The critic Hollis Alpert said of Stanley Kubrick years ago, "He does not believe in biting the hand that might strangle him." Kubrick's ability to work with major studios but preserve such complete autonomy that he might as well have been spending his own money was the unique identifying characteristic of his life and work.

Other filmmakers have wrested autonomy from the corporate masters - Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and George Lucas (who has no corporate masters) spring to mind.

But Kubrick stood alone in his insistence on testing himself each time out against a new and often monumental creative challenge, and then taking whatever time he needed to solve the challenge to his satisfaction.

The studios were not wrong to grant Kubrick his limitless leases. They knew that they would ultimately receive something unique, personal, uncompromised, startling in its ingenuity and originality, and more than likely of instant classic quality.

Kubrick's independence was obviously part of everything that has defined him: his total, almost monastic dedication, his patience, his minute perfectionism, his cinematic inventiveness and his adamant refusal to repeat himself.

As the London critic Alexander Walker, a close friend of Kubrick for 40 years, noted in his book Stanley Kubrick Directs in 1971, "After Spartacus, Kubrick never relinquished the power of decision-making to anyone." (Walker's book, retitled Stanley Kubrick Director and expanded to include discussions of all the later films plus Walker's memoir of their long friendship, is being republished to coincide with the release of Eyes Wide Shut in July.)

I first met Kubrick when he was shooting Dr. Strangelove. I was working for Tone in London and he invited me out for a look. It turned out to be a remarkable revelation of Kubrick's own persistence of vision.

He was filming a master shot in the subterranean War Room, with Peter Sellers as U.S. President Merkin Muffley on the phone to the Russian Premier, who was drunk. "The hydrogen bomb, Dimitri," Sellers was explaining with desperate calm. The set was extraordinary, designed by the great Ken Adam, and I carry in mind a particular image of the set's black floor, so highly polished it was as reflective as a mirror.

When I revisited the production a few weeks later, Kubrick was again (or still) working on the War Room set, now partially dismantled for a close-up. And there was Sellers, again as Merkin Muffley, still explaining with desperate calm, "The hydrogen bomb, Dimitri." Other sequences had undoubtedly intervened, possibly involving the Russian ambassador, played by Peter Bull, caught sneaking photographs of the wall maps showing nuclear targets. Then again, of course, possibly not, and I hesitated to guess how often Sellers had said the dialogue.

Jack Nicholson once gave me a measure of what the demands can be on an actor working with Kubrick. Just back from completing The Shining, Nicholson said, in what I regarded as a proud chortle, "I had to hit 19 marks in one shot, and by God I made them all." (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman may have their own tales to tell of Eyes Wide Shut.)

In the spring of 1966, now on a reporting trip for the Los Angeles Time, I stopped in London and had the privilege (and it was nothing less) of visiting the Space Odyssey sets out at the Elstree studio. There, on one of the stages, stood the fantastic 40-foot-high, 38-ton enclosed Ferris wheel, which had been built for Kubrick by Vickers-Armstrong, a leading British aircraft and engineering firm. Two of Kubrick's consultants, Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway III, both veterans of the U.S. space team at Huntsville, Alabama, were in residence.

It was not a Ferris wheel, of course, although it moved. It was part of the spacecraft, in which the astronauts jogged to keep in shape across the interstellar distances. They jogged, miraculously in cinematic terms, through 360 degrees, defying gravity all the way. Kubrick watched the actors on closed circuit television and instructed them by radio from outside. It is one of the film's great astonishments. Kubrick generously tried to explain how it was all being filmed, and I think it involved shooting through a prism, but I've never fully understood the paper clip and the wizardry was beyond me - and even further beyond me when I saw the completed film.

Kubrick called Space Odyssey a "mythological documentary," and the challenges he had set himself in the film were both cinematic and intellectual. He was using the forward edge of film technique to investigate the evolution and the nature of human intelligence, and to speculate on the possibility (which Kubrick saw as the likelihood) of other intelligent life-forms in the universe. In the struggles between HAL and the astronauts, he also explored, rather scarily, human vs. machine intelligence.

In its provocative strangeness, Space Odyssey confused and angered critics (I admit to membership among the baffled). The brilliantly hallucinatory trip through a time warp (or whatever it was) made the film a great hit among young substance-abusers. The greenish embryo at the end of the wordless last half-hour, suggesting as it did a kind of evolutionary rebirth for man, was another of the film's stunning visual happenings.

Kubrick once said that, "Naturalism does not elicit the more mysterious echoes contained in myths and fables; those resonances are far better suited to film than any other art form." It seems clear now (or clearer now) that Kubrick had designed a film that was meant to be felt, absorbed, experienced by the senses even more than by the intellect. The wordless beginning and end were daring choices, and part of his grand plan. As if to confirm the rightness of those choices, the memories of watching the dazzling images in Space Odyssey are vivid and unforgettable with me and I'm sure with many viewers, these 30 years later, even if we might still have trouble explaining what it all meant.

Kubrick was legendarily private but, like George Lucas, he bridled at being described as reclusive. He simply got rid of most of the distractions that interfered with the discipline of being a filmmaker. But he enjoyed company and was a lively conversationalist who, however, had a way of turning conversations into interviews driven by his unslakable curiosity.

I last saw him on another trip to England a few years ago. He was between pictures, or rather had no picture shooting, and agreed to meet me at a small pub near his home. He was well known there and was treated with studied neglect. He debriefed me at length on what was going on in Hollywood, although I was sure he knew all I knew and a good deal more besides.

After lunch he accompanied me to the street while I looked for the car that had brought me out from town. I couldn't find it. "What color is it?" he asked me. "Black," I said confidently. Kubrick walked up the street, came back and took me by the arm and led me to the car, which was white. "Ah, well, so much for reportorial observation," he said with a grin.

I talked with Alex Walker a few days after Kubrick's death was announced. "You finish your film after the long struggle," Alex mused. "You show it to the studio bosses and your stars and they love it. They rave about it. And then you go home and die peacefully and quietly in your sleep. Talk about the perfect closure."

No one who admired Stanley Kubrick could be other than profoundly saddened that his life and his unique career are ended. But no one who knew and admired him could feel anything but gratitude that he had been granted that perfect closure.

Charles Champlin is the Arts Editor Emeritus of the Los Angeles Times and a member of the DGA Magazine Publications Committee.

DGA Magazine, Maggio 1999