The sheer pointlessness of Stanley Kubrick’s most demanding scene: “Only the last two were good”
Only an actor can comment on whether or not shooting dozens of takes of the same shot is a good or a bad thing, but reaching triple figures seems excessive either way. That wasn’t out of the ordinary for Stanley Kubrick, even if there is an air of sheer pointlessness to the director’s infamously exacting standards.
Some filmmakers, most famously Clint Eastwood, will only shoot a couple of takes before moving on. He’s won four Academy Awards for his efforts, whereas Kubrick only has one, and even that was a special effects prize for his contributions to the pioneering techniques used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
David Fincher is arguably Kubrick’s closest heir in terms of sheer volume, but when Robert Downey Jr was mounting a silent protest by stashing jars of piss all over the Zodiac set after being asked to perform the same sequence over and over and over again, it’s clear his approach isn’t embraced by all of his actors.
The Shining was the ultimate example of Kubrick’s meticulousness, largely thanks to Shelley Duvall’s experience. During the lengthy production, she was put through the physical, emotional, and psychological wringer, and the war stories she told painted the auteur as less of a perfectionist and more of a tyrant.
The most notorious instance was when Duvall’s Wendy Torrance had to fend off Jack Nicholson’s spouse with a baseball bat. He wasn’t going to hurt her; he was only going to bash her brains in. Still, were 127 takes really necessary? That means there were 126 versions of the scene that weren’t up to snuff from Kubrick’s perspective, which meant almost 99.3% of the footage was rendered obsolete.
In typically Kubrickian fashion, it sounded an awful lot like he was laying the blame at the actor’s door when reflecting upon the sequence with Michael Ciment. “It was only with the greatest difficulty that Shelley was able to create and sustain for the length of the scene an authentic sense of hysteria,” he claimed.
“It took her a long time to achieve this, and when she did, we didn’t shoot the scene too many times,” Kubrick continued. “I think there were five takes favouring Shelley, and only the last two were really good.” Breaking that down, he’s suggesting that there were 122 takes required before Duvall finally cracked it.
Quite frankly, that’s insane. Kubrick seemingly boils the exhausting ordeal down to a technicality: ‘Sure, I shot it 122 times beforehand, but they didn’t really count because Duvall wasn’t doing what I wanted, but she almost got there on take 123, and the next four were alright, too’. No wonder The Shining affected the actor so much when there were 126 do-overs.
Kubrick admitted that “there are, occasionally, scenes which benefit from extra takes,” which is drastically underselling it, looking at his reputation. Even then, he still wasn’t “sure that the early takes aren’t just glorified rehearsals with the added adrenaline of film pumping through the camera.” That’s a fair point if he was talking about shooting it five, six, or seven times, but 127? Absolute madness.
