Stanley Kubrick borrowed NASA technology to capture Barry Lyndon's natural look

Of course, the new challenge was to mount such a lens on a classic 35mm camera. The lens in question, as one might imagine, was much larger than lenses typically used for film production, and landing the light on a film strip required adjustment. In order to bring the lenses closer to the actual moving film strip, the cameras had to be rebuilt and a new type of rotary camera shutter had to be invented from scratch. However, once this camera was built, shooting "Barry Lyndon" became easy. Indeed, many older technical issues had been resolved, as Kubrick explains:

"There was still a lot of work to be done on it and the camera to make it usable. For one, the rear lens element needed to be 2.5mm from the film plane, which required a special modification to the camera's rotary shutter, but with this lens it was now possible to shoot in light conditions so low that they were difficult to read. , we used either real daylight from the windows or simulated daylight from exterior lights in the windows and diffusing it with tracing paper taped to the glass."

With nothing but natural light entering the camera and only diffuse lamp light entering through the windows, Kubrick would never have to worry about accidentally shooting directly into a light source. With such a camera, lens flare would look more like the iris adjustment of a real human eye, and the camera would never appear to be artificially turned off.

The room may have been dark enough to interfere with reading, but the movie picture was now clearer than ever.