Stanley Kubrick’s favourite directors of all time: “He saw everything”
For many filmmakers and cinephiles, Stanley Kubrick is the gold standard. Few directors have enjoyed his level of respect and reverence. If anything, his legacy has only grown in the years since his death, with movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr Strangelove, and The Shining proving to be enduring classics. Aside from Orson Welles, no other director has received the amount of hero worship that he has.
Despite being known as a relentlessly exacting director, Kubrick was a private person who avoided interviews and even refused to travel outside the UK. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock and Welles, who were happy to speak at length about their craft, the Barry Lyndon director kept himself to himself, a decision which still, no doubt, still irks his legions of fans and acolytes.
Following his death, however, people who were close to Kubrick revealed more details about how he worked and what his thought process was when making a film. One of these people is Jan Harlan, the director’s brother-in-law and producer of five of his movies – A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. In an interview with DVD Talk, Harlan revealed that even Kubrick had his heroes. When asked which movies and directors the auteur loved, Harlan said that his brother-in-law was “a great film lover” and that there were a handful of directors he revered.
“He was very knowledgeable and in fact he saw everything,” he said. When it came to directors, he continued, “He loved Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Ingmar Bergman, Carlos Saura, Edgar Reitz, Fellini.” Allen, Spielberg, Bergman, and Fellini are well-known in the film world, though they run the gamut of filmmaking styles. Saura and Reitz are more obscure.
Saura was a Spanish director who earned international acclaim when his 1966 film The Hunt won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Since he was working under Franco’s dictatorship, many of his movies relied on symbolism to avoid censorship. According to Harlan, Kubrick was especially fond of his 1976 psychological drama Cría Cuervos (‘Raise Crows’) and his 1981 musical Blood Wedding. Saura earned three Oscar nominations for ‘Best International Feature’ in the 1980s and early ‘90s, though none of those nominations were for Kubrick’s favourites. He continued working until just before his death in 2023 at age 91.
Reitz is a German director who began making movies in the late 1960s. He is most famous for his Heimat series, which follows the life of a German family from the 1840s to the 2000s. The first part of the series was released in 1984 and, over the course of more than 15 hours, spans 1919 to 1982.
“Amazing scenes there,” Harlan said of Heimat. “The best thing that came out of Germany after the war. Mind you, very little came out of Germany after the war, but I mean, Reitz is great.” While anyone who’s seen a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film would likely disagree with that last sentence, it is notable that Kubrick was so enamoured of Reitz, a director whose work is a far cry from the mass appeal of Spielberg or even the slightly more niche appeal of Allen and Fellini.
He wasn’t easy to please, either. According to Harlan, Kubrick didn’t hesitate to quit a film partway through if it wasn’t grabbing his attention. “There were a lot of films he would give up after ten minutes,” he revealed. “We had stacks of prints in our projection room, and many times, he would only see reel one because if reel one somehow leaves you totally cold, the risk is too great to go on and waste another hour and a half.” Given what we know of Kubrick’s brutal directorial style, this ruthlessness checks out.
