Fact Check-Actor playing Stanley Kubrick discusses staging moon landing
Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick did not admit to helping the U.S. government and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stage the Apollo moon landings between 1969 and 1972. A quote from an actor playing the director in a recording of a purposely fabricated interview has been falsely attributed to Kubrick himself. Separate clips of the actor being reminded of his lines show it is not the famed filmmaker.
One Facebook user uploaded a picture of Kubrick with a superimposed caption seemingly attributed to the director (here), which reads: “I have committed a great fraud on the American public, which I will explain in detail: With the cooperation of the US government and NASA, we faked the moon landing. ALL the moon landings were faked and I was the one who filmed it all.”
Similar posts can be seen on Facebook (here) and on Twitter (here).
However, the quotation comes from a fictitious film, titled “Shooting Stanley Kubrick,” in which an actor is seen playing the U.S. filmmaker in an imagined interview (from 1:27, here).
The movie’s poster (archived here: archive.is/s9AJR) states that the ‘interview’ was recorded in May 1999, two months after the director’s death on March 8, 1999 (here), and credits a T. Patrick Murray as director.
Other footage of the recording, uploaded to a YouTube account named T Patrick Murray (here), shows the actor playing Kubrick being reminded of his lines (at 36:06, 36:13 and 36:50) and being given extensive directions about how to imitate Kubrick (at 1:19:33).
A separate clip of Kubrick from 1998 highlights the differences in how the real Kubrick and the actor in the fabricated interview look and sound (here).
In an interview with the Black Bag blog, published in 2015 (here), Kubrick’s widow Christiane Kubrick said of the “Shooting Stanley Kubrick” footage: “The interview is a lie, Stanley Kubrick has never been interviewed by T. Patrick Murray the whole story is made up, fraudulent & untrue.”
Reuters has previously addressed the claim that Kubrick helped to fake the moon landings (here ).
T. Patrick Murray did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
VERDICT
False. The quote about the moon landings being staged comes from a film where an actor plays Stanley Kubrick, not from the director himself.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.
