When one speaks of a director wielding an influence over a film, one generally is making a reference—however oblique—to the thoroughly discredited but still lingering notion of the “auteur theory” in which the director’s influence allows him to gain credit as the singular “author” of a film rather than the screenwriter or producer or anyone—or any collective unit—at all. The auteur theory is generally little but wishful thinking, of course, but there are certainly occasions when a director who has not, in fact, also written the screenplay can properly request attribution as its author. One of those cases is most definitely Spartacus and Stanley Kubrick.
Kubrick did not start out as the director of what was on its way to becoming one of the last in the long line of rather empty-headed epics about ancient times and figures. Noted director of westerns, Anthony Mann, was intent on making Spartacus standout as something quite different from what came before and the noted difference began with his agreement with producer and star Kirk Douglas to hire legendary blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo to whip the script into shape. Mann’s performance on set, however, did little to inspired Douglas who was the real visionary behind getting Spartacus made, until he fired Mann and hired Kubrick.
At the time, Kubrick was not the legend he would become. He had directed only a handful of movies and the most important among them was Paths of Glory…starring Kirk Douglas. Barely into his 30’s, Kubrick thus became the youngest director to ever guide a Hollywood epic of such proportions and also, it was assumed, Douglas’ lapdog. The former remains so, the latter not so much.
Almost as soon as Kubrick came on board, he asserted his primacy and proceeded to imprint his vision upon Trumbo’s script and Douglas’ pet (of Great Dane proportions) project. One of the first decisions was to pare down the pages of dialogue spoken by Douglas’ title character in the first half-hour of the film to the bone. The choice to scale back on the number of lines spoken by a character is rarely popular with actors—especially those with such a distinctive speaking voice as Kirk Douglas—but it succeeded in endowing the ordinary man destined to lead a slave revolt with a sense of mystery and even a thin layer of awe.
This influence of Kubrick to focus on man while using cinematic effects to transform him into myth was perhaps best described by co-star Tony Curtis who advises the attentive viewer to watch how Kubrick sets up and shoots the massive crowd shots that dominate much of the film. Curtis recognized that the laborious hours of setting up those shots resulted in long pans in which the frame is absolutely crowded with extras, but the focus remains intently upon the key figure in the scene, thus enhancing his status as something greater than those around him while also insisting upon his humanity. Such a dualistic approach to the main characters was certainly not a convention established by the creators of Hollywood historical epics which had preceded Kubrick’s entry. It would, however, eventually become a adopted as the standard approach by the time epics started making a comeback in the late 1980s and 1990s.
