So I Married An Axe Murderer - The Making Of The Shining
Sure, Jack Nicholson running amok was scary, but Stanley Kubrick's relentless direction was truly terrifying...
Stephen King doesn’t like to talk about The Shining. Not his bestselling novel,
of course; he’s still more than happy to discuss the book that made him a millionaire. He’ll even give you a few lines on the 1997 television adaptation which he wrote the script for.
No, The Shining which King prefers to keep quiet about is Stanley Kubrick’s big-screen version. “Kubrick set out to make a horror film with no apparent understanding of the genre,” is pretty much all King can bring himself to say about the film which regularly tops lists of the world’s scariest movies.
Fortunately, the late Mr Kubrick’s other collaborators are more forthcoming than the disgruntled author. Indeed, Tony Burton, who plays Durkin, the manager of the car repair shop that rents Scatman Crothers’ Hallorann a Sno-Cat, can’t say enough good things about what he consideres the most important film on his resume.
“Once you’ve worked with Stanley Kubrick, you have to get used to the idea that the rest of your professional life is going to be a bit disappointing,” says the actor today. “It was never easy but, boy, was it ever worthwhile!”
Another Shining surivuor who is more than willing to discuss the experience is
co-writer Diane Johnson. An award-winning novelist, Johnson became involved in
the project when talks between King and Kubrick broke down. “Stephen had been brought on board to appat his book, and Stanley hadn’t been that impressed with his adaptation. It turned out Stephen and Stanley had very different ideas about ghosts, hell, horror in general.”
According to archive sources, the director and author fell out the first time they spoke. As King recalled, “It was 7.30am and I was shaving and my wife comes in and says, ‘Stanley Kubrick’s on the phone.’ About the first thing he said was, ‘The idea of a ghost is always optimistic, isn’t it? The concept of the ghost presupposes life after death. That’s always a cheerful concept.’ I said, ‘But what about hell?’ There was a long pause. ‘I don’t believe in hell.’ Stanley doesn’t believe in ghosts either…”
With King having walked away from the picture, Johnson was drafted in to work with the notoriously difficult Kubrick. “You hear a lot about screenwriters collaborating on a project but we really did write the screenplay together. We would sit down and talk about a scene, and then I would go to an office or to my hotel room and write all of the dialogue. And when we weren’t writing we would spend time talking about the nature of horror, or reading classic horror novels. We’d even read children’s stories, the Brothers Grimm and CS Lewis, to remind us of what frightened us when we were young, because childhood terror is such an essential aspect of The Shining.”
The more they worked on the screenplay, the further Johnson and her co-writer found themselves straying from the original text. “We kept most of the plot but a lot of the other elements were changed, either because they were weak or because they didn’t fit in with our vision. So what began as an old-fashioned horror story turned more and more into a story of family strife.” Kubrick himself would describe The Shining as “the story of one’s family quietly going insane together.”
With the script nearing completion, the authors set out to sign a leading man.
As Johnson remembers, Kubrick’s wish list ran to just one name: Jack Nicholson. “We’d screened a lot of Jack’s movies,” remembers Johnson, “and decided that he was the only man with the intestity to play Jack Torrance. Our character is a desperate, driven man and Jack can play insanity better than anyone. Of course, we’d have changed Torrance to get Jack Nicholson but that wasn’t necessary.”
In the end, Nicholson turned in a performance so frantic, it took even Kubrick by surprise. According to David Baxt, who played a forest ranger, there was more to the star’s mania than acting. “Nicholson had been going through a tough time when he came to England to make the picture. His girlfriend, Anjelica Huston, had been arrested for drugs offences and one of his best friends, Roman Polanski, had fled statutory rape charges. So you can imagine, he wasn’t in a great mood during the making of The Shining.”
Nicholson’s demeanour wasn’t improved by the repetitive torture that was the
Stanley Kubrick school of filmmaking. Once, when asked about his love of retakes,
the director replied that he only re-shot scenes if an actor forgot their lines.
But the experiences of Scatman Crother, who plays the hapless Hallorann, reveal that Kubrick was obsessed with more than just getting the words right:
“In one scene, I had to get out of a Sno-Cat and walk across the street, no dialogue. Forty takes. Stanley had Jack Nicholson walk across the street, no dialogue. Fifty takes. He had Shelley [Duvall, who plays Torrance’s wife Wendy], Jack and Danny [Lloyd, cast as Torrance’s son, also called Danny] walk across the street. Eighty-seven takes. He always wants something new and he doesn’t stop until he gets it.”
In fact, Kubrick’s multiple takes approach almost cost Crothers his health, as Tony Burton recalls: “Stanley had Scatman fall down so many times, it was a wonder that he didn’t hurt himself. He wasn’t a young man and he could have done himself some serious damage. Then there was the time Scatman got frustrated with all the takes and began shouting, ‘MR KUBRICK, WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?!"‘ The stress was written all over his face.”
Nicholson also struggled to come to terms with the method in Kubrick’s madness. “He’s demanding, he’ll do a scene 50 times and you have to be good to do that. There are so many ways to walk into a room, order breakfast, or be frightened to death in a closet… Stanley’s approach is, ‘How can we do it better than it’s ever been done before?’ It’s a big challenge. A lot of actors give him what he wants. If you don’t,
he’ll beat it out of you - with a velvet glove, of course!”
Nicholson’s response to Kubrick’s eccentricities was to complain about the director behind his back -”I’m a great off-stage grumbler.” Shelley Duvall, on the other hand, was so stressed out by the endless takes and constant berating that she almost suffered a nervous breakdown. “It was a real endurance test. It’s as if I spent a whole year with Stanley resting his elbow on my neck, and every day he leant on me harder. The pressure was immense. I got sick. Flu, stomach upsets, migraines - all brought on by the stress of making that movie.”
While she doesn’t hesitate to describe the performance as “the hardest of my career”, Duvall is now able to appreciate Kubrick’s genius. “Stanley’s head-to-head approach brought the very best out of Jack, Scatman, Danny, me, everybody. The mixture of anger, frustration and ideas made the film fly. I might have hated him at the time but I now see him as a really important filmmaker who gave me the role of my life and made me the sort of actress I never dared think I could become.”
The film’s extras also had to put up with the director’s perfectionism, as David Baxt recalls: “Stanley brought in a doctor to reach Anne Jackson to be a doctor, and then cut here character out of the finished film. He sent a guy round to run lines with supporting actors like Philip Stone [who essays the ghostly Grady], who’d learned the script the day he received it. With most directors, you might have asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ But Stanley isn’t most directors.”
Tony Burton also experienced Kubrick’s fastidious attention to detail. “I swear he notices things that no one else would even be aware of. While we were making The Shining, I heard a rumour that, on one of his movies, Stanley had once asked that a scene be reshot because the temperature in the room had altered between takes. While we were making our film, it was easy to believe that this story had substantial basis in fact.”
Diane Johnson remembers that Kubrick cooked up the film’s famous conclusion.
“We agreed that blowing up the hotel was banal. Things always blow up in horror films. It was Stanley who thought of Jack chasing Danny through the maze in the ice.
I remember him ringing me in California and asking, ‘What do you think of this?’”
If the change represented a departure from genre convention, it left the crew with a whole host of new problems. “They filmed that tracking shot through the maze for days and days,” sighs Tony Burton. “Stanley was determined that the cameras should move smoothly like a shark and as he thought the camera was shaking, he kept asking for additional takes. I don’t think anyone else thought the camera was bumping,
but Stanley was convinced and once Stanley’s convinced, it’s going to take an awful lot to unconvince him. He was pretty fussy about the blood coming out of the elevator, too. I don’t think Stanley felt he ever licked it.”
The Shining eventually finished shooting in March 1979. Although the completion of principal photography didn’t spell the end to Kubrick’s obsessiveness. Not content with editing the film for 10 months, he went to extreme lengths to find the right score, his epic quest only ending when he called up musician and composer Rachel Elkind: “Stanley rang up by partner Wendy [Carlos] and asked what sort of music would be fitting for a horror movie. Once we get over the shock of Stanley Kubrick calling, we rushed to our local book shop and bought two copies of the novel.
We didn’t have any footage to refer to. We had to work with the images and feelings that the book conjured up. That was really unusual.”
Kubrick’s unorthodox techniques eventually led Elkind to the music of Bela Bartok. “Stanley asked if we were familiar with Sibelius’ Valse Trieste and naturally we were, so we bought a recording and listened to it. And then he mentioned Bartok and so we went and bought Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta. That’s when we knew we’d found our soundtrack.”
The music found, Kubrick still couldn’t leave The Shining alone. No sooner had the film opened in America than editor Ray Lovejoy got a message from the director to cut a short, two-minute scene.
“Stanley asked me to cut the scene because he’d seen the movie a few times with an audience and he thought that it was slowing up the film’s climax. He’d already sent someone to cut the material from the cinema prints and now he wanted me to cut it from the negative. On other movies, I might have argued, but I’d worked on the film for a year and I was quite happy to concede to Stanley’s wishes.”
Despite the exhausting shoot and the endless editing, only an idiot would claim that The Shining wasn’t worth the effort. And despite the countless takes and endless tinkering, few of Kubrick’s collaborators regret making the film. “It was an incredible experience,” says Rachel Elkind. “Whatever else I do with my life, I can always say I made a film with Stanley Kubrick and hold my head up high.”
David Baxt also remembers the picture with immese pleasure. “When you’re an extra in a Stanley Kubrick movie, it’s truly an extra special acting experience.”
As the cast and crew’s fondness for the film has increased, so The Shining’s reputation
as a superior horror picture grows ever stronger. And while Stephen King might describe it as a “big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,” anyone who’s spent a night at the Overlook Hotel knows otherwise…