By Todd Garbarini
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The
Shining is one of the most written about, most celebrated, most loved, most
hated, and most misunderstood motion pictures in the history of the medium. Its
hypnotic effect is undeniable, and countless books and articles have been
written in many languages about its purported hidden meanings and the on-set
difficulties that were encountered by the cast and crew on the nearly year-long
shooting schedule. One of the film’s biggest fans, film director Lee Unkrich
and caretaker of http://www.theoverlookhotel.com,
teamed with the late great author J.W. Rinzler on the ultimate book on the
making of the film: a 2,200-page tome from Taschen appropriately entitled Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining, now available on the company website, just in time
for Jack Nicholson’s 86th birthday. Cinema Retro recently spoke with
Mr. Unkrich about the new book, twelve years in the making, and how it came
about.
Todd Garbarini: How did you first hear about Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining?
Lee Unkrich: Honestly, I had no awareness of it
until my mom took me to see it. I had no knowledge or understanding of who
Stanley Kubrick was. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and I may have seen it at the
Randall Park Mall. I was 13 and I remember liking it. A few days after I saw
the movie, my mom was driving me to summer camp, and we stopped at a gas
station. They had a rack of paperback books, and they had the movie tie-in edition
of Stephen King’s novel. It had Saul Bass’s yellow and black poster art on the
front. I bought it, and I ended up reading it voraciously all summer at camp
and beyond. I still have the copy to this day. I think I realized right away
that the book was different in a lot of ways than the movie, but for me, it was
more of an extension of the film. We got a Betamax at some point, and I had to
wait until The Shining came out on video to see it again. I loved both
the movie and the book. In the middle of the paperback, there was a collection of
black and white film stills from the movie. One of the photos was from a scene
that I didn’t remember. It was a shot of Wendy cooking in the kitchen,
presumably making the breakfast that she then takes up to Jack who is just
waking up. I saw that and I started thinking, wow, if that was a scene that was
shot and cut, were there others?
TG: I saw The Shining on ABC-TV in May
1983 and became obsessed with it, too, watching it on home video shortly
afterwards. When we went to Florida on vacation in July, I found a used copy of
the movie tie-in, and saw the photo of Wendy that you mentioned and wondered
what happened to the scene.
LU: Somewhere roughly around the same
time, I read that there had been a hospital epilogue that Kubrick had cut out
of the film after its limited release. Between those two things, I just started
really becoming obsessed with trying to get my hands on a screenplay or any
more information about the film. I would say that the idea of trying to track
down ostensibly more of the movie that I loved was the beginning of this
obsession that built and grew and morphed over the subsequent decades. It was
the fact that I couldn’t find anything, frustratingly, because Kubrick held
such tight reins over it all. I’d get little tidbits here and there. I found a
few crumbs, but it honestly wasn’t until The Stanley Kubrick Archives
book by Allison Castle was published by Taschen in 2005 that I had my first
glimpse into the fact that there was a lot more material that existed in
Kubrick’s own archives. Then subsequently his family established the Kubrick
Archive after he passed away. It was when I was on a press tour for Toy
Story 3 that I managed to visit the archive for the first time and really
got to dive in deep for the first time and get answers to the questions I’d had
for decades.
TG: Did The Shining scare you when
you saw it?
LU: I don’t think so. It didn’t give me
nightmares or anything like that, and I’m an only child. My parents both
worked, so I was a latchkey kid. I was home alone a lot. I had a vivid
imagination. I liked reading scary things. I liked scaring myself, but then
that would extend into bad scaring where I’d be alone and think someone was in
the house, or a statue that we had was alive, or all kinds of crazy stuff. My
parents fought a lot. They ended up divorcing by the time I was nine, so I knew
what it was like to be the child of an unstable marriage. All of that, there
were just so many elements to the movie, coupled with its tone and its
uncanniness, and how it gets under your skin, that I think it just really
wormed its way into me in a way and just never left.
TG: Your new book looks beautiful and vast
in scope, covering intimate aspects of the film’s production. It’s a book that could
never have been published without the inclusion of the Kubrick family. How
involved were they?
LU: They were very involved, and they were
amazing. What I had that was the most helpful was Stanley’s daughter, Vivian, who
made the documentary on the making of The Shining that has been
available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra High Definition. She sat Jack and
everyone down for interviews around the time the film was completed and I got
my hands on the transcripts and those full interviews, including Jack’s, which
is like a two-hour interview. That’s the most helpful because he’d just made
the movie. He’s young and he remembers everything. I would have loved to have
met Jack, of course. I know fully that the book itself wasn’t harmed in any way
because he wasn’t involved. It’s just full of him through and through but very
thoroughly. We sent him a few copies of the book that just got to his house within
the past few weeks. I’m looking forward to hearing his thoughts about it.
TG: Did you talk to Steven Spielberg about The
Shining? I know he said he wasn’t crazy about the film the first time he
saw it because he felt that Jack was nuts from the word go.
LU: Yes, we spoke multiple times and he wrote
the foreword. Kubrick was mostly interested in Steven because he was fascinated
with how Steven had made such a huge blockbuster in Jaws. He was just
constantly peppering him with questions about Jaws and the marketing. If
Stanley was talking to you, usually it was because you had some information
that he wanted, and that was true for Spielberg as well.
TG: Did you speak at length with Leon
Vitali (Stanley Kubrick’s personal assistant)?
LU: I did, yes. I spent a lot of time with
Leon. He was extremely helpful to me at many junctures throughout the making of
the book. I was, of course, devastated when he died suddenly last summer, that
he never got to see the finished book because he was really honestly the person
I probably wanted to see it the most. He was just a very sweet, kind man. He
had a very complicated relationship with Stanley, but it was loving. I just had
enormous respect for him and how he just essentially gave his life over in many
ways to Stanley. Then even in the decades after Stanley’s death, he did
everything he could to fight the fight and make sure that everything was
presented and handled in a way that Stanley would’ve wanted. Sitting down with
Leon, especially in showing him photos, because I had hundreds that nobody had
seen before, many of them I got from the Danny Lloyd family, it would instantly
bring up stories that he probably never would’ve summoned or remembered.
TG: I’ve seen the film well over fifty
times, and yet I’m still seeing things that I never noticed!
LU: I know! It’s because we’re in this
digital age now where people can do frame grabs and overlay them. If you look
at the Colorado lounge set throughout that movie, practically every scene,
there are major differences from one scene to the next in terms of how the
furniture is laid out, where lamps are, for example. It’s because Stanley didn’t
care about continuity because he knew nobody would notice. What he did care
about were individual compositions. If a lamp in the background was coming out
of someone’s shoulder in a weird way, he’d say, “Get the lamp out of there.” He
didn’t care.
TG: What did you stumble across that you
had absolutely no idea about, that was revelatory to you?
LU: I saw lots of stuff in the Kubrick
Archive that made me think, “What the hell is this?” An example of that would
be, I found all these outtake frames, most of which are reproduced in the book.
These are actual compositions, frames from set-ups, from shots and scenes that
Kubrick shot that aren’t in the finished film. A lot of them I could figure out
from drafts of the screenplay and shooting scripts, shot logs, all that I could
figure out. Like the scrapbook, for instance. It used to play a big part in the
movie (as it does in the novel). You can see it on Jack’s desk while he’s
typing. No reference is made to it in the finished film, but there were lots of
scenes about it. There was a whole scene where he found it. There were scenes
of him becoming obsessed with it. There was a scene of him showing it to Wendy.
There was a scene of him going back and looking at it again after he saw the
old woman in room 237. There was a lot of stuff having to do with that. I saw
all those frames, and I was able to figure out what they were. Then there were
other things as well. One in particular, where I never found any reference to
it anywhere, nor did I speak to anyone who remembered it. That was when Jack is
wandering around the hotel with writer’s block where he’s throwing the tennis
ball. He ends up in the lobby of the hotel, and he wanders over to the maze
model. There’s a model of the hedge maze in the lobby. He looks down at it, and
Kubrick cuts to this weird shot that’s almost like the maze in Jack’s mind. It’s
like a maze that’s far bigger and more elaborate than the model sitting on the
table in front of him. As you know, he slowly zooms in on that, and you see a
tiny little Wendy and Danny walking around in the center of the maze. I found
some footage of that same oversized maze model that had been completely
redressed to be encrusted with snow. Sitting in the middle of it was a tiny
frozen Jack. I found both the head and the tail of that shot. It was a slow
zoom. I’m presuming it was a slow zoom-out from frozen Jack. I’m guessing that
Kubrick had an idea and intended, possibly after the shot of him frozen in the
snow, that he would cut to this God’s eye view of the maze and Jack frozen in
it, and just slowly zoom out to reveal him just getting lost in this endless
labyrinth before then presumably dissolving through to the hospital epilogue. I
talked to Les Tomkins, the man who built that maze model, but he had no memory
of the snowy version.
TG: How many people did you interview for
the book?
LU: Seventy-two. I spoke with Kelvin Pike
at his house, and he has the coffee table from room 237 in his living room. When
I was over at Jan Harlan’s
(Kubrick’s brother-in-law) house, Jan has a guest bedroom in the bathroom. He
did a renovation right around the time they finished The Shining, and so
the bathtub in his guest bathroom is the bathtub from room 237.
TG: That’s arguably cinema’s most famous
(and peculiar) bathroom.
LU: I talked a lot with (assistant editor) Gordon Stainforth
who was very helpful to me with the things that he was able to be helpful with,
which is Vivian’s documentary and the cutting of music on The Shining,
which he ended up doing most of. I met Greg
MacGillivray a few times (whose company shot the
opening in Montana). He ended up providing a lot of photographs as well for the
book. He had a big archive. He went to visit the set twice, and Stanley allowed
him to take photos. He had a whole bunch of photos from the second unit shoot,
the helicopter stuff at the beginning of the movie. He graciously gave me
access to his entire library of mostly slides. Some black and white negatives.
It was mostly color slides. Greg is one of two people I spoke to who I really
am convinced has a photographic memory. Vivian was very friendly. I spent two
whole days with her down in Florida, but she was very selective about what she
would talk about. She gave me an amazing artifact, this continuity script that
the script supervisor, Joan Randall, had given her at the end of production. I
was shocked that she’d entrusted me with it. She popped it in the mail, and it showed
up at my office at Pixar. I opened it, and I just about died because it was
this amazing working screenplay with notes all over it, and fragments of paper
right out of Stanley’s typewriter on the set, taped in, and continuity
Polaroids. It was amazing. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, it’s such a shame
that no one is going to get to see this in its entirety.” But, as it worked
out, as we figured out what this collector’s edition of the book was going to
be, I ended up pitching the idea of doing an exact facsimile of this script and
Taschen went forward with it after Vivian gave us approval. Everyone who buys
this collector’s edition gets this. Other than it not having actual photos
taped and glued into it, it’s an exact replica of that screenplay.
TG: Nice! I read that Vivian had shot
roughly 45 to 50 hours on the set during principal photography.
LU: That’s exactly what it is. Yes, 50
hours.
TG: She keeps that close to her vest. She’s
not releasing it. Did you see any of this footage beyond the widely available 30-minute
documentary?
LU: No. There were little clippings,
16-millimeter clippings of it in the archive, all of which I scanned and used
as stills in the book. Jan used some bits of it in his film Stanley Kubrick
– A Life in Pictures. There are some bits from The Shining that are
not in Vivian’s documentary. The family defers to Vivian on that footage
because it was her film. Ultimately, I think Warner Brothers probably owns it,
but in terms of the relationship with the family and the estate, everyone
defers to Vivian, and she just is very adamant about no one ever seeing it.
TG: I know that a lot of viewers probably
felt that Stanley really worked over Shelley Duvall on this film.
LU: Exactly, and nothing could be further
from the truth. Was it a difficult shoot? Yes. Did Shelley have to summon
hysteria and cry on a daily basis sometimes for a big stretch of the last part
of the production? Yes. Was she abused? No, I don’t believe she was abused.
When I talk about this, I really try not to have my own opinion, even though I
do have my own opinion based on everyone I’ve talked to. At the end of the day,
I think that the only person who can really speak on the subject is Shelley. I
have interviews with Shelley, and I spent a whole day with her. We talked about
this, and Shelley remembers Stanley warmly. Shelley is proud of her work on
that film. Shelley will say, “Yes, it was difficult. Yes, it was taxing.” It
was a taxing role and she knew what she was getting into in terms of what the
role demanded, and she took the part. She’s proud of her work.
TG: I am eagerly looking forward to seeing
this book. It looks astonishing. Thank you for all your hard work and
dedication for making this a reality.
LU: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining limited edition collector's edition (1,000) is
available for purchase from Taschen. Click here.
(Lee Unkrich's credits as film director include Coco, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3 and as co-director of Finding Nemo.)