No evidence Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing

A Facebook reel, played more than a million times, claims that the late film director Stanley Kubrick “faked the moon landing” and confessed to perpetuating the lie in an interview. But the man speaking in the film is not the real Mr Kubrick.

In the clip, it appears that the director—known for films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Clockwork Orange— confesses that he “perpetrated a huge fraud [...] involving the United States government and NASA.”

While he doesn’t explicitly spell out the nature of the fraud, he later references the “moon landing” adding “conspiracy theorists were right on this occasion”. 

This appears to refer to a long-running conspiracy theory that the 1969 moon landing was faked, which we have written about a number of times before. 

Various online versions of this apparent interview are taken from a film called Shooting Stanley Kubrick, which was released in 2015.

 But as Snopes and Gawker have previously reported, evidence suggests that Mr Kubrick is portrayed by an actor.

The original website for the film appears to have now been taken down, but Snopes reported that the film’s director claimed he had been “granted unprecedented access” to interview Mr Kubrick in May 1999—despite the fact Mr Kubrick died in March 1999. 

There are other indications that the interview is not with the real Mr Kubrick. For example, in a speech given by the director a year earlier in 1998, Mr Kubrick sounds and looks different to the apparent version of himself in the Facebook reel. 

A spokesperson for Mr Kubrick’s widow also previously told Gawker the “whole story is made up, fraudulent and untrue”. 

In 2016 Mr Kubrick’s daughter also posted a statement to social media regarding conspiracy theories surrounding her father’s alleged staging of the 1969 moon landing, describing the claims as a “grotesque lie”.