We Stan a Legend
'The Complete Kubrick' doesn't just collect all of the filmmaker's work in one impeccable package. It gives you an incredible peek at the man behind it all
Michael Chaiken wasn’t quite sure what he was getting into. But he still said yes immediately.
The Philadelphia-born, Brooklyn-based curator had been cataloguing the archives of Paul Morrissey, the late underground filmmaker who worked closely with Andy Warhol back in the Sixties and Seventies, when he got a phone call from Kim Hendrickson, a longtime executive producer at the Criterion Collection, at the end of 2024. “She said, ‘Hey, we’re working on a Kubrick project. We’re not sure what the dimensions will be just yet. But would you be interested?'” he recalls. Like a lot of the iconic director’s work, there was a slight air of mystery around the proposal. Nonetheless, Chaiken was intrigued. He signed on without a single moment of hesitation.
The initial “Kubrick project” turned out to be a Blu-Ray edition of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s controversial final film. Due to the fact that Kubrick shot the 1999 psychological thriller in a highly unusual manner, involving a process known as “force developing,” and there was no 4K master of the film, simply getting that transfer made to the specifications that Kubrick had dictated before his death — his reputation as being hands on regarding how his works were shown extended beyond the grave — was a major operation unto itself.
Chaiken worked diligently on that movie for several months, then found himself in a meeting with the Criterion brass, wondering if there was something bigger they had in mind as well. “It occurred to me, even before I asked them, that they were in a unique position to work with all the studios who had the rights to Kubrick’s work,” Chaiken says, on a Zoom call from his apartment. “The bulk of his movies were done at Warners, but Sony owned the rights to Dr. Strangelove. Universal had Spartacus. Plus there are his early independent films, the shorts, the two different versions of The Shining — including the international cut, which isn’t widely known in America. It’s why there had never, ever been a complete collection of his movies.”
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It turns out that Criterion did have their eyes on that particular prize. Getting Kubrick’s last movie into shape wasn’t the end game, but the first step. They wanted Chaiken to curate a comprehensive box set that laid out everything, from the documentaries Kubrick made when he was still a Life photographer to the DGA Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech he taped shortly before his death. The archivist couldn’t believe his ears. “For some people, Stanley Kubrick is a secular religion,” Chaiken admits, “and I’m one of those people.
The Complete Kubrick, a 30-disc set that includes all of Kubrick’s shorts and features plus a number of commentary tracks, archival behind-the-scenes docs, and original supplementary material — all packaged in a red box shaped remarkably similar to the 2001 monolith — is definitely catnip for Kubrick fanatics. Even if you own individual copies of the filmmaker’s 13 movies, there are a number of unearthed treasures and additions that will inspire a Pavlovian froth. Everything has been given the full 4K restoration treatment; even Making ‘The Shining,’ the legendary lo-fi 1980 documentary that Stanley’s daughter, Vivian Kubrick, shot on the set of his Stephen King adaptation, gets a spit-and-polish upgrade. Chaiken mentions that this is also the first time that Fear and Desire, Kubrick’s 1952 debut that he found so embarrassing he pulled it from circulation for decades, gets an authorized release from the estate. (Kino Lorber put out a Blu-Ray of it in 2022 after it was in the public domain.)
“Look, there have been a lot of wonderful discs of Stanley’s movies over the years, including several by Criterion,” Chaiken says. “My role in putting this together was really to untangle some of the history and kind of push everything forward to 2026.” The purpose was not just to be a completist’s dream, but also build on the past work that Warners, Sony, et al., did on Kubrick’s home-entertainment releases and expand on them whenever possible. Kubrick rarely did press himself, he adds, so it wasn’t like there were dozens of interviews and talk-show appearances they could draw from. Yet there was still a lot of research and influential material that Chaiken was able to curate that contextualize his films even if you know Kubrick’s work backwards and forwards. He points to the 2001: A Space Odyssey discs as a prime example.
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“Warner Brothers put out a 50th anniversary edition of 2001 that was spectacular,” Chaiken says. “So the question is not how do one up it, but: What can we add to that? We were able to license a lot of stuff that had never been brought together before. Like Universe — it’s a 1960 documentary about space that Kubrick was obsessed with. He hired Wally Gentleman, who shot it, to be the cinematographer on 2001. Douglas Rain, who ended up voicing HAL, narrates it; this is where Stanley first heard him. To the Moon and Beyond was this short that played at the 1964 World’s Fair; Kubrick ended up hiring the special effects team, which included Douglas Trumbull. We got Michael Benson, who wrote an incredible book on the film’s making, to do a new commentary track. John Whitney was this experimental filmmaker who had developed this technique called ‘slit scan,’ which would be a key element to the ‘Stargate’ sequence. There were a couple of reels in his archive at the Academy Museum that had never been transferred — they turned out to be the tests he sent Stanley! All of that is on the box set’s edition.”
Both Chaiken and the Criterion producers were also keen that The Complete Kubrick function as a primer for younger cinephiles as well as a deep dive designed for die-hard Kubrickologists, which is why they ended up reaching out to a like-minded organization: Turner Classic Movies. “Stanley,” the new season of TCM’s in-house narrative podcast The Plot Thickens, devotes roughly 11 episodes to Kubrick’s life and work. Developed in partnership with Criterion and kicking off just before the set’s release on October 20, it’s both a complementary extension to the collection and an investigative look into a groundbreaking career on its own. (How the TCM team was able to procure a rare audio interview between Kubrick and author Joseph Gelmis from 1968 is a story worthy of its own podcast.)
“What’s amazing to me,” says Plot’s host and TCM stalwart Ben Mankiewicz, in a separate interview, “has been discovering all these little textured things about Stanley while doing this, which remind you how normal he was. Like the fact he was a huge sports fan — he’d have NFL games sent over to England to him on videotape so he could watch them himself!
“I mean, of course we all know the work — Paths of Glory is one of my favorite movies of all time,” he adds. “But I think some folks tend to think of Stanley as the monolith from 2001. He was just a regular guy. A regular guy who was a genius and made totally brilliant art, but was still just a man who loved his family, who loved making films, who loved talking to people about all sorts of subjects. The podcast works well against the box set, I think, because you get to know the person behind those great works.”
Indeed, it’s helpful to go back and forth between The Complete Kubrick and Mankiewicz’s multi-episode profile, and see how both are in conversation regarding a back catalog of work that, over a quarter century after Kubrick’s death, can still provoke passionate advocacy and heated debates. Both do contextualize nearly 50 years worth of films that prove Kubrick is one of the few filmmakers worthy of the adjective “visionary.” And taken altogether, they also change how you see the work itself — a vast panoply of different styles, different genres, and different eras of cinema, that all form a bigger-picture perspective of someone who, like God, laughed at those with master plans yet dearly loved people.
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“There’s a humanist strand that don’t have to scratch too far to find,” Chaiken says. “I had the feeling that there was always this underlining sense of humor in his work. All of his films are comedies; they’re nightmare comedies, but they are comedies. I know some folks find Kubrick cold to the touch. I get it. But if you have a connection to these films, it really is a relationship that that doesn’t end. It just changes over time.
“This box set is definitely not the end,” he adds. “It’s the beginning, I hope, of something for everyone who continues to watch the movies. And in the end, Kubrick himself would likely tell you: It’s all about the movies. His fingerprints are all over each of them.”