In the gaming room in Barry Lyndon, the key light is the candles on the card table. John Alcott, who shot the film, gave American Cinematographer the number in 1976: "Roughly, three foot-candles was the key." Past the players' faces the room sinks into brown and gold, and with that little light the lens can only hold a slice of the room in focus, a few centimetres deep, so an actor who leans two inches out of it goes soft. Watching it, you can feel everybody at that table holding still.
Kubrick's lighting is usually described as a mood, cold and painterly. Under the mood sits a working rule: at night, the scene is lit by the lamps the audience can see. Keeping that rule took a lens faster than anything that had been on a movie camera and film pushed hard in the lab, and it runs from the candlelight of Barry Lyndon through the amber, blue and red of The Shining to the Christmas lights of Eyes Wide Shut.
Kubrick's lighting rule: the lamp in the shot is the light
In film a practical is a light you can see in the frame that actually works, a desk lamp, a candle, a neon sign. Most productions treat practicals as set dressing, they glow away in the background while the faces get lit by big units hidden off-screen.
Kubrick flipped that around. When the critic Michel Ciment asked him why he preferred natural lighting, he said: "Because it's the way we see things. I have always tried to light my films to simulate natural light; in the daytime using the windows actually to light the set, and in night scenes the practical lights you see in the set."
He also knew where the rule broke: "when candelabras and oil lamps are the brightest light sources which can be in the set, the difficulties are vastly increased. Prior to Barry Lyndon, the problem has never been properly solved." A 35mm movie camera exposes each frame for about 1/50 of a second, he explained, so a usable exposure by candlelight needed "a lens at least 100% faster than any which had ever been used on a movie camera." A hundred percent faster is one stop, twice the light.
Barry Lyndon's lens: the Zeiss f/0.7 and the NASA story
Zeiss only ever built ten Planar 50mm f/0.7 lenses, six of them went to NASA, and three of the ten ended up with Kubrick. His executive producer Jan Harlan went and collected one: "In 1972, I was able to pick up the lens here in Oberkochen directly from the developers," he said in 2022, when he lent it to the Zeiss museum.
A legend says NASA used the lens to photograph the far side of the Moon; Zeiss says "there is no evidence to support the myth."
Fitting a still lens to a movie camera took surgery. Kubrick sent the dimensions to Ed DiGiulio of Cinema Products Corporation in Los Angeles, whose first answer was that it couldn't be done: the barrel was too wide for the port of Kubrick's Mitchell BNC, and the rear element came within 4mm of the film plane. DiGiulio's shop took out the camera's shutter blade, machined the housing and the aperture plate inward, and built a mount where the whole lens barrel turned to focus.
A Kollmorgen projection adapter on a second Planar, suggested by Richard Vetter of Todd-AO, made a 36.5mm lens that still opened to f/0.7, and the candlelight scenes were shot on those two lenses.
Focus was the hard part. Alcott said that through the finder the lens seemed to have "fantastic range of focus, quite unbelievable," and that on film "you discovered that it had no depth at all." The focus puller, Doug Milsome, watched a closed-circuit video camera set at 90 degrees to the shot, with a grid over its monitor, and read the actors' distance off the screen while they moved.
Pushed film and three-wick candles
The film was Eastman 5254, rated 100 ASA, and the last stop came from the lab. DiGiulio wrote that Kubrick "push-developed the entire film one stop," outdoor and indoor scenes alike, for the light the candle scenes needed "and in order to make the whole movie balance out properly."
The light itself came from 70-candle chandeliers and table candelabra with three or five candles. Asked whether those scenes were lit entirely by candles, Alcott said: "Entirely by the candles." He wanted the faces bright: "We actually went for a burnt-out effect, a very high key on the faces themselves." Two of the film's candles went back to Oberkochen with the lens in 2022, and Zeiss notes they have three wicks, "to make them just a bit brighter than conventional candles."
Run the numbers and you see how little room they had. A common wax candle gives about one candela, and one candela a foot away gives one foot-candle, so three candles a foot from a face give you Alcott's three. Put that into a light meter's exposure equation with the pushed film at EI 200 and the 1/50-second shutter, and it comes out at f/0.72, right at the edge of what that lens could do.
Painted light: Hogarth, Gainsborough and Kubrick's picture file
Kubrick told Ciment he built "a very large picture file of drawings and paintings taken from art books," and that the costumes "were all copied from drawings and paintings of the period."
The BFI names Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth, and the clearest borrowings are Hogarth's. Writing in Apollo, Arjun Sajip picks out two tableaux the film lifts from him, the orgy scene of A Rake's Progress and The Tête à Tête from Marriage A-la-Mode, a couple slumped in their drawing room after a night apart. He also reads the film's held poses against the conversation pieces of Hogarth, Johann Zoffany and Arthur Devis, small group portraits where people stand around like they'll never move again.
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The wide
Hogarth, about 1743. The wall clock says shortly after noon. The bride stretches after a whole night of cards; the groom sprawls with his hands in his pockets, back from a night out.
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The steward
He rolls his eyes to heaven and leaves with a wad of unpaid bills. The one paper on his spike carries the year of the painting, 1743.
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The last candle
Past noon, one candle on the chandelier is still burning. The others are out. The night has not left the room.
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The card room
Through the arch the card tables stand where the night left them, and a servant still in his hair curlers stumbles about.
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The mantelpiece
A battered antique bust among fashionable, bogus Chinese figures, on white marble that Hogarth lets blaze. On Barry Lyndon, Alcott put black net over marble like this.
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The couple
A small dog tugs a girl’s muslin cap out of the groom’s pocket. Two people in one drawing room, as far apart as the furniture allows. This is the tableau the film lifts.
The paintings shaped the light as well. "We studied the lighting effects achieved in the paintings of the Dutch masters, but they seemed a bit flat," Alcott said, so they lit more from the side. In Barry's dining room he let the light fall from one source onto the centre of the table and let the rest of the room drop "into nice subdued, subtle color."
He steered the color too. Alcott never used an 85 filter outdoors, so daylight on the tungsten-balanced film came out blue unless the lab corrected it, and sometimes he let "the natural blue daylight come through in the background without correcting it." For warmth he went the other way, an extra half sepia over the window light in the room where Barry recovers from his amputation. A Tiffen No. 3 Low Contrast filter stayed on for the whole film, and the white marble fireplaces got black net to tone them down.
Joseph Wright of Derby had solved Kubrick's candle problem on canvas in the 1760s. In A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery the only light is a lamp standing in for the Sun at the centre of a brass model of the solar system, hidden behind a figure seen from behind, so every face is lit by a source you never get to see.
The Shining's color palette: amber, cold blue and the red bathroom
The Overlook Hotel in The Shining was a stage set at EMI Studios in England, and Alcott lit it from the inside. "The lights were wired as actual practicals. They were part of the hotel," he told American Cinematographer in 1980. The lounge and ballroom chandeliers each held 25 FEP 1000-watt lamps, every five of them on a 5-kilowatt dimmer, all run from a control board outside the stage.
The daylight was a machine too. Behind the big lounge windows stood an 80-by-30-foot diffusion backing, and behind that, on 40-foot scaffolding, 860 PAR 64 lamps of 1000 watts each, mounted on linked ball-bearing pivots so a whole bank could swing with one handle as the camera moved.
When the snow starts in the story, Alcott put full blue gel on every window, sandwiched between two panes of glass. What he wanted, in his words, was "a much better contrast between the warm light of the chandeliers and the cold light coming through the windows," so from then on the hotel is warm inside with the cold pressing at the glass. In the Gold Room ballroom, troughs of 100-watt household bulbs ran far under their 240 volts, at 60 or 70, and dimmed tungsten burns warmer, "a kind of golden glow."
The red almost never comes from a lamp. It comes in as a surface: the saturated red walls of the men's room off the Gold Room, where the ghost of Grady talks Jack toward murder, and the blood that pours out of the elevator doors. Once, it is a lamp. When Hallorann phones from Florida, Alcott lit him with a hard open arc under full blue, and "the only other light was the red practical burning in the background."
Eyes Wide Shut: Christmas lights and a two-stop push
For his last film Kubrick picked Larry Smith as cinematographer, the gaffer who had wired the Overlook. Smith told American Cinematographer in 1999 that Kubrick went as far as asking DiGiulio to recalibrate the f/0.7 lenses before dropping the plan, because he wanted Steadicam and wide lenses swinging through whole rooms, and because film had changed: "Barry Lyndon was made more than 25 years ago, when film stocks were rated at 100 ASA. Now we have the luxury of 500- and 800-speed stocks."
Smith tested Kodak's then-new Vision 500T and found that forcing it gave "a blue bias," so he shot Kodak EXR 5298, an older 500-speed stock Kodak had already phased out but promised to keep supplying. Everything was force-developed two stops at Deluxe in London, which set aside a bath just for this film, and Smith put what the push bought them at "an extra stop and a quarter or a stop and a half." Most of the film was shot at T1.3 on Zeiss Super Speeds. Chester Eyre, who ran operations at Deluxe, recalled Kubrick writing the red, green and blue timing-light specifications on the camera sheets himself. "He had a fixed idea about the color of each sequence."
The Christmas party is lit almost entirely by a wall of ordinary Christmas lights, picked out of a catalogue after two months of testing. "They were very low-wattage, but had a really magical quality," Smith said, and for close-ups he walked a China ball with a dimmed 200-watt bulb in near the actors. The Harford apartment sets warm household lamps against a blue Smith described as "much bluer than natural moonlight would be," and he summed up the whole film as "either very rich and warm, or very blue and cold." Through it runs a crimson that, in American Cinematographer's words, "signals danger": the robe of the figure who presides over the orgy, the felt of Ziegler's pool table. From the Overlook to the Harford apartment the scheme holds: warm light from lamps you can see, cold light pressing in from outside, and red arriving as a thing in the room.
The same opposition hangs in No Colder Place: a field of blue ice under starlight, pale shafts falling through the dark, and one small red figure suspended beneath a burning red ring. Its statement opens where the Overlook leaves off, "They told me hell burned. But it was cold when I arrived." Like the Overlook once the snow starts, it is a cold world held around one warm source.
Frequently asked questions
Was Barry Lyndon really shot by candlelight?
The night interiors were, lit "entirely by the candles," in Alcott's words, with the film pushed a stop. There are no true night exteriors: the one twilight scene, Barry by a fire after he joins the army, was shot at magic hour.
What lens did Kubrick use for Barry Lyndon?
The candle scenes were shot on a Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 and a second one converted to 36.5mm, both on a modified Mitchell BNC. Most of the rest of the film was shot on an Arriflex 35BL, often with an Angenieux 10-to-1 zoom.
Did The Shining use pushed film too?
No. Alcott called it the first picture he shot with normal development throughout: the window backings gave him enough light to work between stops of 2.8 and 4, and tests showed forcing added contrast.
Read next
- Color in film: how cinema makes you feel, the hub of the Screening Room.
- Chiaroscuro, from Caravaggio to The Godfather, on light that carves a face out of the dark.
- Teal and orange, the warm-against-cold contrast after it became a formula.
References
- Herb A. Lightman, "Photographing Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon," interview with John Alcott, and Ed DiGiulio, "Two Special Lenses for Barry Lyndon," American Cinematographer, March 1976: theasc.com/articles/flashback-barry-lyndon
- Michel Ciment, "Kubrick on Barry Lyndon," interview: visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.bl.html
- ZEISS, "(Probably) the most famous lens in the world comes back home," 21 September 2022: zeiss.com
- Herb A. Lightman, "Photographing Stanley Kubrick's The Shining," interview with John Alcott, American Cinematographer, August 1980, reprinted at scrapsfromtheloft.com
- Stephen Pizzello, "A Sword in the Bed," American Cinematographer, October 1999: theasc.com/articles/a-sword-in-the-bed-eyes-wide-shut
- Sam Wigley, "Barry Lyndon 40th anniversary: behind the scenes with Stanley Kubrick," BFI, 2015: bfi.org.uk
- Arjun Sajip, "Rogue's gallery: the art of Barry Lyndon," Apollo, 2025: apollo-magazine.com
- The National Gallery, Marriage A-la-Mode: 2, The Tête à Tête (NG114): nationalgallery.org.uk