Why Stanley Kubrick thought Jack Nicholson’s acting approach was perfect
Famed for his unique vision and immortal contribution to the world of cinema with classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick died nearly a quarter of a century ago, leaving a gaping hole in Hollywood. Even 100 years from now, the auteur will be celebrated as one of the medium’s most vital progenitors.
Despite Kubrick’s lofty status among directors, he has been labelled as a notably difficult man to work with. This isn’t to discredit his personality, but the filmmaker was painstakingly meticulous and, hence, was known to rub some actors up the wrong way.
Although he was never cast in a Kubrick production, the legendary actor Robert Duvall once called the director the “actor’s enemy” while speaking at the 2010 THR’s Awards Watch Roundtable alongside Ryan Gosling.
“To me, the great Stanley Kubrick was an actor’s enemy,” he said. “He was an actor’s enemy. I can point to movies he’s done, the worst performances I’ve ever seen in movies: The Shining, A Clockwork Orange.”
“Terrible performances,” he repeated. “Maybe great movies, but they’re terrible performances. How does he know the difference between the first take and the seventieth take? I mean, what is that about?”
Duvall refers to the late director’s reputation for copious retakes in this statement. These sentiments have been echoed through the years by several frustrated actors. Understandably, The Shining crew were yawning clock-watchers approaching the last of the 148 takes it took to get one scene just right.
Defending his meticulous and controlling nature, Kubrick once lamented that actors were often ill-disciplined and blamed the painstaking process on lack of competency. “Actors are sometimes undisciplined enough not to go home and go to sleep at night and learn their lines, and they go out,” Kubrick said. “They cannot act without knowing dialogue. If you have to think about anything when you’re acting, you cannot work on the emotion. It’s happened in every film. There’s really not much you can do about it.”
As a man with a solid, unwavering vision for each project, he was delighted to work with Nicholson in The Shining. Nicholson was patient and open to new approaches, unlike many of his peers.
In Vivian Kubrick’s documentary Making The Shining, Nicholson explained how an open approach keeps his acting style fresh. “When I come up against a director who has a concept that, maybe, I don’t agree with it […] I’d be more prone to go with them than my own because I want to be out of control as an actor. I want them to have the control. Otherwise, it’s going to become predictably my work. And that’s not fun.”
Continuing, the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest actor opined that actors shouldn’t have just “one set of theories.” He added: “You can go for years saying, ‘I’m gonna get this thing real because they really haven’t seen it real’ […] and then you come up against someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, it’s real, but it’s not interesting.'”
With innumerable takes and pinpoint direction, Kubrick undoubtedly presented Nicholson with one of his career’s biggest yet most cherished challenges. In a 1986 article in The New York Times, titled ‘The Method and Mystique of Jack Nicholson’, writer Ron Rosenbaum quoted Kubrick as saying that Nicholson brought to his roles “the one unactable quality – great intelligence.”
Watch Jack Nicholson in a scene from The Shining below.
