Stanley Kubrick

Born in the Bronx, Kubrick left formal schooling with poor grades but a photographer's eye, selling his first picture to Look magazine as a teenager and working as a staff photojournalist through his early twenties. That background in still composition — waiting for exactly the right light, exactly the right arrangement of bodies in a frame — never left him; colleagues would later describe him treating a film set the way a photographer treats a darkroom, controlling every variable before allowing a single frame to be exposed.

The perfectionist's perfectionist, Kubrick reinvented every genre he touched, and his cold, meticulous eye gave science fiction some of its most enduring images — from the star gate to the Korova Milk Bar. He was famous for dozens or even over a hundred takes on a single shot, for building entire practical sets from scratch rather than compromise on a look he could see only in his head, and for research so exhaustive that his production offices reportedly filled with index cards on subjects as varied as nuclear war protocol and orbital mechanics.

He directed only thirteen features across a five-decade career, relocating permanently to England early on and rarely giving interviews, which only deepened his reputation as cinema's most reclusive genius. At least four of those thirteen films are now routinely named among the greatest ever made, and his influence on how directors think about production design, sound and unnervingly symmetrical composition remains difficult to overstate.