Kubrick by Kubrick

Kubrick by Kubrick is a documentary about the American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who lived from 1928 to 1999 and was known both for his body of work and for his reluctance to discuss it publicly. Over a long career he gave few interviews, and none of them were captured on film. This documentary builds its portrait from a recorded conversation between Kubrick and the French film critic Michel Ciment, presenting his life and career from his own perspective. Alongside that material, the film draws on archive footage, including appearances by Kubrick himself and by collaborators and performers such as Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Christiane Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell. The result is a first-person account of a director who preferred to let the films speak for him. It runs 74 minutes.

The film is directed by Grégory Monro, who also wrote the screenplay, with Martin Laurent and Jérémy Zelnik producing. It is a Polish-French production involving Ciné+, ARTE, Telemark and Temps noir, and it was released in October 2020. It stands as Monro's first feature documentary, followed later by Chaplin et Les temps modernes and La voie du silence. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from around 3,100 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.3 from a much smaller base of 52 votes, indicating a modest but generally favourable response from those who have seen it.