quality:corruption
Multiple takes

Kubrick was notorious for filming many more takes than is common during feature production and his relentless approach often placed large demands on his actors. Jack Nicholson remarked that Kubrick would frequently require up to fifty takes of a scene before the director felt justice had been done to the material. Nicole Kidman explained that the dozens of takes he often required had the effect of suppressing an actor's conscious thoughts about technique, diffusing the concentration Kubrick said he could see in the eyes of an actor who was not yet performing at the peak of their ability and helping them to enter a "deeper place". Kubrick echoed this sentiment, saying, "ctors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try".

While Kubrick's high take ratio was considered by some critics to be irrational he firmly believed that actors were at their best during filming, as opposed to in rehearsals, saying, "hen you make a movie, it takes a few days just to get used to the crew, because it is like getting undressed in front of fifty people. Once you're accustomed to them, the presence of even one other person on set is discordant and tends to produce self-consciousness in the actors, and certainly in itself".

In 1987, when Kubrick was asked about his reputation for excessive takes by Rolling Stone, he replied that it was exaggerated but that when it was true, "t happens when actors are unprepared. You cannot act without knowing dialogue. If actors have to think about the words, they can't work on the emotion. So you end up doing thirty takes of something. And still you can see the concentration in their eyes; they don't know their lines. So you just shoot it and shoot it and hope you can get something out of it in pieces." He likewise told biographer Michel Ciment that, "n actor can only do one thing at a time, and when he learned his lines only well enough to say them while he's thinking about them, he will always have trouble as soon as he has to work on the emotions of the scene or find camera marks. In a strong emotional scene, it is always best to be able to shoot in complete takes to allow the actor a continuity of emotion, and it is rare for most actors to reach their peak more than once or twice. There are, occasionally, scenes which benefit from extra takes, but even then, I'm not sure that the early takes aren't just glorified rehearsals with the adding adrenaline of film running through the camera."

Matthew Modine, who played Joker in Full Metal Jacket, echoes these assessments of even a world-renowned actor's delivery on a Kubrick film. In an oral history gathered by Peter Bogdanovich after the director's death Modine recalled that, "I once asked why he so often did a lot of takes. And he talked about Jack Nicholson '' Jack would come in during the blocking and he kind of fumbled through the lines. He'd be learning them while he was there. And then you'd start shooting and after take 3 or take 4 or take 5 you'd get the Jack Nicholson that everybody knows and most directors would be happy with. And then you'd go up to 10 or 15 and he'd be really awful and then he'd start to understand what the lines were, what the lines meant, and then he'd become unconscious about what he was saying. So by take 30 or take 40 the lines became something else. ''

By contrast, during the filming of Full Metal Jacket the former Marine Corps drill instructor R. Lee Ermey often satisfied Kubrick in as few as two or three takes. The director praised Ermey as an excellent performer, later saying to Rolling Stone that Ermey's intense familiarity with the role had perfected his delivery and fluency of improvisation to a level he could not have hoped to discover in a professional actor, no matter how many takes they were given. Kubrick repeated his praise to the Washington Post, saying he had, "always found that some people can act and some can't, whether or not they've had training. And I suspect that being a drill instructor is, in a sense, being an actor. Because they're saying the same things every eight weeks, to new guys, like they're saying it for the first time – and that's acting."