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Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 political satire black comedy film co-written, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is loosely based on the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George, who wrote the screenplay with Kubrick and Terry Southern. Financed and released by Columbia Pictures, the film was a co-production between the United States and the United…
Directed by Stanley Kubrick · Shot by Gilbert Taylor · Cut by Anthony Harvey · Music by Laurie Johnson · Ratio Academy ratio · 93 min
How it was made
- Kubrick began writing the film as a serious thriller based on Peter George's novel Red Alert, but found that keeping the material believable meant repeatedly cutting things that were absurd or paradoxical, which pushed him toward black comedy instead.
- Terry Southern joined as co-writer in late 1962 after Kubrick read his novel The Magic Christian, a gift from Peter Sellers; Southern's prominent billing later caused a rift with novelist Peter George, who wrote to Life magazine insisting he had written the source novel and spent ten months on the script himself.
- Production designer Ken Adam built the War Room as a triangular, 130-foot concrete room with a shiny black floor inspired by Fred Astaire dance numbers; Kubrick had the ceiling poured solid in concrete so cinematographer Gilbert Taylor could light the scene only with the ring of lamps above the poker-style table.
- Lacking Pentagon cooperation, Adam's team reconstructed the B-52 cockpit from a B-29 cockpit and a single photograph; US Air Force personnel who later viewed it called it "absolutely correct", which worried Kubrick that the research had crossed a legal line.
- The B-52's polar flight was shot as a scale model composited into sped-up Arctic footage filmed from a camera plane, a Boeing B-17, whose shadow is visible on the ice in several shots.
- Because the film's first test screening fell on the day of Kennedy's assassination, its release was delayed to January 1964, and a line by Slim Pickens referencing "Dallas" was redubbed to "Vegas" for the English-language release.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Stanley Kubrick
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