Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers, and Shelley Winters on the set of Lolita.
The role of Peter Sellers as Quilty, and his disgusted recurrence throughout the film, seems unique. I don’t recall any other instance in movies of such an elaborate combination of the comic-grotesque. Was this treatment derivative of something you had seen or read?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, that aspect of the picture interests me very much. I’ve always thought, for example, that Kafka could be very funny, or actually is funny—I mean like a comic nightmare, and I think that Sellers in the murder scene, and in fact in the whole characterization, is like something out of a bad dream, but a funny one. I’m very pleased with the way that came off and I think it opens up an avenue, as far as I’m concerned, of telling certain types of stories in ways which haven’t yet been explored in movies.
