Director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining is widely considered one of the best movies of all time in the horror genre. Based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name, the film featured some iconic Hollywood stars like Jack Nicholson, Danny Lloyd, Shelley Duvall, and Scatman Crothers.
Kubrick was keen on laying out his vision, to the point where he reshot several scenes multiple times to get the perfect shot. He shot one scene 127 times, making it one of the most reshot scenes in all of cinema. It was revealed that one of the scenes in the movie, where blood pours out of the elevator, took one year to get right.
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This scene in The Shining took one year to film
The director of 1980’s The Shining, Stanley Kubrick, is well-known for reshooting scenes if he doesn’t feel like a scene portrays his vision. There is a scene in the movie where blood pours out of an elevator, that scene reportedly took nine days to setup and took three retakes.
Every time the doors opened and the blood poured out, the director would say, “It doesn’t look like blood.” After roughly one year, Kubrick finally liked one take and approved it. Even the scene where a tennis ball rolls into Danny’s toys took fifty takes to get right.
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Stanley Kubrick shot the same scene 127 times
There is a scene in the movie where Shelley Duvall‘s character, Wendy Torrance, armed with the baseball bat, walks backward up the stairs. With 127 takes, the scene is one of the most reshot scenes in the history of cinema. Stanley Kubrick reshot the scene until he finally liked one, ignoring the pleas of the film’s crew. The scene was exhausting, especially for Duvall, who said (via FilmTalking),
“I had never done more than say, fifteen takes before in my life. So, it was a great change for me to do so many. After you do a certain number, it sort of goes dead, and then five more takes or so, it revives itself, and by then you know the scene like the back of your hand and you can make no mistakes with it and you forget all reality other than what you’re doing.”
Throughout the filming of the movie, the script was revised multiple times. Jack Nicholson claimed he stopped reading it and would only read the new pages that were given to him each day. The filming process was quite stressful, but in the end, all the hard work paid off as The Shining was a massive hit among the audience.
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Source: IMDb
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