With a sharp knowledge of social satire and the constant urge to break the traditional way of filmmaking, Stanley Kubrick is easily one of the greatest and most renowned filmmakers in the history of filmmaking. The director’s attention to detail and the constant attempt to become a perfectionist have earned him a notorious reputation in the industry. However, when you have a massive ego and the reputation of making box office hits, having such a reputation is not a vice.
One of Stanley Kubrick’s most popular films is The Shining, where he drew inspiration from David Lynch’s Eraserhead, as he used Lynch’s film as a direct inspiration for his 1980 film. However, the Lolita director was obsessed with the 1977 film, which led to a years-long conflict with Stephen King.
Stanley Kubrick’s Obsession with David Lynch’s
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same, and it is one of the best films to be ever created. Interestingly enough, the film is hard to categorize into one genre due to the evident presence of different themes, which are often unmoored from the laws of reality, and the plot is unveiled through potentially unreliable narrators.
However, the movie adaptation was a result of David Lynch’s cult classic film, Eraserhead, and it even inspired Kubrick to put those unsettling themes into his own film but couldn’t. The problem? Well, Kubrick could not find a suitable novel to inject those particular themes into the adaptation. As per reports from American Cinema Papers, Stephen King stated how Kubrick, who was “looking for a supernatural subject, chose The Shining after buying stacks and stacks of books.”
He mentioned how the director had bought stacks of books, and he would read the first couple of pages of each novel, and then “fling it across the room against the wall,” expressing his dissatisfaction. Stanley Kubrick’s secretary would sit outside his office and hear a series of thumps, but one day, she was surprised because the thump ceased, though puzzled, she went in. They reported, “Kubrick said, “This is it.” He was reading The Shining.”
When it was decided that The Shining would be adaptated into a film, King came forward with the script of the film. However, Kubrick was not interested at all in reading the given script as he wanted to infuse his own ideas into the film. As a result, King was kept away from the set of the film, and the author of the novel had the following opinion of the director,
“He’s a man you can go out and have a few beers with as long as you don’t think you’re going to go on and drink all night.”
Nevertheless, the film was shot in the way that we know and love today only featuring the salient points of the books and readers would know how the ending of the film was somewhat different from the source material. Though King felt that the audience was cheated, the bottom line for him was whether the changes worked or didn’t. Safe to say, the changes in the adaptation worked so well that it swept the nation off its feet as it grossed $46.2 million at the box office,
Dr. Strangeglove’s Production Designer’s Opinion of Stanley Kubrick’s
Ken Adam, the production designer of Kuberick’s Dr. Strangeglove has massive respect for the director with whom he worked in the 1964 film. In the same report from American Cinema Papers, the designer mentioned that Kubrick’s brain was like that of a computer. He also said,
“Stanley is a very complex personality. My first impression of him was of this almost naive charm, but then you find behind the naive charm there is a gigantic brain-I can only compare it with a computer. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, you must remember, he was almost in the grand-master class of chess playing.”
He added,
“Stanley is probably the one director today who has a completely free hand. Whatever you say, it’s always Stanley’s film. He is an absolute perfectionist, and he will go on and on until he gets his thoughts and ideas over to you. And `you’ includes the cast, the crew, the craftsmen, and finally, of course, the audience.”
While the director does not make the lives of the cast and crew easier on the set of his film, there’s no denying that his range as a director and constant urge to come up with something innovative makes him one of the greatest filmmakers of this generation.
The Shining can be rented on AppleTV.
