Ari Aster names his favourite Stanley Kubrick movie
Celebrated filmmaker Ari Aster was exposed to the cinematic wonder of horror, the most disturbing yet enticing movie genre, from a very young age. He became particularly enamoured with the tension-wielding style of Stanley Kubrick in his 1980 classic starring Jack Nicholson, The Shining. As a fellow New Yorker, Aster also fell in love with another of the city’s Hollywood heavyweights, Martin Scorsese.
Aster, 36, has risen to widespread critical acclaim over the past five years with the release of two eminently disturbing and cinematically original movies, Hereditary and Midsommar.
Praise from his growing number of fans was perhaps topped by the words of one of Aster’s all-time heroes in 2020. “A couple of years ago, I watched a first film called Hereditary by a director named Ari Aster,” Scorsese said in praise of Aster’s 2018 horror. “Right from the start, I was impressed. Here was a young filmmaker that obviously knew cinema. The formal control, the precision of the framing and the movement within the frame, the pacing of the action, the sound — it was all there, immediately evident.”
Earlier this year, Aster was asked by some fans to list his favourite films of the 1990s. Taking to Twitter, the filmmaker listed Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Stanley Kubrick’s farewell film, Eyes Wide Shut, among his top five from the prominent decade in cinema.
In a recent feature with Sight and Sound, Aster picked out his favourite movies from some of the most important directors of the past century, including Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Scorsese and Kubrick. Selecting his all-time favourite Kubrick film, Aster landed on Barry Lyndon.
The 1975 period drama was written, directed and produced by Kubrick, based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by British author William Makepeace Thackeray. Starring Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson, the movie follows the life of a fictional 18th-century Irish rogue and opportunist who marries a rich widow to climb the social ladder and assume her late husband’s aristocratic position of unbound wealth and influence.
In the Sight and Sound feature, Aster explained why Barry Lyndon was the peak of Kubrick’s craft. “The funniest, the most stately, and at once the loveliest and most alienating of Kubrick’s films,” he said. “Everything here feels perfectly judged – from the ultra-deliberate tempo of its scenes to the uncannily measured line readings to the famously immaculate slow zooms to that sudden, hilarious shift to handheld when cool heads finally cease to prevail.”
See the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon below.
