Martin Scorsese’s three favourite Stanley Kubrick movies
Despite comfortably residing among the greatest directors ever gracing the silver screen, Martin Scorsese has never been one to shy away from naming Stanley Kubrick as a major influence. He’s far from the only legendary filmmaker to have spoken of Kubrick in the same breath, with three of his features in particular standing out as key recommendations.
Virtually all of Scorsese’s peers who emerged during the 1970s to change the face of cinema are indebted to Kubrick in one way or another, but it’s fitting, given the former’s forays into so many different types of storytelling, that the trio of the latter’s features he singled out for particular praise all occupy entirely different genres.
In a BFI Sight & Sound poll, the Goodfellas and Casino creator revealed how he was left stunned by the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He said: “It takes extraordinary audacity and power and guts to say, ‘Let’s just screech everything to a halt and take everybody back to prehistoric times’.”
An existential sci-fi dragging its audience right back to the dawn of civilisation immediately let viewers know that something epic was afoot, with Scorsese remarking on how “Kubrick was saying, ‘I want you to see something. I’m going to take you through something you never thought you’d experience,'” which is exactly what he did.
1975’s historical drama Barry Lyndon finds Ryan O’Neal’s title hero evolving throughout the course of the story from a lovable rogue into a master manipulator upon marrying a wealthy woman. Scorsese remarked to Time: “If you’ve seen 2001 too many times, watch Barry Lyndon“. Complimenting its “elegant framing” and “use of the zoom lens” but not without labelling it as a technique he admits “I don’t really like.”
“The zoom lens flattens the images to a certain extent, and as he zooms out for more detail, it becomes an 18th Century painting,” he said, “But what’s even more interesting to me is again, the rhythm and pacing of the 18th Century.” Barry Lyndon wasn’t greeted with entirely unanimous praise when it first landed in cinemas, but in the years since, it’s been reappraised as comparable to any other of Kubrick’s influential works.
Horror has never been a medium in which Scorsese has shown much interest in a professional capacity, either, but that didn’t stop him from designating The Shining as “a majestically terrifying movie” to The Daily Beast. Noting that “I never read the Stephen King novel, I have no idea how faithful it is or isn’t” – an issue that significantly bothered the author – the Academy Award winner was nonetheless left enthralled by the atmosphere created by Kubrick, “where what you don’t see or comprehend shadows every move the characters make.”
Science fiction, period pieces, and psychological terror make for an eclectic triple bill, with Scorsese’s appreciation of three markedly different Kubrick classics underlining not just his own wide-ranging tastes as a cinephile but the impact the Doctor Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket director made on the industry as a whole.
Martin Scorsese’s favourite Stanley Kubrick movies:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- Barry Lyndon (1975)
- The Shining (1980)
