Some insight into Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick - A dream movie revisited

Last year, I saw the doco "Stanley Kubrick's Boxes" which gave a good account of the directors obsessively detailed movie preparations.

Now, you can buy an extremely expensive book that sets out all of the incredibly detailed preparation Stanley Kubrick made for his never funded film about Napoleon. In the article about it, the author makes some comments which I think are pretty interesting:

"At a deeper level, his never-ending interest in observing human folly was the wellspring for nearly all his films," writes Harlan in the book. "Napoleon was the ideal study subject. One of Stanley's often repeated notions was that, since we are all driven by our emotions, our belief that we might be governed by rational thought is a vain illusion." Kubrick's widow, Christiane, believes he struggled to understand how such a capable man as Napoleon could be so manipulated by the philandering Josephine, or have so hopelessly miscalculated the Russian campaign that defeated him. "When Stanley was young, he played chess for money for a while in New York," she says at the book's launch party later that evening. "[He believed] Napoleon might have learned to control himself better had he played chess. Stanley thought if you are too emotional, you lose."

I presume it was this distrust of emotion which led to Kubrick's pretty consistent inability to convincingly have emotion shown in his movies.