With their stunning production design and fluid camera work, Stanley Kubrick’s films are instantly identifiable. But the reclusive director himself? Not so much. Kubrick once went ten years without giving an interview. Occasionally a journalist or film student would show up on his doorstep, hoping to score an elusive Q&A. “He’s not home,” Kubrick would intone, and shut the door in the visitor’s face. Since few people knew what he looked like, the line actually worked.
He came by his introversion honestly. The son of a prominent New York City doctor and a Romanian-born mother, Kubrick lived a fairly solitary childhood on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. He developed a passion for chess at an early age, played drums in his school band, and spent nearly all the rest of his downtime sitting alone in New York’s Depression-era movie palaces, studying films. He received a camera for his thirteenth birthday, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with visual composition and photography.
Chess wasn’t Kubrick’s only game. He also loved table tennis and made sure to include ping-pong scenes in a number of his movies. He had a world-class ping-pong table installed on the grounds of his estate in England. Visitors were often enticed into playing against him. Kubrick especially liked playing against actors, in the belief that beating them at ping-pong allowed him to achieve dominance over them and thus more easily control them on the set.
