Barry Lyndon
At long last Redmond Barry became a gentleman—and that was his tragedy.
Country
Production
Budget
$11 000 000
Revenue
$20 039 900
Director
Actors
Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Diana Körner, Murray Melvin, Frank Middlemass
All actors and roles (10)
All actors and roles (10)
Scenario
Producer
Operator
Composer
Artist
Ken Adam, Bill Brodie
Audition
Editing
Tony Lawson
All team (26)
All team (26)
Short description
Barry Lyndon follows Redmond Barry, a young Irishman whose life is upended after a duel over his cousin Nora. He leaves home, loses what he has to robbers, and joins the British army, fighting in Europe during the Seven Years' War. Desertion leads to capture by the Prussians, who force him into their ranks; he later becomes involved in espionage and professional gambling. Moving through eighteenth-century high society, he learns its manners and uses them to court a wealthy widow, Lady Lyndon. His marriage into the aristocracy brings him into conflict with her son, Lord Bullingdon.
Stanley Kubrick directed, wrote and produced the film, the tenth of the thirteen features he directed in chronological order, arriving between A Clockwork Orange in 1971 and The Shining in 1980. Ryan O'Neal plays Barry, with Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon, Patrick Magee as the Chevalier, Hardy Krüger as Captain Potzdorf, Steven Berkoff as Lord Ludd and Gay Hamilton as Nora among a credited cast of fifty. The production cost about 11 million US dollars and took roughly 20 million worldwide.
On IMDb the film holds 8.1 out of 10 from around 203,000 votes, while on TMDB it rates 8 out of 10 from a much smaller base of about 3,300. A critics' score of 8.4 out of 10 from 156 reviews places it slightly above the audience figure on IMDb.
What's left behind the scenes
- Kubrick insisted on abandoning electric lighting during interior filming. Evening scenes in the film were the first in the history of cinema to be shot by candlelight without additional illumination, made possible by the use of ultra-fast Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 cine lenses, specifically designed for observing stars during NASA's lunar program. The production of each of these lenses cost NASA a million dollars, and three units were specially manufactured for Kubrick in a slightly cheaper version with reduced use of rare earth elements.
- In 1977, in an interview with «Sight & Sound» magazine, Steven Spielberg commented on the film as follows: “I really like ‘Barry Lyndon,’ but for me, it’s like walking through the Prado Museum without a lunch break.”
- The film was shot over approximately three hundred days, spanning two years.
- Kubrick always selected the music for his films himself. As a rule, he used well-known classics. For the soundtrack to "Barry Lyndon," he used Handel's "Sarabande," which had been forgotten by everyone.
- Kubrick worked on the screenplay independently. He finished the first draft in three months and subsequently revised it many times. About half of the episodes from the novel were not included in the screenplay, in particular, everything concerning Barry Lyndon's parliamentary career and his rivalry for the Countess's heart with Lord Poynings.
- When filming interiors during daylight hours, the windows were covered with tracing paper, onto which beams of artificial light were directed from the outside. Kubrick often worked for days and weeks on a minute episode that did not play a significant role in the narrative. For example, Barry's baptism of fire in an unnamed skirmish of the Seven Years' War was filmed from the side by three cameras that moved along an 800-foot track on dolly tracks.
- A number of episodes (including a frank scene between Barry and Lady Lyndon) were not included in the final version of the film.
- It is a common opinion that the selection of actors for the main roles was motivated by advertising considerations. Hoping to recoup the expensive filming, the film company demanded that the role of Redmond be given to one of the ten most sought-after actors in Hollywood. Only two actors from this list had Irish roots and were suitable for the role by age – Robert Redford and Ryan O’Neal; the former refused to cooperate with Kubrick, so the latter played Redmond.
- Kubrick, who saw a commonality between the professions of director and investigator, considered comments regarding the scrupulousness of his historical reconstruction as compliments. He saw no point in making a historical (or futuristic) film if the director was unable to make the audience believe in the reality unfolding on the screen. Work on "Barry Lyndon" required him to immerse himself in the study of the daily life of European aristocracy in the eighteenth century. A whole year was spent preparing for filming. Kubrick compiled a weighty folder with reproductions of artworks from that period. He insisted that nothing created after the eighteenth century appear in the frame. Architecture, furniture, costumes, means of transportation – all these elements were found by him in the paintings and engravings of the recreated era.
- Production designer Ken Adam recalls that the task set before him by Kubrick was to recreate the scenery of an eighteenth-century aristocratic estate with documentary accuracy. The Countess’s house, according to Adam, should have given the impression of being an old building even by the standards of the eighteenth century. Having traveled all over England, the designer decided to combine in the image Castle Howard’s theatrical silhouette with the interiors of Longleat and Petworth and the park structures of Wilton House. Due to the poor preservation of Irish estates, it was more difficult to reproduce the setting of Barry’s ancestral home. The Potsdam scenes were filmed in East Germany by a separate team, which sent slides to the director in the UK, and he gave them instructions by phone. At Kubrick’s direction, the filmmakers had to study toothbrushes of that time, contraceptives, and a multitude of things that did not make it into the film.
- Kubrick approached the choice of musical theme with no less scrupulousness than he did the development of visual solutions. It was common practice for him to fit scenes to music selected in advance. He recalls that during the work on the film he listened to all the available records of music from the 17th and 18th centuries. The film features such rarely performed melodies as the Hohenfriedberg March, traditionally attributed to the Prussian king himself.
- After Kubrick’s death, retrospective screenings of "Barry Lyndon" were held in many cities.
- Such major directors as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese (who paradoxically defined it as "one of the most emotional films") count themselves among the admirers of "Barry Lyndon".
- Kubrick spent 42 days editing the duel scene between Barry and Lord Bulington.
- The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel “The Luck Of Barry Lyndon” (1844).
- The figure of the unseen narrator, whose voice comments on the events unfolding on screen, sparked considerable debate among critics. Kubrick justified the need for voiceover by the necessity of conveying a large amount of extra-plot information to the audience. The narrator not only mocks Barry's motives but also predicts how events will unfold, preparing the viewer for them and giving them a sense of inevitability: «Barry Lyndon» is a story where there is no room for surprises. It's not what will happen that matters, but how it will happen,» Kubrick emphasizes.
- Following the films “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “A Clockwork Orange,” Kubrick set out to make a film epic about the Napoleonic Wars era. Initial plans to adapt Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” had to be abandoned due to the novel’s length, which was more suitable for a television series than a film. Gradually, Kubrick’s attention shifted to the figure of Napoleon; he was developing an idea for a biographical film. Kubrick wrote a 150-page screenplay for “Napoleon.” Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, and Alec Guinness were invited for the leading roles in the blockbuster, but the box office failure of Sergei Bondarchuk’s “Waterloo” (which led to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refusing to finance the production) and the release of another version of “Vanity Fair” on television forced Kubrick to moderate his ambitions and turn to an earlier period of history. Thus, Stanley Kubrick began work on “Barry Lyndon.”
- Work on «Barry Lyndon» continued for more than two years in an atmosphere of such secrecy that even studio executives had little idea what Kubrick was filming. The triumph of Kubrick's two previous films convinced the bosses of Warner Bros. to take a risk and invest $11 million in his new project.
- This was Kubrick's last experience working outside of a studio during his lifetime. Filming, which began in December 1973, continued not only in England and Ireland but also behind the «Iron Curtain»—in socialist East Germany. This caused additional difficulties due to Kubrick's dislike of travel; instead of traveling to various corners of England, Ireland, and Germany himself, he sent assistants.
- The entire original negative of the film was shot with the then-newest filmmaking camera, the «Arriflex 35 BL», which subsequently became Kubrick's favorite camera.
- Kubrick believed that cinema, with much less expense and greater persuasiveness than other art forms, transported the viewer years and centuries back in time. He sought to demonstrate this ability with his film, insisting on the use of only authentic settings in which people from the mid-18th century could have operated. Despite all this, inaccuracies could not be avoided: the film mentions the “Kingdom of Belgium” (which arose after the Napoleonic Wars), Chevalier de Balibari stops at the neo-Gothic Hohenzollern Castle (an architectural fantasy of 19th-century romantic crowned heads), and in the corner of a map in the study of Lady Lyndon’s sons there is an image of a locomotive.
- Kubrick instructed the film crew to create a "documentary" about the morals and manners of the aristocracy of the previous century. Convinced of the impossibility of accurately recreating the atmosphere of the 18th century in modern conditions, the director deviated from his usual practice and insisted on a complete refusal of studio filming. The pursuit of authenticity required artist Milena Kanonero to create costumes completely corresponding to the Rococo era.
- When asked why he chose the picaresque genre of William Makepeace Thackeray's 'The Luck of Barry Lyndon', Kubrick joked: 'Try explaining why you fell in love with your wife—it's a completely pointless exercise.' The fact that Kubrick chose a novel that was not the strongest work by a not-so-prominent writer of Victorian England allowed Harold Rosenberg in 1976 to accuse Kubrick of 'recycling unread literature.' Dismissing the charges of poor taste, Kubrick noted that deeper novels cannot be converted into a two- or three-hour film without significant loss.
- The particularity of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel was that the narrative was delivered from the perspective of the memoirist himself, Barry Lyndon, who sought in every way to justify his actions and protect his good name. From the beginning, Kubrick decided to discard the first-person narrative, as events in cinema unfold before the viewer's eyes without the mediation of text. In Kubrick's view, accompanying them with the protagonist's not-entirely truthful commentary would have reduced the film to the level of a comedy, which was not at all his intention.
- When a critic came to discuss the film with William Makepeace Thackeray's novel in hand, the director remarked: 'The most significant parts of a film cannot be recounted or analyzed.' At the time, he promised that the screenplay for 'Barry Lyndon' would never be published, as it held no interest from a literary standpoint.
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