Director Stanley Kubrick had a scene in the cult film “The Shining” repeated so often that it even made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
The Shining is a 1980 haunted house film and mystery thriller based on Stephen King’s book of the same name. The film was produced and directed by Stanley Kubick († March 7, 1999).
The director is one of the most famous names in film history. He is regarded as an absolute perfectionist who paid attention to the smallest details, as you can read here from our colleagues at Moviepilot. This is also reflected in a world record that he set with a well-known horror film.
Here’s a trailer for The Shining:
English trailer for “The Shining” from 1980
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A single scene was shot a total of 148 times
With the “most repetitions for a scene with dialogue“ (via guinnessworldrecords.com) The Shining secures an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. With a total of 148 shots, the film sets the world record.
The moment in the story is rather unspectacular. In the often-repeated scene, Dick Hallorann and the boy Danny Torrance talk about the phenomenon of the “shining”.
Here you can see the record scene:
That a scene directed by Stanley Kubrick was repeated so many times was by no means an isolated case.
For example, actress Shelley Duvall, who played Wendy, said that she got anxiety attacks during the shooting and that she was completely exhausted from the numerous retakes that it took until the director was satisfied (via comingsoon.com).
Kubrick, on the other hand, felt that if the actors didn’t prepare their lines well enough, it would take several tries.
Asked whether the director would actually do hundreds of takes for a scene, Kubrick replied in an interview with The RollingStone on August 27, 1987:
This is what happens when actors are unprepared. You can’t act without knowing the dialogue. When the actors have to think about the words, they can’t work on their feelings.
That’s how you do thirty takes of something. And yet you can see the focus in her eyes; they do not know their text. So you just go on and on and hope that you get something out at the end[…] […}
Stanley Bubrick via rollingstone.com
The iconic moment when Jack Nicholson announces himself with the words “Here’s Johnny” was improvised by the actor himself, as our fellow film stars write in their list here.
Who was responsible for filing the record? Garrett Brown, who was in charge of the steadicam on the set, had registered the total number of takes of one scene in The Shining as a record.
Another big movie had a particularly expensive scene that ended up being cut:
A single scene with Johnny Depp cost 16 million dollars: It doesn’t even appear in the film