Stanley Kubrick breaks down his revolutionary approach to lighting in ‘Barry Lyndon’
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business, with some filmmakers coming onto set each day rightfully just after their paycheck. But, for others, the artistic medium of cinema is a space to constantly innovate, with such minds as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Denis Villeneuve, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick innovating the contemporary moving image with each and every new film they release.
Kubrick was particularly enthusiastic in this field, releasing 14 movies throughout his celebrated career, with each one elevating his style and form. His first considerable success came in 1957 with the release of the war drama Paths of Glory, a gloriously-shot monochrome drama that features one of cinema’s greatest single tracking shots, with Kubrick following Kirk Douglas’ Col Dax as he marches through his army’s trenches.
Years later, in 1968, he would revolutionise the contemporary science fiction genre with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a phenomenal technical achievement that brought the oddities of the outer cosmos to life through models and ingenious camera techniques. To this day, the film is considered an exemplary piece of science fiction, inspiring countless directors jealous of its technical and narrative scope.
Though one of Kubrick’s most understated technical achievements was his approach to lighting in 1975’s Barry Lyndon, a period drama that has long gone under the radar as one of the director’s greatest movies. In the film, which follows an Irish rogue who cheats his way into autocracy, Kubrick uses natural lighting to frame each and every moment, utilising the sun outside and candlelight indoors.
Speaking about his love of natural light, Kubrick stated in an interview with Michel Ciment: “I have always tried to light my films to simulate natural light; in the daytime using the windows actually to light the set, and in night scenes the practical lights you see in the set. This approach has its problems when you can use bright electric light sources, but when candelabras and oil lamps are the brightest light sources which can be in the set, the difficulties are vastly increased.”
The solution to the technical issue came with the director’s discovery of a new lens, explaining: “Prior to Barry Lyndon, the problem has never been properly solved. Even if the director and cameraman had the desire to light with practical light sources, the film and the lenses were not fast enough to get an exposure… Fortunately, I found just such a lens, one of a group of ten which Zeiss had specially manufactured for NASA satellite photography.”
The new lens allowed Kubrick to shoot in very low light, producing some truly spectacular moments of atmospheric cinema that challenged how such industry practices were performed in the future.
“For the day interior scenes, we used either the real daylight from the windows or simulated daylight by banking lights outside the windows and diffusing them with tracing paper taped on the glass,” Kubrick explains, breaking down the exactness of how he carried out his process.
He adds: “In addition to the very beautiful lighting you can achieve this way, it is also a very practical way to work. You don’t have to worry about shooting into your lighting equipment. All your lighting is outside the window behind tracing paper, and if you shoot towards the window, you get a very beautiful and realistic flare effect.”
