The actor who refused to work with Stanley Kubrick
Despite being a cinematic icon, Stanley Kubrick never had the best reputation when it came to personal relationships on set. The director behind iconic movies like The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange was known for his ruthless and often controversial directorial style.
Infamously, Stanley Kubrick was a rigid perfectionist. It’s well documented that some of his most notorious scenes were shot on repeat, with the director canning over 100 takes to ensure he got the perfect picture. Pushing his actors to their absolute limits, stories of his directorial style and on-set behaviour have gone down in history.
His perfectionism really took grip while filming The Shining in 1980. Shelley Duvall, who played Wendy Torrance, described the experience as “absolutely miserable” and “almost unbearable” as Kubrick made her repeat some of the film’s most emotionally demanding scenes over and over. The infamous ‘bat scene’ took 127 takes, with Duvall forced to endure her character’s pain and fear repeatedly.
The experience reportedly made Duvall’s hair fall out in clumps, with fans speculating that her experience on set later contributed to her decision to retire in 2002.
Similarly, Scatman Crothers, who played Dick Hallorann, was put through a gruelling filming schedule. The scene in which Hallorann first talks to Danny about his psychic powers was reportedly filmed 148 times, earning the record for the most amount of takes ever recorded for a dialogue scene. To make matters worse, Kubrick actually used the first take in the final cut, making the hours of repetition totally pointless.
Despite the repetition, Crothers’ performance is a triumph. But he wasn’t originally supposed to be in the film at all. Instead, the famous cowboy actor Slim Pickens was Kubrick’s first choice for the role but refused to work with Kubrick because of his on-set tyrannical perfectionism.
Having starred in his 1964 film Dr Strangelove, Pickens’ iconic scene in which he rides the nuclear bomb has gone down in history as one of Kubrick’s finest shots. However, Pickens was already too familiar with Kubrick’s obsession with shooting take after take.
Pickens would only agree to the role in The Shining if Kubrick promised him that he could do fewer than 100 takes per scene. Despite being a perfectly reasonable request, Kubrick refused, and the role was passed on to Crothers.
After hearing the on-set stories of the gruelling filming of The Shining, Pickens was likely relieved about his decision to pass on the project, but the film could’ve turned out very different.
