurence Olivier as his foe, the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus. Douglas hired Kubrick for a reported $150,000 fee to take over direction soon after he fired director Anthony Mann. Kubrick had, at 31, already directed four feature films, and this became his largest by far, with a cast of over 10,000 and a budget of $6 million. At the time, this was the most expensive film ever made in America, and Kubrick became the youngest director in Hollywood history to make an epic. It was the first time that Kubrick filmed using the anamorphic 35mm horizontal Super Technirama process to achieve ultra-high definition, which allowed him to capture large panoramic scenes, including one with 8,000 trained soldiers from Spain representing the Roman army.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Disputes broke out during the filming of "Spartacus". Kubrick complained about not having full creative control over the artistic aspects, insisting on improvising extensively during the production. Kubrick and Douglas were also at odds over the script, with Kubrick angering Douglas when he cut all but two of his lines from the opening 30 minutes. Despite the on-set troubles, "Spartacus" took $14.6 million at the box office in its first run. The film established Kubrick as a major director, receiving six Academy Award nominations and winning four; it ultimately convinced him that if so much could be made of such a problematic production, he could achieve anything. "Spartacus" also marked the end of the working relationship between Kubrick and Douglas.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick and Harris decided to film Kubrick's next movie "Lolita" (1962) in England, due to clauses placed on the contract by producers Warner Bros. that gave them complete control over the film, and the fact that the Eady plan permitted producers to write off the costs if 80% of the crew were British. Instead, they signed a $1 million deal with Eliot Hyman's Associated Artists Productions, and a clause which gave them the artistic freedom that they desired. "Lolita", Kubrick's first attempt at black comedy, was an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov, the story of a middle-aged college professor becoming infatuated with a 12-year-old girl. Stylistically, "Lolita", starring Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Sue Lyon, was a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema ... to the surrealism of the later films", according to film critic Gene Youngblood. Kubrick was impressed by the range of actor Peter Sellers and gave him one of his first opportunities to improvise wildly during shooting, while filming him with three cameras.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick shot "Lolita" over 88 days on a $2 million budget at Elstree Studios, between October 1960 and March 1961. Kubrick often clashed with Shelley Winters, whom he found "very difficult" and demanding, and nearly fired at one point. Because of its provocative story, "Lolita" was Kubrick's first film to generate controversy; he was ultimately forced to comply with censors and remove much of the erotic element of the relationship between Mason's Humbert and Lyon's Lolita which had been evident in Nabokov's novel. The film was not a major critical or commercial success, earning $3.7 million at the box office on its opening run. "Lolita" has since become critically acclaimed.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick's next project was "" (1964), another satirical black comedy. Kubrick became preoccupied with the issue of nuclear war as the Cold War unfolded in the 1950s, and even considered moving to Australia because he feared that New York City might be a likely target for the Russians. He studied over 40 military and political research books on the subject and eventually reached the conclusion that "nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: After buying the rights to the novel "Red Alert", Kubrick collaborated with its author, Peter George, on the script. It was originally written as a serious political thriller, but Kubrick decided that a "serious treatment" of the subject would not be believable, and thought that some of its most salient points would be fodder for comedy. Kubrick's longtime producer and friend, James B. Harris, thought the film should be serious, and the two parted ways, amicably, over this disagreement—Harris going on to produce and direct the serious cold-war thriller "The Bedford Incident." Kubrick and "Red Alert" author George then reworked the script as a satire (provisionally titled "The Delicate Balance of Terror") in which the plot of "Red Alert" was situated as a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence, but this idea was also abandoned, and Kubrick decided to make the film as "an outrageous black comedy".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Just before filming began, Kubrick hired noted journalist and satirical author Terry Southern to transform the script into its final form, a black comedy, loaded with sexual innuendo, becoming a film which showed Kubrick's talents as a "unique kind of absurdist" according to the film scholar Abrams. Southern made major contributions to the final script, and was co-credited (above Peter George) in the film's opening titles; his perceived role in the writing later led to a public rift between Kubrick and Peter George, who subsequently complained in a letter to "Life" magazine that Southern's intense but relatively brief (November 16 to December 28, 1962) involvement with the project was being given undue prominence in the media, while his own role as the author of the film's source novel, and his ten-month stint as the script's co-writer, were being downplayed – a perception Kubrick evidently did little to address.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick found that "Dr. Strangelove", a $2 million production which employed what became the "first important visual effects crew in the world", would be impossible to make in the U.S. for various technical and political reasons, forcing him to move production to England. It was shot in 15 weeks, ending in April 1963, after which Kubrick spent eight months editing it. Peter Sellers again agreed to work with Kubrick, and ended up playing three different roles in the film.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Upon release, the film stirred up much controversy and mixed opinions. "The New York Times" film critic Bosley Crowther worried that it was a "discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment ... the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across", while Robert Brustein of "Out of This World" in a February 1970 article called it a "juvenalian satire". Kubrick responded to the criticism, stating: "A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be". Today, the film is considered to be one of the sharpest comedy films ever made, and holds a near-perfect 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 91 reviews . It was named the 39th-greatest American film and third-greatest American comedy film of all time by the American Film Institute, and in 2010, it was named the sixth-best comedy film of all time by "The Guardian".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), having been highly impressed with science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Childhood's End", about a superior alien race who assist mankind in eliminating their old selves. After meeting Clarke in New York City in April 1964, Kubrick made the suggestion to work on his 1948 short story "The Sentinel", in which a monolith found on the Moon alerts aliens of mankind. That year, Clarke began writing the novel "" and collaborated with Kubrick on a screenplay. The film's theme, the birthing of one intelligence by another, is developed in two parallel intersecting stories on two different time scales. One depicts evolutionary transitions between various stages of man, from ape to "star child", as man is reborn into a new existence, each step shepherded by an enigmatic alien intelligence seen only in its artifacts: a series of seemingly indestructible eons-old black monoliths. In space, the enemy is a supercomputer known as HAL who runs the spaceship, a character which novelist Clancy Sigal described as being "far, far more human, more humorous and conceivably decent than anything else that may emerge from this far-seeing enterprise".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick intensively researched for the film, paying particular attention to accuracy and detail in what the future might look like. He was granted permission by NASA to observe the spacecraft being used in the Ranger 9 mission for accuracy. Filming commenced on December 29, 1965, with the excavation of the monolith on the moon, and footage was shot in Namib Desert in early 1967, with the ape scenes completed later that year. The special effects team continued working until the end of the year to complete the film, taking the cost to $10.5 million. "2001: A Space Odyssey" was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70, giving the viewer a "dazzling mix of imagination and science" through ground-breaking effects, which earned Kubrick his only personal Oscar, an Academy Award for Visual Effects. Kubrick said of the concept of the film in an interview with "Rolling Stone": "On the deepest psychological level, the film's plot symbolized the search for God, and finally postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God. The film revolves around this metaphysical conception, and the realistic hardware and the documentary feelings about everything were necessary in order to undermine your built-in resistance to the poetical concept".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Upon release in 1968, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was not an immediate hit among critics, who faulted its lack of dialog, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. The film appeared to defy genre convention, much unlike any science-fiction movie before it, and clearly different from any of Kubrick's earlier works. Kubrick was particularly outraged by a scathing review from Pauline Kael, who called it "the biggest amateur movie of them all", with Kubrick doing "really every dumb thing he ever wanted to do". Despite mixed contemporary critical reviews, "2001" gradually gained popularity and earned $31 million worldwide by the end of 1972. Today, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential films ever made and is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists. Baxter describes the film as "one of the most admired and discussed creations in the history of cinema", and Steven Spielberg has referred to it as "the big bang of his film making generation". For biographer Vincent LoBrutto it "positioned Stanley Kubrick as a pure artist ranked among the masters of cinema".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: After completing "2001: A Space Odyssey", Kubrick searched for a project that he could film quickly on a more modest budget. He settled on "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) at the end of 1969, an exploration of violence and experimental rehabilitation by law enforcement authorities, based around the character of Alex (portrayed by Malcolm McDowell). Kubrick had received a copy of Anthony Burgess's novel of the same name from Terry Southern while they were working on "Dr. Strangelove", but had rejected it on the grounds that Nadsat, a street language for young teenagers, was too difficult to comprehend. The decision to make a film about the degeneration of youth reflected contemporary concerns in 1969; the New Hollywood movement was creating a great number of films that depicted the sexuality and rebelliousness of young people. "A Clockwork Orange" was shot over 1970–1971 on a budget of £2 million. Kubrick abandoned his use of CinemaScope in filming, deciding that the 1.66:1 widescreen format was, in the words of Baxter, an "acceptable compromise between spectacle and intimacy", and favored his "rigorously symmetrical framing", which "increased the beauty of his compositions". The film heavily features "pop erotica" of the period, including a giant white plastic set of male genitals, decor which Kubrick had intended to give it a "slightly futuristic" look. McDowell's role in Lindsay Anderson's "if..." (1968) was crucial to his casting as Alex, and Kubrick professed that he probably would not have made the film if McDowell had been unavailable.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Because of its depiction of teenage violence, "A Clockwork Orange" became one of the most controversial films of its time, and part of an ongoing debate about violence and its glorification in cinema. It received an X rating, or certificate, in both the UK and US, on its release just before Christmas 1971, though many critics saw much of the violence depicted in the film as satirical, and less violent than "Straw Dogs", which had been released a month earlier. Kubrick personally pulled the film from release in the United Kingdom after receiving death threats following a series of copycat crimes based on the film; it was thus completely unavailable legally in the UK until after Kubrick's death, and not re-released until 2000. John Trevelyan, the censor of the film, personally considered "A Clockwork Orange" to be "perhaps the most brilliant piece of cinematic art I've ever seen," and believed it to present an "intellectual argument rather than a sadistic spectacle" in its depiction of violence, but acknowledged that many would not agree. Negative media hype over the film notwithstanding, "A Clockwork Orange" received four Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Editing, and was named by the New York Film Critics Circle as the Best Film of 1971. After William Friedkin won Best Director for "The French Connection" that year, he told the press: "Speaking personally, I think Stanley Kubrick is the best American film-maker of the year. In fact, not just this year, but the best, period."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "Barry Lyndon" (1975) is an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's "The Luck of Barry Lyndon", a picaresque novel about the adventures of an 18th-century Irish rogue and social climber. John Calley of Warner Bros. agreed in 1972 to invest $2.5 million into the film, on condition that Kubrick approach major Hollywood stars, to ensure success. Like previous films, Kubrick and his art department conducted an enormous amount of research on the 18th century. Extensive photographs were taken of locations and artwork in particular, and paintings were meticulously replicated from works of the great masters of the period in the film. The film was shot on location in Ireland, beginning in the autumn of 1973, at a cost of $11 million with a cast and crew of 170. The decision to shoot in Ireland stemmed from the fact that it still retained many buildings from the 18th century period which England lacked. The production was problematic from the start, plagued with heavy rain and political strife involving Northern Ireland at the time. After Kubrick received death threats from the IRA in 1974 due to the shooting scenes with English soldiers, he fled Ireland with his family on a ferry from Dún Laoghaire under an assumed identity and resumed filming in England.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Baxter notes that "Barry Lyndon" was the film which made Kubrick notorious for paying scrupulous attention to detail, often demanding twenty or thirty retakes of the same scene to perfect his art. Often considered to be his most authentic-looking picture, the cinematography and lighting techniques that Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott used in "Barry Lyndon" were highly innovative. Interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA to be used in satellite photography. The lenses allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional, diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings. Cinematographer Allen Daviau states that the method gives the audience a way of seeing the characters and scenes as they would have been seen by people at the time. Many of the fight scenes were shot with a hand-held camera to produce a "sense of documentary realism and immediacy".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "Barry Lyndon" found a great audience in France, but was a box office failure, grossing just $9.5 million in the American market, not even close to the $30 million Warner Bros. needed to generate a profit. The pace and length of "Barry Lyndon" at three hours put off many American critics and audiences, but the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, including Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Musical Score, more than any other Kubrick film. As with most of Kubrick's films, "Barry Lyndon"'s reputation has grown through the years and it is now considered to be one of his best, particularly among filmmakers and critics. Numerous polls, such as "The Village Voice" (1999), "Sight & Sound" (2002), and "Time" (2005), have rated it as one of the greatest films ever made. , it has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 64 reviews. Roger Ebert referred to it as "one of the most beautiful films ever made ... certainly in every frame a Kubrick film: technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "The Shining", released in 1980, was adapted from the novel of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King. The film stars Jack Nicholson as a writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains. He spends the winter there with his wife, played by Shelley Duvall, and their young son, who displays paranormal abilities. During their stay, they confront both Jack's descent into madness and apparent supernatural horrors lurking in the hotel. Kubrick gave his actors freedom to extend the script and even improvise on occasion, and as a result, Nicholson was responsible for the 'Here's Johnny!' line and the scene in which he's sitting at the typewriter and unleashes his anger upon his wife. Kubrick often demanded up to 70 or 80 retakes of the same scene. Duvall, whom Kubrick intentionally isolated and argued with, was forced to perform the exhausting baseball bat scene 127 times. The bar scene with the ghostly bartender was shot 36 times, while the kitchen scene between the characters of Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Halloran (Scatman Crothers) ran to 148 takes. The aerial shots of the Overlook Hotel were shot at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon, while the interiors of the hotel were shot at Elstree Studios in England between May 1978 and April 1979. Cardboard models were made of all of the sets of the film, and the lighting of them was a massive undertaking, which took four months of electrical wiring. Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track was impractical. According to Garrett Brown, Steadicam's inventor, it was the first picture to use its full potential. "The Shining" was not the only horror film to which Kubrick had been linked; he had turned down the directing of both "The Exorcist" (1973) and "" (1977), despite once saying in 1966 to a friend that he had long desired to "make the world's scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Five days after release on May 23, 1980, Kubrick ordered the deletion of a final scene, in which the hotel manager Ullman (Barry Nelson) visits Wendy (Shelley Duvall) in hospital, believing it unnecessary after witnessing the audience excitement in cinemas at the film's climax. "The Shining" opened to strong box office takings, earning $1 million on the first weekend and earning $30.9 million in America by the end of the year. The original critical response was mixed, and King detested the film and disliked Kubrick. "The Shining" is now considered to be a horror classic, and the American Film Institute has ranked it as the 27th greatest thriller film of all time.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick met author Michael Herr through mutual friend David Cornwell (novelist John le Carré) in 1980, and became interested in his book "Dispatches", about the Vietnam War. Herr had recently written Martin Sheen's narration for "Apocalypse Now" (1979). Kubrick was also intrigued by Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel "The Short-Timers." With the vision in mind to shoot what would become "Full Metal Jacket" (1987), Kubrick began working with both Herr and Hasford separately on a script. He eventually found Hasford's novel to be "brutally honest" and decided to shoot a film which closely follows the novel. All of the film was shot at a cost of $17 million within a 30-mile radius of his house between August 1985 and September 1986, later than scheduled as Kubrick shut down production for five months following a near-fatal accident with a jeep involving Lee Ermey. A derelict gasworks in Beckton in the London Docklands area posed as the ruined city of Huế, which makes the film visually very different from other Vietnam War films. Around 200 palm trees were imported via 40-foot trailers by road from North Africa, at a cost of £1000 a tree, and thousands of plastic plants were ordered from Hong Kong to provide foliage for the film. Kubrick explained he made the film look realistic by using natural light, and achieved a "newsreel effect" by making the Steadicam shots less steady, which reviewers and commentators thought contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: According to critic Michel Ciment, the film contained some of Kubrick's trademark characteristics, such as his selection of ironic music, portrayals of men being dehumanized, and attention to extreme detail to achieve realism. In a later scene, United States Marines patrol the ruins of an abandoned and destroyed city singing the theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club as a sardonic counterpoint. The film opened strongly in June 1987, taking over $30 million in the first 50 days alone, but critically it was overshadowed by the success of Oliver Stone's "Platoon", released a year earlier. Co-star Matthew Modine stated one of Kubrick's favorite reviews read: "The first half of "FMJ" is brilliant. Then the film degenerates into a masterpiece." Roger Ebert was not particularly impressed with it, awarding it a mediocre 2.5 out of 4. He concluded: "Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" is more like a book of short stories than a novel", a "strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick's final film was "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. Tom Cruise portrays a doctor who witnesses a bizarre masked quasireligious orgiastic ritual at a country mansion, a discovery which later threatens his life. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Freudian novella "Traumnovelle" ("Dream Story" in English), which Kubrick relocated from turn-of-the-century Vienna to New York City in the 1990s. Kubrick said of the novel: "A difficult book to describe—what good book isn't. It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality. All of Schnitzler's work is psychologically brilliant". Kubrick was almost 70, but worked relentlessly for 15 months to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16, 1999. He commenced a script with Frederic Raphael, and worked 18 hours a day, while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "Eyes Wide Shut", like "Lolita" and "A Clockwork Orange" before it, faced censorship before release. Kubrick sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release, but his sudden death on March 7, 1999, came a few days after he finished editing. He never saw the final version released to the public, but he did see the preview of the film with Warner Bros., Cruise, and Kidman, and had reportedly told Warner executive Julian Senior that it was his "best film ever". At the time, critical opinion of the film was mixed, and it was viewed less favorably than most of Kubrick's films. Roger Ebert awarded it 3.5 out of 4 stars, comparing the structure to a thriller and writing that it is "like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided", and thought that Kubrick's use of lighting at Christmas made the film "all a little garish, like an urban sideshow". Stephen Hunter of "The Washington Post" disliked the film, writing that it "is actually sad, rather than bad. It feels creaky, ancient, hopelessly out of touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty thing contemporary sexuality has become."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss on expanding his short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" into a three-act film. It was a futuristic fairy tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a child, and his efforts to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar to Pinocchio. Kubrick approached Spielberg in 1995 with the AI script with the possibility of Steven Spielberg directing it and Kubrick producing it. Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Following Kubrick's 1999 death, Spielberg took the drafts and notes left by Kubrick and his writers and composed a new screenplay based on an earlier 90-page story treatment by Ian Watson written under Kubrick's supervision and specifications. In association with what remained of Kubrick's production unit, he directed the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001) which was produced by Kubrick's longtime producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan. Sets, costumes, and art direction were based on the works of conceptual artist Chris Baker, who had also done much of his work under Kubrick's supervision.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Spielberg was able to function autonomously in Kubrick's absence, but said he felt "inhibited to honor him", and followed Kubrick's visual schema with as much fidelity as he could. Spielberg, who once referred to Kubrick as "the greatest master I ever served", now with production underway, admitted, "I felt like I was being coached by a ghost." The film was released in June 2001. It contains a posthumous production credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at the end. John Williams's score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Following "2001: A Space Odyssey", Kubrick planned to make a film about the life of Napoleon. Fascinated by the French leader's life and "self-destruction", Kubrick spent a great deal of time planning the film's development and conducted about two years of research into Napoleon's life, reading several hundred books and gaining access to his personal memoirs and commentaries. He tried to see every film about Napoleon and found none of them appealing, including Abel Gance's 1927 film which is generally considered to be a masterpiece, but for Kubrick, a "really terrible" movie. LoBrutto states that Napoleon was an ideal subject for Kubrick, embracing Kubrick's "passion for control, power, obsession, strategy, and the military", while Napoleon's psychological intensity and depth, logistical genius and war, sex, and the evil nature of man were all ingredients which deeply appealed to Kubrick.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick drafted a screenplay in 1961, and envisaged making a "grandiose" epic, with up to 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. He intended hiring the armed forces of an entire country to make the film, as he considered Napoleonic battles to be "so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets", with an "aesthetic brilliance that doesn't require a military mind to appreciate". He wanted them replicated as authentically as possible on screen. Kubrick sent research teams to scout for locations across Europe, and commissioned screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, one of his young assistants on "2001", to the Isle of Elba, Austerlitz, and Waterloo, taking thousands of pictures for his later perusal. Kubrick approached numerous stars to play leading roles, including Audrey Hepburn for Empress Josephine, a part which she could not accept due to semiretirement.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: British actors David Hemmings and Ian Holm were considered for the lead role of Napoleon, before Jack Nicholson was cast. The film was well into preproduction and ready to begin filming in 1969 when MGM cancelled the project. Numerous reasons have been cited for the abandonment of the project, including its projected cost, a change of ownership at MGM, and the poor reception that the 1970 Soviet film about Napoleon, "Waterloo", received. In 2011, Taschen published the book "Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made", a large volume compilation of literature and source documents from Kubrick, such as scene photo ideas and copies of letters Kubrick wrote and received. In March 2013, Steven Spielberg, who previously collaborated with Kubrick on "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" and is a passionate admirer of his work, announced that he would be developing "Napoleon" as a TV miniseries based on Kubrick's original screenplay.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In the 1950s, Kubrick and Harris developed a sitcom starring Ernie Kovacs and a film adaption of the book "I Stole $16,000,000", but nothing came of them. Tony Frewin, an assistant who worked with the director for a long period of time, revealed in a 2013 "Atlantic" article: "[Kubrick] was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and desperately wanted to make a film on the subject." Kubrick had intended to make a film about , a Nazi officer who used the pen name "Dr. Jazz" to write reviews of German music scenes during the Nazi era. Kubrick had been given a copy of the Mike Zwerin book "Swing Under the Nazis" after he had finished production on "Full Metal Jacket", the front cover of which featured a photograph of Schulz-Köhn. A screenplay was never completed and Kubrick's adaptation was never initiated. The unfinished "Aryan Papers", based on Louis Begley's debut novel "Wartime Lies", was a factor in the abandonment of the project. Work on "Aryan Papers" depressed Kubrick enormously, and he eventually decided that Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" (1993) covered much of the same material.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: According to biographer John Baxter, Kubrick had shown an interest in directing a pornographic film based on a satirical novel written by Terry Southern, titled "Blue Movie", about a director who makes Hollywood's first big-budget porn film. Baxter claims that Kubrick concluded he did not have the patience or temperament to become involved in the porn industry, and Southern stated that Kubrick was "too ultra conservative" towards sexuality to have gone ahead with it, but liked the idea. Kubrick was unable to direct a film of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" as Eco had given his publisher instructions to never sell the film rights to any of his books after his dissatisfaction with the film version of "The Name of the Rose". Also, when the film rights to Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" were sold to United Artists, the Beatles approached Kubrick to direct them in a film adaptation, but Kubrick was unwilling to produce a film based on a very popular book.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: As a young man, Kubrick was fascinated by the films of Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Kubrick read Pudovkin's seminal theoretical work, "Film Technique," which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, and it needs to be employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest. Kubrick recommended this work to others for many years. Thomas Nelson describes this book as "the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick's] private aesthetics". Kubrick also found the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski to be essential to his understanding the basics of directing, and gave himself a crash course to learn his methods.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick's family and many critics felt that his Jewish ancestry may have contributed to his worldview and aspects of his films. After his death, both his daughter and wife stated that he was not religious, but "did not deny his Jewishness, not at all". His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, the "Aryan Papers", having spent years researching the subject. Most of Kubrick's friends and early photography and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent Jewish immigrants from Europe. British screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who worked closely with Kubrick in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick's films was partly because he "had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars". He declared that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Walker notes that Kubrick was influenced by the tracking and "fluid camera" styles of director Max Ophüls, and used them in many of his films, including "Paths of Glory" and "2001: A Space Odyssey". Kubrick noted how in Ophuls' films "the camera went through every wall and every floor". He once named Ophüls' "Le Plaisir" (1952) as his favorite film. According to film historian John Wakeman, Ophüls himself learned the technique from director Anatole Litvak in the 1930s, when he was his assistant, and whose work was "replete with the camera trackings, pans and swoops which later became the trademark of Max Ophüls". Geoffrey Cocks believes that Kubrick was also influenced by Ophüls' stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men, while Herr notes that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst, who earlier tried, but was unable to adapt Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle", the basis of "Eyes Wide Shut". Film historian/critic Robert Kolker sees the influence of Welles' moving camera shots on Kubrick's style. LoBrutto notes that Kubrick identified with Welles and that this influenced the making of "The Killing", with its "multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick admired the work of Ingmar Bergman and expressed it in personal letter: "Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today [...], unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a film; [...] and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: When the American magazine "Cinema" asked Kubrick in 1963 to name his favorite films, he listed Italian director Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni" as number one in his Top 10 list.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick's films typically involve expressions of an inner struggle, examined from different perspectives.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: He was very careful not to present his own views of the meaning of his films and to leave them open to interpretation. He explained in a 1960 interview with Robert Emmett Ginna:


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "One of the things I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, 'Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?' And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T. S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him—I believe it was "The Waste Land"—what he meant by the poem. He replied, 'I meant what I said.' If I could have said it any differently, I would have".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick likened the understanding of his films to popular music, in that whatever the background or intellect of the individual, a Beatles record, for instance, can be appreciated both by the Alabama truck driver and the young Cambridge intellectual, because their "emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects". He believed that the subconscious emotional reaction experienced by audiences was far more powerful in the film medium than in any other traditional verbal form, and this was one of the reasons why he often relied on long periods in his films without dialogue, placing emphasis on images and sound. In a 1975 "Time" magazine interview, Kubrick further stated: "The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves." He also said: "Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Diane Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay for "The Shining" with Kubrick, notes that he "always said that it was better to adapt a book rather than write an original screenplay, and that you should choose a work that isn't a masterpiece so you can improve on it. Which is what he's always done, except with "Lolita"". When deciding on a subject for a film, there were many aspects that he looked for, and he always made films which would "appeal to every sort of viewer, whatever their expectation of film". According to his co-producer Jan Harlan, Kubrick mostly "wanted to make films about things that mattered, that not only had form, but substance". Kubrick believed that audiences quite often were attracted to "enigmas and allegories" and did not like films in which everything was spelled out clearly.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Sexuality in Kubrick's films is usually depicted outside matrimonial relationships in hostile situations. Baxter states that Kubrick explores the "furtive and violent side alleys of the sexual experience: voyeurism, domination, bondage and rape" in his films. He further points out that films like "A Clockwork Orange" are "powerfully homoerotic", from Alex walking about his parents' flat in his Y-fronts, one eye being "made up with doll-like false eyelashes", to his innocent acceptance of the sexual advances of his post-corrective adviser Deltroid (Aubrey Morris).


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Indeed, the film is believed to have been at least partially inspired by the landmark work of queer cinema "Funeral Parade of Roses". Film critic Adrian Turner notes that Kubrick's films appear to be "preoccupied with questions of universal and inherited evil", and Malcolm McDowell referred to his humor as "black as coal", questioning his outlook on humanity. A few of his pictures were obvious satires and black comedies, such as "Lolita" and "Dr. Strangelove"; many of his other films also contained less visible elements of satire or irony. His films are unpredictable, examining "the duality and contradictions that exist in all of us". Ciment notes how Kubrick often tried to confound audience expectations by establishing radically different moods from one film to the next, remarking that he was almost "obsessed with contradicting himself, with making each work a critique of the previous one".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick stated that "there is no deliberate pattern to the stories that I have chosen to make into films. About the only factor at work each time is that I try not to repeat myself". As a result, Kubrick was often misunderstood by critics, and only once did he have unanimously positive reviews upon the release of a film—for "Paths of Glory".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Film author Patrick Webster considers Kubrick's methods of writing and developing scenes to fit with the classical auteur theory of directing, allowing collaboration and improvisation with the actors during filming. Malcolm McDowell recalled Kubrick's collaborative emphasis during their discussions and his willingness to allow him to improvise a scene, stating that "there was a script and we followed it, but when it didn't work he knew it, and we had to keep rehearsing endlessly until we were bored with it".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Once Kubrick was confident in the overall staging of a scene, and felt the actors were prepared, he would then develop the visual aspects, including camera and lighting placement. Walker believes that Kubrick was one of "very few film directors competent to instruct their lighting photographers in the precise effect they want". Baxter believes that Kubrick was heavily influenced by his ancestry and always possessed a European perspective to filmmaking, particularly the Austro-Hungarian empire and his admiration for Max Ophuls and Richard Strauss.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Gilbert Adair, writing in a review for "Full Metal Jacket", commented that "Kubrick's approach to language has always been of a reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all whims, shades and modulations of personal expression". Johnson notes that although Kubrick was a "visual filmmaker", he also loved words and was like a writer in his approach, very sensitive to the story itself, which he found unique. Before shooting began, Kubrick tried to have the script as complete as possible, but still allowed himself enough space to make changes during the filming, finding it "more profitable to avoid locking up any ideas about staging or camera or even dialogue prior to rehearsals" as he put it. Kubrick told Robert Emmett Ginna: "I think you have to view the entire problem of putting the story you want to tell up there on that light square. It begins with the selection of the property; it continues through the creation of the story, the sets, the costumes, the photography and the acting. And when the picture is shot, it's only partially finished. I think the cutting is just a continuation of directing a movie. I think the use of music effects, opticals and finally main titles are all part of telling the story. And I think the fragmentation of these jobs, by different people, is a very bad thing". Kubrick also said: "I think that the best plot is no apparent plot. I like a slow start, the start that gets under the audience's skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don't have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense tools."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick was notorious for demanding multiple takes during filming to perfect his art, and his relentless approach was often extremely demanding for his actors. Jack Nicholson remarked that Kubrick would often demand up to fifty takes of a scene. Nicole Kidman explains that the large number of takes he often required stopped actors from consciously thinking about technique, thereby helping them enter a "deeper place". Kubrick's high take ratio was considered by some critics as "irrational"; he firmly believed that actors were at their best during the filming, as opposed to rehearsals, due to the sense of intense excitement that it generates. Kubrick explained: "Actors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try" ...


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: "When you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the crew, because it is like getting undressed in front of fifty people. Once you're accustomed to them, the presence of even one other person on set is discordant and tends to produce self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in itself". He also told biographer Michel Ciment: "It's invariably because the actors don't know their lines, or don't know them well enough. An actor can only do one thing at a time, and when he learned his lines only well enough to say them while he's thinking about them, he will always have trouble as soon as he has to work on the emotions of the scene or find camera marks. In a strong emotional scene, it is always best to be able to shoot in complete takes to allow the actor a continuity of emotion, and it is rare for most actors to reach their peak more than once or twice. There are, occasionally, scenes which benefit from extra takes, but even then, I'm not sure that the early takes aren't just glorified rehearsals with the adding adrenaline of film running through the camera."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick would devote his personal breaks to having lengthy discussions with actors. Among those who valued his attention was Tony Curtis, star of "Spartacus", who said Kubrick was his favorite director, adding, "his greatest effectiveness was his one-on-one relationship with actors." He further added, "Kubrick had his own approach to film-making. He wanted to see the actor's faces. He didn't want cameras always in a wide shot twenty-five feet away, he wanted close-ups, he wanted to keep the camera moving. That was his style." Similarly, Malcolm McDowell recalls the long discussions he had with Kubrick to help him develop his character in "A Clockwork Orange", noting that on set he felt entirely uninhibited and free, which is what made Kubrick "such a great director". Kubrick also allowed actors at times to improvise and to "break the rules", particularly with Peter Sellers in "Lolita", which became a turning point in his career as it allowed him to work creatively during the shooting, as opposed to the preproduction stage.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: During an interview, Ryan O'Neal recalled Kubrick's directing style: "God, he works you hard. He moves you, pushes you, helps you, gets cross with you, but above all he teaches you the value of a good director. Stanley brought out aspects of my personality and acting instincts that had been dormant ... My strong suspicion [was] that I was involved in something great". He further added that working with Kubrick was "a stunning experience" and that he never recovered from working with somebody of such magnificence.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick credited the ease with which he filmed scenes to his early years as a photographer. He rarely added camera instructions in the script, preferring to handle that after a scene is created, as the visual part of film-making came easiest to him. Even in deciding which props and settings would be used, Kubrick paid meticulous attention to detail and tried to collect as much background material as possible, functioning rather like what he described as "a detective". Cinematographer John Alcott, who worked closely with Kubrick on four of his films, and won an Oscar for Best Cinematography on "Barry Lyndon", remarked that Kubrick "questions everything", and was involved in the technical aspects of film-making including camera placement, scene composition, choice of lens, and even operating the camera which would usually be left to the cinematographer. Alcott considered Kubrick to be the "nearest thing to genius I've ever worked with, with all the problems of a genius".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Among Kubrick's innovations in cinematography are his use of special effects, as in "2001", where he used both slit-scan photography and front-screen projection, which won Kubrick his only Oscar for special effects. Some reviewers have described and illustrated with video clips, Kubrick's use of "one-point perspective", which leads the viewer's eye towards a central vanishing point. The technique relies on creating a complex visual symmetry using parallel lines in a scene which all converge on that single point, leading away from the viewer. Combined with camera motion it could produce an effect that one writer describes as "hypnotic and thrilling". "The Shining" was among the first half-dozen features to use the then-revolutionary Steadicam (after the 1976 films "Bound for Glory", "Marathon Man" and "Rocky"). Kubrick used it to its fullest potential, which gave the audience smooth, stabilized, motion-tracking by the camera. Kubrick described Steadicam as being like a "magic carpet", allowing "fast, flowing, camera movements" in the maze in "The Shining" which otherwise would have been impossible.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick was among the first directors to use video assist during filming. At the time he began using it in 1966, it was considered cutting-edge technology, requiring him to build his own system. Having it in place during the filming of "2001", he was able to view a video of a take immediately after it was filmed. On some films, such as "Barry Lyndon", he used custom made zoom lenses, which allowed him to start a scene with a close-up and slowly zoom out to capture the full panorama of scenery and to film long takes under changing outdoor lighting conditions by making aperture adjustments while the cameras rolled. LoBrutto notes that Kubrick's technical knowledge about lenses "dazzled the manufacturer's engineers, who found him to be unprecedented among contemporary filmmakers". For "Barry Lyndon" he also used a specially adapted high-speed (f/0.7) Zeiss camera lens, originally developed for NASA, to shoot numerous scenes lit only with candlelight. Actor Steven Berkoff recalls that Kubrick wanted scenes to be shot using "pure candlelight", and in doing so Kubrick "made a unique contribution to the art of filmmaking going back to painting ... You almost posed like for portraits." LoBrutto notes that cinematographers all over the world wanted to know about Kubrick's "magic lens" and that he became a "legend" among cameramen around the world.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick spent extensive hours editing, often working seven days a week, and more hours a day as he got closer to deadlines. For Kubrick, written dialogue was one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on film editing, Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often "re-direct" a film, and he remarked: "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking ... Editing is the only unique aspect of filmmaking which does not resemble any other art form—a point so important it cannot be overstressed ... It can make or break a film". Biographer John Baxter stated that "Instead of finding the intellectual spine of a film in the script before starting work, Kubrick felt his way towards the final version of a film by shooting each scene from many angles and demanding scores of takes on each line. Then over months ... he arranged and rearranged the tens of thousands of scraps of film to fit a vision that really only began to emerge during editing".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick's attention to music was an aspect of what many referred to as his "perfectionism" and extreme attention to minute details, which his wife Christiane attributed to an addiction to music. In his last six films, Kubrick usually chose music from existing sources, especially classical compositions. He preferred selecting recorded music over having it composed for a film, believing that no hired composer could do as well as the public domain classical composers. He also felt that building scenes from great music often created the "most memorable scenes" in the best films. In one instance, for a scene in "Barry Lyndon" which was written into the screenplay as merely, "Barry duels with Lord Bullingdon", he spent forty-two working days in the editing phase. During that period, he listened to what LoBrutto describes as "every available recording of seventeenth-and eighteenth- century music, acquiring thousands of records to find Handel's sarabande used to score the scene". Nicholson likewise observed his attention to music, stating that Kubrick "listened constantly to music until he discovered something he felt was right or that excited him".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick is credited with introducing Hungarian composer György Ligeti to a broad Western audience by including his music in "2001", "The Shining" and "Eyes Wide Shut". According to Baxter, the music in "2001" was "at the forefront of Kubrick's mind" when he conceived the film. During earlier screening he played music by Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams, and Kubrick and writer Clarke had listened to Carl Orff's transcription of "Carmina Burana", consisting of 13th century sacred and secular songs. Ligeti's music employed the new style of micropolyphony, which used sustained dissonant chords that shift slowly over time, a style he originated. Its inclusion in the film became a "boon for the relatively unknown composer" partly because it was introduced alongside background by Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In addition to Ligeti, Kubrick enjoyed a collaboration with composer Wendy Carlos, whose 1968 album "Switched-On Bach"—which re-interpreted baroque music through the use of a Moog synthesizer—caught his attention. In 1971, Carlos composed and recorded music for the soundtrack of "A Clockwork Orange". Additional music not used in the film was released in 1972 as "Wendy Carlos's Clockwork Orange". Kubrick later collaborated with Carlos on "The Shining" (1980). The opening of the film employs Carlos' rendering of "Dies Irae" (Day of Wrath) from Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz, a caricaturist, on May 29, 1948, when he was 19 years old. The couple lived together in Greenwich Village and divorced three years later in 1951. He met his second wife, the Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York City's East Village beginning in 1952, married in January 1955 and moved to Hollywood in July 1955, where she played a brief part as a ballet dancer in Kubrick's film, "Killer's Kiss" (1955). The following year, she was art director for his film, "The Killing" (1956). They divorced in 1957.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: During the production of "Paths of Glory" in Munich in early 1957, Kubrick met and romanced the German actress Christiane Harlan, who played a small though memorable role in the film. Kubrick married Harlan in 1958 and the couple remained together for 40 years, until his death in 1999. Besides his stepdaughter, they had two daughters together: Anya Renata (April 6, 1959 – July 7, 2009) and Vivian Vanessa (born August 5, 1960). In 1959, they settled into a home at 316 South Camden Drive in Beverly Hills with Harlan's daughter, Katherina, aged six. They also lived in New York City, during which time Christiane studied art at the Art Students League of New York, later becoming an independent artist. The couple moved to the United Kingdom in 1961 to make "Lolita", and Kubrick hired Peter Sellers to star in his next film, "Dr. Strangelove". Sellers was unable to leave the UK, so Kubrick made Britain his permanent home thereafter. The move was quite convenient to Kubrick, since he shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine and he and Christiane had become alarmed with the increase in violence in New York City.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In 1965, the Kubricks bought Abbots Mead on Barnet Lane, just south-west of the Elstree/Borehamwood studio complex in England. Kubrick worked almost exclusively from this home for 14 years where, he researched, invented special effects techniques, designed ultra-low light lenses for specially modified cameras, pre-produced, edited, post-produced, advertised, distributed and carefully managed all aspects of four of his films. In 1978, Kubrick moved into Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, a mainly 18th-century stately home, which was once owned by a wealthy racehorse owner, about north of London and a 10-minute drive from his previous home at Abbotts Mead. His new home became a workplace for Kubrick and his wife, "a perfect family factory" as Christiane called it, and Kubrick converted the stables into extra production rooms besides ones within the home that he used for editing and storage.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: A workaholic, Kubrick rarely took a vacation or left England during the forty years before his death. LoBrutto notes that Kubrick's confined way of living and desire for privacy has led to spurious stories about his reclusiveness, similar to those of Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes and J. D. Salinger. Michael Herr, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on "Full Metal Jacket", who knew him well, considers his "reclusiveness" to be myth: "[He] was in fact a complete failure as a recluse, unless you believe that a recluse is simply someone who seldom leaves his house. Stanley saw a lot of people ... he was one of the most gregarious men I ever knew and it didn't change anything that most of this conviviality went on over the phone." LoBrutto states that one of the reasons he acquired a reputation as a recluse was that he insisted in remaining near his home but the reason for this was that for Kubrick there were only three places on the planet he could make high quality films with the necessary technical expertise and equipment: Los Angeles, New York City or around London. He disliked living in Los Angeles and thought London a superior film production center to New York City.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: As a person, Kubrick was described by Norman Lloyd as "a very dark, sort of a glowering type who was very serious". Marisa Berenson, who starred in "Barry Lyndon", fondly recalled: "There was great tenderness in him and he was passionate about his work. What was striking was his enormous intelligence but he also had a great sense of humor. He was a very shy person and self-protective but he was filled with the thing that drove him twenty-four hours of the day." Kubrick was particularly fond of machines and technical equipment, to the point that his wife Christiane once stated that "Stanley would be happy with eight tape recorders and one pair of pants". Kubrick had obtained a pilot's license in August 1947 and some have claimed that he later developed a fear of flying, stemming from an incident in the early 1950s when a colleague was killed in a plane crash. Kubrick had been sent the charred remains of his camera and notebooks which, according to Duncan, traumatized him for life. Kubrick also had a strong mistrust of doctors and medicine.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: On March 7, 1999, six days after screening a final cut of "Eyes Wide Shut" for his family and the stars, Kubrick died in his sleep at the age of 70, suffering a heart attack. His funeral was held five days later at Childwickbury Manor, with only close friends and family in attendance, totaling about 100 people. The media were kept a mile away outside the entrance gate. Alexander Walker, who attended the funeral, described it as a "family farewell, ... almost like an English picnic", with cellists, clarinetists and singers providing song and music from many of his favorite classical compositions. Kaddish, the Jewish prayer typically said by mourners and in other contexts, was recited. A few of his obituaries mentioned his Jewish background. Among those who gave eulogies were Terry Semel, Jan Harlan, Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. He was buried next to his favorite tree on the estate. In her book dedicated to Kubrick, his wife Christiane included one of his favorite quotations of Oscar Wilde: "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Part of the New Hollywood film-making wave, Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century", and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of cinema. According to film historian and Kubrick scholar Robert Kolker, Kubrick's films were "more intellectually rigorous than the work of any other American filmmaker." Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, George Lucas, James Cameron, Terry Gilliam, the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott, and George A. Romero, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and additionally in the case of Spielberg and Scott, collaboration. On the DVD of "Eyes Wide Shut", Steven Spielberg comments that the way Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories" and that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history". Orson Welles, one of Kubrick's greatest personal influences and favorite directors, said that: "Among those whom I would call 'younger generation', Kubrick appears to me to be a giant."


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, Todd Field, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noé. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing, as well as his use of music, including Frank Darabont.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Artists in fields other than film have also expressed admiration for Kubrick. English musician and poet PJ Harvey, in an interview about her 2011 album "Let England Shake", argued that "something about [...] what is not said in his films...there's so much space, so many things that are silent – and somehow, in that space and silence everything becomes clear. With every film, he seems to capture the essence of life itself, particularly in films like "Paths of Glory", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Barry Lyndon"...those are some of my favorites." The music video for Kanye West's 2010 song "Runaway" was inspired by "Eyes Wide Shut". Pop singer Lady Gaga's concert shows have included the use of dialogue, costumes, and music from "A Clockwork Orange".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia lifetime achievement award the "Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award", joining the likes of D. W. Griffith, Laurence Olivier, Cecil B. DeMille, and Irving Thalberg, all of whom have annual awards named after them. Kubrick won this award in 1999, and subsequent recipients have included George Lucas, Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Many people who worked with Kubrick on his films created the 2001 documentary "", produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who had executive produced Kubrick's last four films.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: The first public exhibition of material from Kubrick's personal archives was presented jointly in 2004 by the Deutsches Filmmuseum and Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, in cooperation with Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan / The Stanley Kubrick Estate. In 2009, an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films was held in Dublin, Ireland, entitled "Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light". On October 30, 2012, an exhibition devoted to Kubrick opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and concluded in June 2013. Exhibits include a wide collection of documents, photographs and on-set material assembled from 800 boxes of personal archives that were stored in Kubrick's home-workplace in the UK. Many celebrities attended and spoke at the museum's pre-opening gala, including Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson, while Kubrick's widow, Christiane, appeared at the pre-gala press review. In October 2013, the Brazil São Paulo International Film Festival paid tribute to Kubrick, staging an exhibit of his work and a retrospective of his films. The exhibit opened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in late 2014 and ended in January 2015.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: Kubrick is widely referenced in popular culture; for example, the TV series "The Simpsons" is said to contain more references to Kubrick films than any other pop culture phenomenon. When the Directors Guild of Great Britain gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, they included a cut-together sequence of all the homages from the show. Several works have been created that related to Kubrick's life, including the made-for-TV mockumentary "Dark Side of the Moon" (2002), which is a parody of the pervasive conspiracy theory that Kubrick had been involved with the faked footage of the NASA moon landings during the filming of "2001: A Space Odyssey". "Colour Me Kubrick" (2005) was authorized by Kubrick's family and starred John Malkovich as Alan Conway, a con artist who had assumed Kubrick's identity in the 1990s. In the 2004 film "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", Kubrick was portrayed by Stanley Tucci; the film documents the filming of "Dr. Strangelove".


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: In April 2018, the month that marked the 50th anniversary of "2001: A Space Odyssey", the International Astronomical Union named the largest mountain of Pluto's moon Charon after Kubrick.


title: Stanley Kubrick

text: From October 2019 to March 2020, the Skirball Cultural Center hosted an exhibition called "Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs", a show focusing on Kubrick's early career.


title: QR code

text: A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about the item to which it is attached. In practice, QR codes often contain data for a locator, identifier, or tracker that points to a website or application. QR codes use four standardized encoding modes (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, and kanji) to store data efficiently; extensions may also be used.


title: QR code

text: The quick response system became popular outside the automotive industry due to its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to standard UPC barcodes. Applications include product tracking, item identification, time tracking, document management, and general marketing.


title: QR code

text: A QR code consists of black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background, including some fiducial markers, which can be read by an imaging device such as a camera, and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted. The required data is then extracted from patterns that are present in both horizontal and vertical components of the image.


title: QR code

text: The QR code system was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara from the Japanese company Denso Wave. The initial design was influenced by the black and white pieces on a Go board. Its purpose was to keep track of automotive parts manufactured by Denso, to replace several bar codes on each box, each of which had to be scanned separately.


title: QR code

text: QR codes are now used in a much broader context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile-phone users (termed mobile tagging). QR codes may be used to display text to the user, to open a webpage on the user's device, to add a vCard contact to the user's device, to open a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), to connect to a wireless network, or to compose an email or text message. There are a great many QR code generators available as software or as online tools that are either free, or require a paid subscription. The QR code has become one of the most-used types of two-dimensional code.


title: QR code

text: During the month of June 2011, 14 million American mobile users scanned a QR code or a barcode. Some 58% of those users scanned a QR or barcode from their homes, while 39% scanned from retail stores; 53% of the 14 million users were men between the ages of 18 and 34.


title: QR code

text: In September 2020, a survey found that 18.8 percent of consumers in the United States and United Kingdom strongly agreed that they had noticed an increase of QR code use since the then-active COVID-19 related restrictions had begun several months prior.


title: QR code

text: At the application layer, there is some variation between most of the implementations. Japan's NTT DoCoMo has established de facto standards for the encoding of URLs, contact information, and several other data types. The open-source "ZXing" project maintains a list of QR code data types.


title: QR code

text: QR codes have become common in consumer advertising. Typically, a smartphone is used as a QR code scanner, displaying the code and converting it to some useful form (such as a standard URL for a website, thereby obviating the need for a user to type it into a web browser).


title: QR code

text: QR code has become a focus of advertising strategy, since it provides a way to access a brand's website more quickly than by manually entering a URL. Beyond mere convenience to the consumer, the importance of this capability is that it increases the conversion rate: the chance that contact with the advertisement will convert to a sale. It coaxes interested prospects further down the conversion funnel with little delay or effort, bringing the viewer to the advertiser's website immediately, whereas a longer and more targeted sales pitch may lose the viewer's interest.


title: QR code

text: Although initially used to track parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR codes are used over a much wider range of applications. These include commercial tracking, entertainment and transport ticketing, product and loyalty marketing and in-store product labeling. Examples of marketing include where a company's discounted and percent discount can be captured using a QR code decoder which is a mobile app, or storing a company's information such as address and related information alongside its alpha-numeric text data as can be seen in Yellow Pages directories.


title: QR code

text: They can also be used in storing personal information for use by organizations. An example of this is Philippines National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) where NBI clearances now come with a QR code. Many of these applications target mobile-phone users (via mobile tagging). Users may receive text, add a vCard contact to their device, open a URL, or compose an e-mail or text message after scanning QR codes. They can generate and print their own QR codes for others to scan and use by visiting one of several pay or free QR code-generating sites or apps. Google had an API, now deprecated, to generate QR codes, and apps for scanning QR codes can be found on nearly all smartphone devices.


title: QR code

text: QR codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, on buses, on business cards, or on almost any object about which users might want information. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone's browser. This act of linking from physical world objects is termed hardlinking or object hyperlinking. QR codes also may be linked to a location to track where a code has been scanned. Either the application that scans the QR code retrieves the geo information by using GPS and cell tower triangulation (aGPS) or the URL encoded in the QR code itself is associated with a location. In 2008, a Japanese stonemason announced plans to engrave QR codes on gravestones, allowing visitors to view information about the deceased, and family members to keep track of visits. Psychologist Richard Wiseman was one of the first authors to include QR codes in a book, in "" (2011).


title: QR code

text: QR codes have been incorporated into currency. In June 2011, The Royal Dutch Mint ("Koninklijke Nederlandse Munt") issued the world's first official coin with a QR code to celebrate the centenary of its current building and premises. The coin can be scanned by a smartphone and originally linked to a special website with contents about the historical event and design of the coin. In 2014, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a 100-naira banknote to commemorate its centennial, the first banknote to incorporate a QR code in its design. When scanned with an internet-enabled mobile device, the code goes to a website which tells the centenary story of Nigeria. In 2015, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation issued a 100-rubles note to commemorate the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. It contains a QR code into its design, and when scanned with an internet-enabled mobile device, the code goes to a website that details the historical and technical background of the commemorative note. In 2017, the Bank of Ghana issued a 5-cedis banknote to commemorate 60 years of Central Banking in Ghana, and contains a QR code in its design, which when scanned with an internet-enabled mobile device, that code goes to the official Bank of Ghana website.


title: QR code

text: Credit card functionality is under development. In September 2016, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) launched the eponymously named Bharat QR, a common QR code jointly developed by all the four major card payment companies – National Payments Corporation of India that runs RuPay cards along with MasterCard, Visa and American Express. It will also have the capability of accepting payments on the unified payments interface (UPI) platform.


title: QR code

text: QR codes are used in some augmented reality systems to determine the positions of objects in 3-dimensional space.


title: QR code

text: QR codes also used to direct users to specific multimedia content (such as videos, audios, images, documents and any type of content accessible from the web). This type of QR code is called "Multimedia QR code".


title: QR code

text: QR codes can be used on various mobile device operating systems. iPhones running on iOS 11 and higher and some Android devices can natively scan QR codes without downloading an external app. The camera app is able to scan and display the kind of QR code (only on iPhone) along with the link (both on Android and iPhone). These devices support URL redirection, which allows QR codes to send metadata to existing applications on the device. Many paid or free apps are available with the ability to scan the codes and hard-link to an external URL.


title: QR code

text: QR codes have been used to establish "virtual stores", where a gallery of product information and QR codes is presented to the customer, e.g. on a train station wall. The customers scan the QR codes, and the products are delivered to their homes. This use started in South Korea, and Argentina, but is currently expanding globally. Walmart, Procter & Gamble and Woolworths have already adopted the Virtual Store concept.


title: QR code

text: QR codes can be used to store bank account information or credit card information, or they can be specifically designed to work with particular payment provider applications. There are several trial applications of QR code payments across the world. In developing countries like China, India and Bangladesh QR code payment is a very popular and convenient method of making payments. Since Alipay designed a QR code payment method in 2011, mobile payment has been quickly adopted in China. As of 2018, around 83% of all payments were made via mobile payment.


title: QR code

text: In November 2012, QR code payments were deployed on a larger scale in the Czech Republic when an open format for payment information exchange – a Short Payment Descriptor – was introduced and endorsed by the Czech Banking Association as the official local solution for QR payments. In 2013, the European Payment Council provided guidelines for the EPC QR code enabling SCT initiation within the Eurozone.


title: QR code

text: In 2017, Singapore created a taskforce including their Government Agencies such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Infocomm Media Development Authority to spearhead a system for e-payments using standardized QR code specifications. These specific dimensions are specialized for Singapore’s market.


title: QR code

text: The e-payment system, Singapore Quick Response Code (SGQR), essentially merges various QR codes into one label which can be used by both parties in the payment system. This allows for various banking apps to facilitate payments between multiple customers and a merchant that displays the single QR code.


title: QR code

text: A single SDQR label contains e-payments and combines multiple payment options. Once consumers spot the SGQR label, they will be able to scan it and see which payment options the merchant accepts.  The SGQR scheme is co-owned by MAS and IMDA.


title: QR code

text: QR codes can be used to log into websites: a QR code is shown on the login page on a computer screen, and when a registered user scans it with a verified smartphone, they will automatically be logged in. Authentication is performed by the smartphone which contacts the server. Google tested such a login method in January 2012.


title: QR code

text: There is a system whereby a QR code can be displayed on a device such as a smartphone and used as an admission ticket. Its use is common for J1 League and Nippon Professional Baseball tickets in Japan. In some cases, rights can be transferred via the Internet.


title: QR code

text: Restaurants can present a QR code near the front door or at the table allowing guests to view an online menu, or even redirect them to an online ordering website or app, allowing them to order and/or possibly pay for their meal without having to use a cashier or waiter. QR codes can also link to daily or weekly specials that are not printed on the standardized menus, and enable the establishment to update the entire menu without needing to print copies. At table-serve restaurants, QR codes enable guests to order and pay for their meals without a waiter involved – the QR code contains the table number so servers know where to bring the food.<ref name="Verge, Kastrenakes, 9/29/20"></ref> This application has grown especially since the need for social distancing during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic prompted reduced contact between service staff and customers.


title: QR code

text: By specifying the SSID, encryption type, password/passphrase, and if the SSID is hidden or not, mobile device users can quickly scan and join networks without having to manually enter the data. A MeCard-like format is supported by Android and iOS 11+.


title: QR code

text: A QR code can link to an obituary and can be placed on a headstone. In 2008, Ishinokoe in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan began to sell tombstones with QR codes produced by IT DeSign, where the code leads to a virtual grave site of the deceased. Other companies, such as Wisconsin-based Interactive Headstones, have also begun implementing QR codes into tombstones. In 2014, the Jewish Cemetery of La Paz in Uruguay began implementing QR codes for tombstones.


title: QR code

text: QR codes are also used to generate time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) for electronic authentication.


title: QR code

text: QR codes have been used by various retail outlets that have loyalty programs. Sometimes these programs are accessed with an app that is loaded onto a phone and includes a process triggered by a QR code scan. The QR codes for loyalty programs tend to be found printed on the receipt for a purchase or on the products themselves. Users in these schemes collect award points by scanning a code.


title: QR code

text: Serialised QR codes have been used by brands and governments to let consumers, retailers and distributors verify the authenticity of the products and help with detecting counterfeit products, as part of a brand protection program. However, the security level of a regular QR Code is limited since QR Codes printed on original products are easily reproduced on fake products, even though the analysis of data generated as a result of QR Code scanning can be used to detect counterfeiting and illicit activity. A higher security level can be attained by embedding a digital watermark or copy detection pattern into the image of the QR Code. This makes the QR Code more secure against counterfeiting attempts, and fake products which contain a counterfeit QR Code can be detected by scanning the secure QR Code with a specific app (even though the QR Code message itself is valid).


title: QR code

text: The treaty regulating apostilles (documents bearing a seal of authenticity), has been updated to allow for the issuance of digital apostilles by countries; a digital apostille is a PDF document with a cryptographic signature containing a QR code for a canonical URL of the original document, allowing users to verify the apostille from a printed version of the document.


title: QR code

text: Different studies have been made to assess the effectiveness of QR codes as a means of conveying labelling information and their use as part of a food traceability system. In a field experiment, it was found that when provided free access to a smartphone with QR Code scanning app, 52.6% of participants would use it to access labelling information. A study made in South Korea showed that consumers appreciate QR code used in food traceability system, as they provide detailed information about food, as well as information that helps them in their purchasing decision. If QR Codes are serialised, consumers can access a web page showing the supply chain for each ingredient, as well as information specific to each related batch, including meat processors and manufacturers, which helps address the concerns they have about the origin of their food.


title: QR code

text: After the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading, QR codes began to be used as a "touchless" system to display information, show menus, or provide updated consumer information, especially in the hospitality industry. Restaurants replaced paper or laminated plastic menus with QR code decals on the table, which opened an online version of the menu. This prevented the need to dispose of single-use paper menus, or institute cleaning and sanitizing procedures for permanent menus after each use. Local television stations have also begun to utilize codes on local newscasts to allow viewers quicker access to stories or information involving the pandemic, including testing and immunization scheduling websites, or for links within stories mentioned in the newscasts overall.


title: QR code

text: In several Australian states, patrons are required to scan QR codes at shops, clubs, supermarkets and other service and retail establishments on entry to assist contact tracing. Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and New Zealand use similar systems.


title: QR code

text: QR codes are also present on COVID-19 vaccination certificates in places such as Canada, and the EU (EU Digital COVID certificate) where they can be scanned to verify the information on the certificate.


title: QR code

text: Unlike the older, one-dimensional barcodes that were designed to be mechanically scanned by a narrow beam of light, a QR code is detected by a 2-dimensional digital image sensor and then digitally analyzed by a programmed processor. The processor locates the three distinctive squares at the corners of the QR code image, using a smaller square (or multiple squares) near the fourth corner to normalize the image for size, orientation, and angle of viewing. The small dots throughout the QR code are then converted to binary numbers and validated with an error-correcting algorithm.


title: QR code

text: The amount of data that can be stored in the QR code symbol depends on the data type ("mode", or input character set), version (1, ..., 40, indicating the overall dimensions of the symbol, i.e. 4 × version number + 17 dots on each side), and error correction level. The maximum storage capacities occur for version 40 and error correction level L (low), denoted by 40-L:


title: QR code

text: QR codes use Reed–Solomon error correction over the finite field formula_1, the elements of which are encoded as bytes of 8 bits; the byte formula_2 with a standard numerical value formula_3 encodes the field element formula_4 where formula_5 is taken to be a primitive element satisfying formula_6. The Reed–Solomon code uses one of 37 different polynomials over formula_1, with degrees ranging from 7 to 68, depending on how many error correction bytes the code adds. It is implied by the form of Reed–Solomon used () that these polynomials are all on the form formula_8, however the rules for selecting the degree formula_9 are specific to the QR standard.


title: QR code

text: When discussing the Reed–Solomon code phase there is some risk for confusion, in that the QR ISO/IEC standard uses the term "codeword" for the elements of formula_1, which with respect to the Reed–Solomon code are symbols, whereas it uses the term "block" for what with respect to the Reed–Solomon code are the codewords. The number of data versus error correction bytes within each block depends on (i) the version (side length) of the QR symbol and (ii) the error correction level, of which there are four. The higher the error correction level, the less storage capacity. The following table lists the approximate error correction capability at each of the four levels:


title: QR code

text: In larger QR symbols, the message is broken up into several Reed–Solomon code blocks. The block size is chosen so that no attempt is made at correcting more than 15 errors per block; this limits the complexity of the decoding algorithm. The code blocks are then interleaved together, making it less likely that localized damage to a QR symbol will overwhelm the capacity of any single block.


title: QR code

text: Due to error correction, it is possible to create artistic QR codes with embellishments to make them more readable or attractive to the human eye, and to incorporate colors, logos, and other features into the QR code block; the embellishments are treated as errors, but the codes still scan correctly.


title: QR code

text: It is also possible to design artistic QR codes without reducing the error correction capacity by manipulating the underlying mathematical constructs. Image processing algorithms are also used to reduce errors in QR-code.


title: QR code

text: The format information records two things: the error correction level and the mask pattern used for the symbol. Masking is used to break up patterns in the data area that might confuse a scanner, such as large blank areas or misleading features that look like the locator marks. The mask patterns are defined on a grid that is repeated as necessary to cover the whole symbol. Modules corresponding to the dark areas of the mask are inverted. The format information is protected from errors with a BCH code, and two complete copies are included in each QR symbol.


title: QR code

text: The message dataset is placed from right to left in a zigzag pattern, as shown below. In larger symbols, this is complicated by the presence of the alignment patterns and the use of multiple interleaved error-correction blocks.


title: QR code

text: The general structure of a QR encoding is as a sequence of 4 bit indicators with payload length dependent on the indicator mode (e.g. byte encoding payload length is dependent on the first byte).


title: QR code

text: Encoding modes can be mixed as needed within a QR symbol. (e.g., a url with a long string of alphanumeric characters )


title: QR code

text: [ Mode Indicator][ Mode bitstream ] --> [ Mode Indicator][ Mode bitstream ] --> etc... --> [ 0000 End of message (Terminator) ]


title: QR code

text: After every indicator that selects an encoding mode is a length field that tells how many characters are encoded in that mode. The number of bits in the length field depends on the encoding and the symbol version.


title: QR code

text: Alphanumeric encoding mode stores a message more compactly than the byte mode can, but cannot store lower-case letters and has only a limited selection of punctuation marks, which are sufficient for rudimentary web addresses. Two characters are coded in an 11-bit value by this formula:


title: QR code

text: This has the exception that the last character in an alphanumeric string with an odd length is read as a 6-bit value instead.


title: QR code

text: "Model 1 QR code" is an older version of the specification. It is visually similar to the widely seen model 2 codes, but lacks alignment patterns. Differences are in the bottom right corner, and in the midsections of the bottom and right edges are additional functional regions.


title: QR code

text: Micro QR code is a smaller version of the QR code standard for applications where symbol size is limited. There are four different versions (sizes) of Micro QR codes: the smallest is 11×11 modules; the largest can hold 35 numeric characters.


title: QR code

text: IQR Code is an alternative to existing QR codes developed by Denso Wave. IQR codes can be created in square or rectangular formations; this is intended for situations where a rectangular barcode would otherwise be more appropriate, such as cylindrical objects. IQR codes can fit the same amount of information in 30% less space. There are 61 versions of square IQR codes, and 15 versions of rectangular codes. For squares, the minimum size is 9 × 9 modules; rectangles have a minimum of 19 × 5 modules. IQR codes add error correction level S, which allows for 50% error correction. IQR Codes have not yet been given an ISO/IEC specification, and only proprietary Denso Wave products can create or read IQR codes.


title: QR code

text: Secure Quick Response (SQR) code is a QR code that contains a "private data" segment after the terminator instead of the specified filler bytes "ec 11". This private data segment must be deciphered with an encryption key. This can be used to store private information and to manage company's internal information.


title: QR code

text: SQR codes have been developed by the FORUS Foundation to enable secure transactions, and published under a Creative Commons Licence.


title: QR code

text: The SQR solution guarantees the integrity of the source data as well as the validity of the originating party.


title: QR code

text: The payment instruction string is made up of the electronic instruction data from the scanned QR code appended with a SHA-2 cryptographic hash.


title: QR code

text: The message digest can then be encrypted using the private key of the sender, which then creates a digital signature of the message.