chest of daves

During the filming of The Shining, director Stanley Kubrick gave his seventeen-year-old daughter, Vivian, unprecedented access to the set to film a documentary on the making of the movie.

Although her finished film is only thirty-five minutes long, Vivian filmed over eighty hours of footage over the course of production. Most of that footage still exists, and is housed at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication. Unfortunately, none of it is available to the public for viewing.

This rare sequence of clips, which was broadcast on French television in 1980, offers a tantalizing glimpse into more of Vivian’s footage. None of these clips were used in her finished documentary.

In the first clip. we see the filming of the shot where Jack Nicholson chops down the Caretaker’s Apartment entrance door. The finished shot used in the film contains a series of impeccably operated whip-pans, and this clip shows, for the first time, that it was Stanley Kubrick himself who operated the camera during the shot.

In the second clip, Kubrick, Nicholson and Shelley Duvall watch video playback of the shot where Shelley hysterically reacts to Jack chopping his way into the bathroom. Interestingly, Duvall says “That’s the one…” during a moment in her performance that did, indeed, get used in the finished film.

In the third clip, the crew shoots the low angle shot of Jack leaning against the Pantry door. Camera Operator Kelvin Pike shoots the scene, but Kubrick lays on the floor next to him, using his hand to model and control the fill light which illuminates Jack from below.

In the final clip, Nicholson and Duvall run lines from the Pantry scene at a table on the Kitchen set, discussing the scene with Kubrick. —Lee Unkrich, theoverlookhotel.com