A One-Film Friendship with McDowell: During the shooting of A Clockwork Orange (1971), he formed an extremely intellectual, deep and rich friendship with its lead actor, Malcolm McDowell. Yet from the moment his work on the film was finished, he never contacted McDowell again for the rest of his life.
A Mission to Preserve Cinema's Heritage: In May 1990, he spearheaded the Film Foundation project, founded to protect the world's cinematic heritage and to restore and archive old reels. For this vision he came together with giant directors such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack and George Lucas.
"Kubrick Isn't Home": He fled fame and the media so thoroughly that people outside did not know what his face looked like. When fans knocked on the door of his mansion in England and asked for him in person, he would open the door himself, look them in the eye, say, "Stanley Kubrick isn't home right now," and close the door.
A Madness for Historical Detail and a Powerful Memory: He had an immense passion for reading and an unbelievable meticulousness. For his enormous, cancelled Napoleon Bonaparte project, he sent his assistant to bookshops to collect every book ever written about the French Emperor. When the assistant returned with more than 100 books, Kubrick read them all and shocked his team by reciting even the smallest footnotes in the books from memory. While planning a battle scene, he examined a historical painting depicting that battle under a magnifying glass; in order to capture the cloud formation and weather in the painting exactly, he waited months for the shooting day to match that weather.
Directing Style and Silence on Set: While shooting on set, he absolutely refused to discuss the film's philosophical meaning with the actors or the crew. Even more interesting, once a film had left editing and taken its final form, he would never turn back and watch it again.
Absolute Fidelity to the Text and the Exceptions: He never allowed a single word of the dialogue in the script to be changed, or an actor to add his own interpretation to a line. Over his career he relaxed this strict rule for only two geniuses: Peter Sellers, whose improvisational genius he trusted in Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964); and R. Lee Ermey, who had also been a soldier in real life and worked like a military-jargon generator, in Full Metal Jacket (1987).
The Perfectionism Objection: Although the film world declared him an "obsessive perfectionist," he fiercely rejected that label. He defended his series of takes lasting for hours with these words: "Even if the actors catch the idea I want, I feel they are not yet fully satisfied with their own performance, so I take the repeats for them." Indeed, only a week after The Shining was released, he had the final scene, in which Wendy and Danny are in the hospital, pulled from cinemas and cut because it "didn't sit right with him." When Full Metal Jacket actor Dorian Harewood called him a perfectionist in an interview, Kubrick personally called the actor a few days later and defended himself, saying, "I am not a perfectionist."
A Visual Effects Genius: Despite being one of the best directors in cinema history, he never won an Oscar in the Best Director or Best Screenplay categories throughout his career. The only Academy Award of his life came for his coordination of the visual effects design in 2001: A Space Odyssey (in a technical category).
Companion Peter Sellers: He shared a passion for photography and home-cinema production with Peter Sellers. While the lights were being set on set or during editing breaks, they would constantly take behind-the-scenes photographs of each other.
"Alex" as a Cinematographic Manifesto: When A Clockwork Orange (1971) was released, he cited the famous film The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) against the critics and said, "I would never make a film like that." To Kubrick, that film was "bad art" because it criticized lynch culture with the argument that "an innocent person can be lynched." Kubrick, by contrast, argued that the act of lynching itself, that is, extrajudicial execution, is a direct evil. That is why he wanted the main character, Alex, to remain a pure villain (and he cut the section at the end of the novel in which Alex is reformed entirely from the screenplay). Through an Alex who is explicitly evil, Kubrick wanted to emphasize that the state's invasion of a prisoner's soul and its transformation of him into a mechanical robot (that is, an automatic orange) is the greatest state terror and evil, regardless of the prisoner's crime.
Resistance to Analysis and Conceptual Refusal: He opposed his films being drowned in symbols and analyzed by intellectual circles. "I don't want to be forced to explain what I do; every film should be judged on its own story alone, not as part of a corpus," he would say. The only secret of his cinematic method, he said, was "finding good stories that interest me and never repeating myself."
Owning His Own Equipment: Unlike most directors in the industry, he personally owned a large portion of the enormous 35mm cinema cameras and lenses he used. This both lowered film costs by sparing the studio a lens-rental budget and allowed him to drill into the camera bodies and freely make whatever special optical modifications he wanted.