The political and religious views of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) have been subjects of speculation during his lifetime and after his death. It is generally agreed that Kubrick was fascinated by the possibilities of a supernatural reality, as reflected in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980).
Politics
In his memoir of Kubrick, Michael Herr, his friend and co-writer of the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket (1987), wrote: Stanley had views on everything, but I would not exactly call them political... His views on democracy were those of most people I know, neither left nor right, not exactly brimming with belief, a noble failed experiment along our evolutionary way, brought low by base instincts, money and self-interest and stupidity... He thought the best system might be under a benign despot, though he had little belief that such a man could be found. He wasn't a cynic, but he could have easily passed for one. He was certainly a capitalist. He believed himself to be a realist. Herr recalls that Kubrick was sometimes akin to a 19th-century liberal-humanist, that he distrusted almost all authority, that he once alluded to Irving Kristol's definition of a neoconservative ("a liberal who has been mugged by reality") in a favorable way, and that he was "seemingly" a social Darwinist.
Herr further wrote that Kubrick owned guns and did not think that war was an entirely bad thing. In the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Herr says "…he also accepted that it was perfectly okay to acknowledge that, of all the things war is, it's also very beautiful." The writer said of initial reactions to Full Metal Jacket that "The political left will call Kubrick a fascist." In a 1987 interview with Gene Siskel, called Candidly Kubrick, Kubrick said, "Full Metal Jacket suggests there is more to say about war than it is just bad." He added that everything serious the drill instructor says, such as "A rifle is only a tool, it is a hard heart that kills", is completely true.
Frederic Raphael, who co-wrote the Eyes Wide Shut screenplay with Kubrick, claimed that the filmmaker once allegedly remarked that A.H. [Adolf Hitler] had been "right about almost everything". Raphael, initially unsure how to respond, ultimately decided it was "an unassuming jest". Kubrick's relationship to his own ethnicity allegedly deeply troubled Raphael, a fellow Jew. Raphael was equally puzzled by Kubrick's critique of Schindler's List. After Raphael mentioned Schindler’s List during a discussion about films about the Holocaust, Kubrick apparently replied: “Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. 'Schindler's List’ was about six hundred people who don't." Kubrick's friend Steven Spielberg, the director of the film, disbelievingly responded that he "didn't recognize the voice of Stanley" in Raphael's interviews. Christiane Kubrick, Kubrick's wife of more than four decades, has also stated that Frederic Raphael's memoir "Eyes Wide Open", where these allegations were made, is an unreliable biography of Kubrick.
Though some have said Kubrick disliked America, Michael Herr says that America was all he talked about and that he often thought of moving back. Herr wrote that Kubrick was sent VHS tapes from American friends of NFL Football, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and other television shows that he could not get in the United Kingdom. Kubrick told Siskel that he was not anti-American and thought that America was a good country, though he did not think that Ronald Reagan was a good president. In the interview, he also predicted an economic meltdown worldwide by pointing out to Siskel that most of the major banks in the United States held dubious foreign bonds as collateral and huge third world loans treated as assets. Kubrick likened this to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the "Emperor's New Clothes", and felt even during the Cold War, an economic collapse was more worrisome and imminent than nuclear annihilation was. As far as Kubrick's views on welfare and taxation, according to Ian Watson, Kubrick said of the pre-1997 Labour Party that "If the Labourites ever get in, I’ll leave the country." Watson claims that Kubrick feared being ruined by tax-the-rich policies and was opposed to welfare in general.
