Re: Who is the best Director. Well, in your mind.
I love Kubrick - but he was more of a great photographer than director - the thing people remember most from his film are not actor exchanges of dialogue but those long shots he would compose. .
There’s no denying Kubrick’s love for, and mastery of, photography. No one could frame and light a shot better than Kubrick.
Come to think of it, no one was better at moving the camera than Kubrick. Or choosing the best actor for the role. Or helping that actor realize his best, most memorable screen performance.
No one was better at deciding when and where to cut (and not cut) a shot for maximum dramatic impact -- including one transition in particular that’s widely regarded as one of the best edits in the history of cinema.
No one was better at choosing just the right music for a scene, taking a classical piece like When Johnny Comes Marching Home, The Blue Danube, or The Thieving Magpies and infusing it with an entirely new, pop-culturally iconic meaning.
No one was better at coaxing career-defining production designs out of Ken Adam and Harry Lange.
No one was better at orchestrating a brilliant marketing campaign, in the process co-inventing (with Pablo Ferro) the modern movie trailer.
No one was better at writing or co-writing some of the twentieth century’s most memorable lines of screen dialogue, or (in the case of Peter Sellers, Jack Nicholson and Lee Ermey) having the instinct and confidence to let his actors improvise many of their own lines.
No one was better at selecting big, relevant, timeless themes, and exploring those themes in intellectually rigorous, stylistically daring, technologically groundbreaking ways.
No one was better at showing the audience something they’d never seen, heard, or experienced before.
No one was a better director than Stanley Kubrick.
Strangelove's dialogue was thanks to Sellers who had connstant arguments with Kubrick over the lack of - this caused everyday rewrites on set as stated in Seller's book.
Although Sellers did improvise some terrific moments in Strangelove he can hardly be credited with “Strangelove’s dialogue,” the vast majority of which was penned by Kubrick in collaboration with Terry Southern (as evidenced by the original production draft of the Strangelove screenplay currently on display at the AMPAS library).
As far as last-minute rewrites are concerned, it is true that Kubrick often liked to let his actors riff their own lines and, if something struck his fancy, work said lines into the screenplay. Dialogue was constantly being revised in this way, and some actors found the process painful. Of course, these were often the same actors who went on to deliver the most memorable performances of their careers as a result of Kubrick’s method of working.
