In his lifetime Stanley Kubrick was always an enigma, and the years since his death have brought little further enlightenment. But maybe illumination is on the way: a first trawl through his vast archives has given rise to a new television documentary, Citizen Kubrick, and surely the more material we have about the sources and motivation of his major works, the more we shall know about him? Well, I wouldn’t be so sure.

Always remember that when Wordsworth wrote of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart”, Browning responded: “If so, the less Shakespeare he.” With Kubrick it was not a mystification, but a genuine mystery. No doubt he was aware of the publicity value of his own reclusiveness, and the deep obscurity in which he enveloped whatever he was doing while he was doing it. Whether or not he knew what he was up to in that respect, the publicity teams tasked with selling the result generally felt that if this was a gimmick, he was carrying it too far, to the extent that the public’s interest dwindled and expired during the ever longer periods of gestation. He was certainly aware of the practical implications of everything he did or didn’t do.

But ultimately he acted as he had to act, as all his instincts told him to act. Not that he would ever admit that it was simply instinct. He would not have been the first amateur (or even professional) pilot to get the jitters and decide he did not want to fly any more, even as a passenger. But Kubrick had to present it as a rigorously intellectual decision: he had studied the statistics, done the sums and concluded that, after the amount of flying he had done, the chances of his being killed in an air crash were too compelling for him to continue.

My first meeting with him was all bound up with this question of intellect over instinct. By the time 2001 came out in 1968, I was film critic of The Times, and had, I fear, rather blotted my copybook by having strong reservations about Doctor Strangelove.Kubrick clearly did not want to meet me. To make matters worse, I was by no means ecstatic, unlike most of my fellows, about 2001, which seemed to me wonderful in parts, but too long, too pretentious and lacking in human drama – except, ironically, when the computer HAL started to fight for mastery.

My reviews appeared on Thursdays, and in those days I wrote as well a regular “think-piece” for the Saturday paper. Intrigued by the film, I decided to go and see it again with an ordinary, paying audience, and for Saturday I wrote an article in which I described the reactions of such an audience to the already notorious “Stargate” sequence (the film’s closing, mystical journey), and came to the conclusion that it was designed to set the audience tripping, with or without chemical aid. (Back then, of course, one could smoke in cinemas.)

Kubrick was supposed not to read his press notices, but evidently he read this one, and quite out of the blue he signified his desire to meet me. Somewhat warily, I went along, to find that he was absolutely charming – as he could be if he wanted to be. It turned out that he had been fascinated by my thesis, and wanted to discuss further my observations on the drug-like effect of Stargate. He had read somewhere Hitchcock’s speculations on the possibility of wiring up cinema seats so that audiences could be played like an organ by electrical impulse alone. “But I don’t think he could ever give up making films in favour of such a procedure. Do you?” he inquired.

Naturally, as Hitchcock’s No 1 admirer (or maybe, in Kubrick’s presence, No 2), I didn’t. So we had a great conversation about movies in general, though very little about Kubrick’s movies in particular. The whole thing was in fact, on consideration, eerily impersonal. He spoke about his own films rarely, and absolutely as though they were made by someone else.

For most of the Seventies I was teaching in Southern California, and by the time The Shining came out in 1980 I was back in London, now as art critic of The Times. The world was therefore unaware of my opinion (wildly enthusiastic, as it happens) of The Shining, and I was surprised to get another call to meet Kubrick. What I had forgotten, or maybe did not know then, was that his wife Christiane was a painter and sculptor.

Again, Kubrick was charming, in a brisk, impersonal sort of way. He had, clearly, no desire to talk about his own work, least of all about what his next project might be. (Full Metal Jacket was more shrouded in secrecy than any of his other films, and did not come out until seven years later; it emerges from Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes that for several years of endless research after The Shining he had no idea what form his next film would take.) But now that I was an art critic, he was touchingly eager to make me aware of his wife’s work.

I could not quite make out what the purpose of our meeting was, since Christiane was at that time not exhibiting. Shortly afterwards a friend and colleague was commissioned to write a book about her art, so I have a shrewd idea that the meeting was a sort of audition. An audition which, evidently, I failed.

Curiously Kubrick

— The director never threw away anything film-related, leaving thousands of boxes, as explored in Jon Ronson’s Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. They include photos, research notes, and footage from the Full Metal Jacket set of Kubrick discussing with his crew the number of tea breaks.

— Kubrick became dissatisfied with the size and lids of the boxes and personally set about finding an optimum size and thickness of card. He then commissioned a cardboard manufacturer with a memo: “Lid to be not too tight, not too loose, but JUST PERFECT.”

— Kubrick employed his photographer nephew, Manuel Harlan, to take pictures of London gates, doorways and various mundane façades as research for Eyes Wide Shut – the project would extend to a daily job lasting a year. Harlan estimates that he took 30,000 photos, Kubrick immediately poring over each one “with tremendous excitement”.

— Script ideas were researched for years before being shelved. Among them was a late 1960s Napoleon biopic – 25,000 library cards were discovered on the subject – and a 1980s Holcaust project called Wartime Lies, which became too depressing. According to his wife Christiane: “Stanley would crumple in the corner and cry . . . that’s why he gave that up.”

— He would also collect stationery from his local Rymans store in St Albans; he owned hundreds of bottles of ink. According to his long-term personal assistant Tony Frewin, Kubrick used to joke that “he was going to open the stationery nostalgia museum.”

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, Tue, More4, 10pm

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