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Barry Lyndon (1977)
Barry Lyndon is a 1975 epic historical drama film written, directed, and produced by Stanley Kubrick, based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray. Narrated by Michael Hordern, and starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Leonard Rossiter, and Hardy Krüger, the film recounts the early exploits and later unravelling of an 18th-century Irish rogue and gold digger who…
Directed by Stanley Kubrick · Shot by John Alcott · Cut by Tony Lawson · Music by Leonard Rosenman · Ratio 1.66:1 · 181 min
How it was made
- To photograph candlelit interiors without electric light, Kubrick obtained three Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lenses, originally developed by Zeiss for NASA's Apollo Moon-landing photography, giving the production the lowest f-stop used in film history to that point.
- Cinematographer John Alcott and production designer Ken Adam drew on the paintings of Watteau and Gainsborough for the film's compositions; Alcott, Adam and art director Roy Walker all won Oscars for their work on the film.
- Principal photography ran 300 days; a third of the way through, Kubrick received a phone threat that the Provisional IRA had put him on a hit list while shooting in Dublin's Phoenix Park, and he left Ireland within 12 hours, relocating the remaining production to England, Scotland and both West and East Germany.
- Interior scenes were shot in the real 18th-century Powerscourt House in County Wicklow; the house burned down in an accidental fire months after filming, making Barry Lyndon the only surviving record of its 'Saloon' interior.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Stanley Kubrick
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