Back ground information of the directors

Stanley Kubrick

Born 26 July 1928 in New York City. He was considered intelligent despite poor grades in school. In 1940, his father, Jack, hoping that a change of scenery would help him perform better academically in school, sent him away to Pasadena, California to stay with his uncle. In 1941, returning to New York city for his last year of grammar school, there was close to no change in his attitude or results. Then, hoping to find some

thing that would interest his son, Jack introduced him to chess. Stanley took the game passionately and soon became a very skilled player. In later years, Kubrick used chess as a tool for dealing with recalcitrant actors and also as a artistic motif in his films. 

Later, for Stanley's thirteenth birthday, his fathers idea of giving his son a camera would be the best idea yet. Kubrick became an active photographer, taking pictures of everything. He would often make trips around New York, taking his camera with him, just to take pictures which he would later develop in his friends darkroom. 

After selling an unsolicited photograph to Look Magazine, Kubrick began to associate with their staff photographers, by age seventeen he was offered a job as an apprentice photographer.

In the next few years, Kubrick was busy with regular assignments for "Look", and had developed a sudden love for movies and became a voracious movie-goer. Together with a friend named Alexander Singer, Kubrick Planned a move into film, and in 1950, he used his every penny into making the documentary Day of the Fight (1951). This was followed by several shot commissined documentaries, and by attracting investors and hustling chess games in Central Park, Kubrick was able to make Fear and Desire (1953) in California. 

Kubrick's experience filming this movie was not a happy one. His marriage to high school sweetheart Toba Metz did not last the first showing of the film. Despite the mixed reviews for the film itself, Kubrick was praised for his obvious talent in directing. Kubricks next two films Killer's Kiss (1995) and The Killing (1956) gave him to the attention of Hollywood, and in 1957 he directed Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory (1957). 

Later, Douglas called upon Kubrick to take over the production of Spartacus (1960), hoping that Kubrick would be daunted by the scale of the project and would be more understanding when directing. However, this was not the case, Kubrick took complete charge of the project, imposing his ideas and standards on the film. Many crew members were upset by his style of shooting, the cinematographer, Russell Metty complained to producers that Kubrick took over his job completely, Metty had complied to Kubrick asking him to just sit there and do nothing, ironically, he was awarded the Academy Award for his Cinematography. 

From 1961 to 1990 Stanley Kubrick worked on many different films including starting an on and off collaboration with Brian Aldiss on a new science fiction film "Artificial Intelligence (AI)", however, the project was backgrounded until speacial effects technology was up to standard that Kubrick wanted. 

In 1999 speacial effects technology had matured greatly in the meantime, Kubrick immediately began work on AI, but tragically, suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep on March 7th, 1999.