The British prison film Christopher Nolan called “the greatest movie that Stanley Kubrick never made”
It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan, like almost every other well-known auteur, worships at the altar of Stanley Kubrick, which is understandable when the latter is one of the greatest directors of all time.
He was also one of the most innovative and influential, with ‘Kubrickian’ entering the cinematic lexicon and being used, or overused in some respects, to describe anything that even vaguely resembles the calculated, perfectionist, and immaculately composed work of the 2001: A Space Odyssey maestro.
If there was no Kubrick, there’d be no Nolan, and there’d be no Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, or James Cameron, either, with all of those top-tier filmmakers citing him, and most of them name-dropping 2001 specifically, as a paramount influence.
Whether you think it’s merited or not, the Dark Knight trilogy, Oppenheimer, and Inception figurehead has been frequently slapped with the Kubrickian label throughout his career, but his adoration runs so deep that he wouldn’t dream of mentioning himself in the same breath as the legendary creative force.
However, other directors are fair game, apparently, with Nolan pointing to one British prison film as the most Kubrickian picture that the man himself didn’t direct. Starring Sean Connery in the leading role, in Sidney Lumet’s 1965 drama, The Hill, the original 007 plays a soldier convicted of assaulting an officer.
Locked up alongside his fellow squaddies in the Libyan desert, where their punishment includes constantly climbing the titular mound, an overbearing staff sergeant pushes them to extreme lengths. Summing up his love for the movie, Nolan praised The Hill as “the greatest movie that Stanley Kubrick never made.”
“It’s amazing to me that Lumet could do such varied things, but could also do something that truly feels like a Kubrick film about brutality and society’s lack of humanity,” he explained. Visually and thematically, The Hill does feel suitably Kubrickian in its construction and execution, and an American director shooting a British-feeling story was obviously something that the Clockwork Orange maestro wasn’t against, either.
There are countless films that Kubrick planned to make but never got around to, and many of them are battling for the title of the greatest movie that he never made, but for Nolan’s money, the best feature that he never directed was made by someone else, with Lumet stepping into the breach and doing a bang-up job in his estimation.
While you wouldn’t necessarily watch The Hill and be convinced that you’re seeing something directly from Kubrick’s hands, it shares enough DNA in style, tone, and atmosphere to pass the test, and coming from a self-confessed superfan like Nolan, praise doesn’t come much higher.
