Stanley Kubrick on the set of Barry Lyndon. Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/CINETEXTIn a recent interview I was asked to name a hero of mine. The question threw me. Perhaps I'm drawn to people who are flawed and citing them as a hero is problematic since idealisation is the exact opposite of what makes these people interesting. But this logic felt like an intellectual cheat – and anyway, a hero doesn't need to be perfect.
Long after the interview had finished, the answer I came up with was Stanley Kubrick. I admit that I know almost nothing about Kubrick as an individual: I've never read a biography. I know him only through his films.
Kubrick's movies are some of the reasons I hungered to become involved in the world of creating fiction. My first encounter with him was an English lesson when I was 11. My teacher told the class that we were going to watch a film called Dr Strangelove. It would be hard to recall a film that had a stronger impact on me – a combination of being both supremely entertaining and thought-provoking. I've seen it only twice, yet it feels as if I can play it back in my thoughts, as though the reel of celluloid were imprinted there.
A combination of intellectual gravitas with cinematic spectacle and gut-wrenching entertainment is also evident in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the Hal sequence being one of the most powerful cinematic experiences in my life. Kubrick's last movie – the only of his movies I was able to see on general release in the cinemas, Eyes Wide Shut, hypnotised me. I thought it unlike anything I'd seen before and Tom Cruise gives one of the most ambiguous performances I've ever witnessed – entirely unlike a hero, and yet compelling in every frame.
And the reason I can be sure Kubrick must be a hero of mine is that I've never felt such sadness at the news of a stranger's death, a man I'd never met or spoken to, but someone who didn't feel like a stranger at all.
Tom Rob Smith's novel Agent 6 is published by Simon & Schuster.
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