How Stanley Kubrick chose the novels he adapted: “I like to be surprised”
When Stanley Kubrick made his first film, Fear and Desire, he took on a staggering amount of behind-the-scenes work, including filming, editing, and producing the anti-war film. One thing he didn’t do, however, was write the movie – that job was left to Howard Sackler.
The screenwriter used an original idea for Kubrick’s movie, but that would soon become an anomaly in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. His next work, Killer’s Kiss, would mark the start of Kubrick’s subsequent fascination with directing a movie based on a pre-existing work of literature, something he did without fail until the end of his career, which culminated in Eyes Wide Shut, a modernised interpretation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story.
Why didn’t Kubrick ever write totally original stories for the screen? He believed that it was hard to think objectively when penning something entirely original – you become so caught up in the story you’re telling that it becomes hard to know whether it would actually work as a movie. Instead, he preferred to put himself in the shoes of the audience, seeing whether a story had enough twists and turns to keep viewers entertained without that bias that comes from having written the story yourself.
That’s not to say that Kubrick simply had no good original ideas. With each adaptation of a novel, he was typically heavily involved, like when he worked with author Arthur C Clarke in adapting several of his short stories into a screenplay that would become 2001: A Space Odyssey. The same goes for Eyes Wide Shut, co-written with Frederic Raphael, which brings Dream Story from its early-20th-century Vienna setting to ‘90s New York.
The novels that Kubrick chose to adapt were incredibly varied, from modern horror novels like Stephen King’s The Shining to much older works of classic literature, such as The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray. So, how did he choose what novels to turn into big-screen pictures?
It turns out that Kubrick would often just pick novels at random, hoping to find something that might interest him. He would go through piles and piles of books until he found something worthwhile, and eventually, he’d stumble upon something that he liked. “I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf,” he once revealed to Tim Cahill. “If I don’t like the book after a bit, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised.”
When it came to picking out a horror novel to adapt during the late 1970s, Kubrick really did just sit there with a stack of books until he found something that captured his attention for long enough. According to King, whose The Shining would of course be the lucky winner (via Stanley Kubrick, A Biography), “Kubrick’s secretary heard the sound of each book hitting the wall as the director flung it into a reject pile after reading the first few pages.”
Concluding, “Finally, one day, the secretary noticed it had been a while since she had heard the thud of another writer’s work biting the dust. She walked in to check on her boss and found Kubrick deeply engrossed in reading a copy of the manuscript of The Shining.”
So, it appears that Kubrick picked his source material by trial and error, having books sent to him or picking ones out at random and seeing what resonated with him. Luckily, he pretty much struck gold every time.
